By Tobin Harris

Latest research shows that 40% of UK consumers know what Quick Response codes are, and 12% have actually scanned them to access the information they contain. This means that it’s a good time to start getting serious about how you can use them for your business.

Here’s some ways you could use a QR code for your business.

Sharing information with customers

This restaurant is using QR on it’s plates. When scanned on your phone, you’ll be shown a list of ingredients in your meal. Very cool stuff.

Thanks to Adam Jones for this one.

Put a QR code on your product packaging

Pepsi are putting QR codes on their product packs. When scanned, people are taken to watch an amusing video of “Rusty”. They can also get to news, games and other content. 

WinergyInc are encouraging wine distributors to put QR codes on the labels of their bottles, so that customers can instantly scan them and then rate the wine or add bookmark it.

Put one on your business card

A QR code can include all your business contact details. So, by printing one on your business card, you people to simply scan your details into their address book, rather than making them tediously type it.

In your advertising

Advertisers are starting to use QR codes in creative ways.

In the UK, Brands such as Heineken, Sky, Pizza Express, Grazia magazine, and Gamma DIY all adopted QR codes in campaigns during Q1 of this year (2011).

The neat thing is that, when people scan a code, they can be taken to a more engaging experience such as a web site or video. It allows consumers to take the experience away with them.

Levis using QR codes in bill-board advertising

Scottish Attraction using QR codes in tourism

QR codes in Facebook, Twitter and Online

There’s opportunities to get the benefits of QR codes in any other mediums you publish to.

Coupons and vouchers

A UK survey revealed that 49% of people would be keen to have QR codes contain vouchers or additional brand information. 

This article discusses how The Gift Experience are one company looking to make the mobile phone a more powerful shopping tool.

Who uses QR codes?

18-24 year olds are the most likely to scan your QR code, followed by 25-34 year olds. So, you’re going to have more success if you target younger audiences.

This Social Media Experiment articles gives a good background to QR codes, and also discuss various applications. 

By Tobin Harris

We’re playing about with QR codes at the moment, thinking we’d like to put some on both our business cards and on our office windows.

A QR code is like a barcode that you can scan with your phone. When scanned, interesting things can happen. If the QR code contains a URL, your phone can open that in a web browser.

Or, if the QR code contains a vCard, your phone can grab the name and address and add them to your address book.

Thomas Hansen, a good friend of mine, seems to be a bit of a guru in the field of QR codes. I found this very cool QR code generator on his web site. 

Here’s an example:

The QR code scanner was created by Thomas’s company - Winergy, Inc. It also lets you create QR codes containing URL’s and SMS messages.

Thomas and I worked at Gaia Ajax Widgets in Norway, he was the founder, and the genius behind the ideas! We had some great times in Barcelona (exhibiting at TechEd), and also in Norway. Most involved beer and guitars :)  

Thomas is also doing some really interesting stuff in the wine/QR code space. He’s in the heart of California, so a handy place for creating benefits for wine merchants :)

Winergy focus on creating Loyalty Programs for Merchants, Producers and Service Providers. Their primary products for achieving this is WinePad [http://www.winergyinc.com/buzz] - which only really works for Wineries with Wine Tasting Rooms, which was launched about 7 months ago.

And they also have a QR Code Program, which works for basically everyone.

The QR Code program works such that anyone can put a QR Code anywhere they wish, and have consumers and customers rate their location, object, product or service. And then the Raters are encouraged to share their rating with their friends on Facebook and similar Social Media sites. In addition, every time somebody rates your QR Code, the owner of that QR Code gets that person email address, exact location, and their consent to initiate Direct Marketing to that person.

So basically they help customers with two things;

• Initiate social buzz in the social media, such as Facebook
• Initiate Direct Marketing through harvesting customer’s email addresses, and their consent to do Direct Marketing towards them

Like everything Thomas get’s his head into, it’s really interesting stuff, suggest you check it out! 

By Tobin Harris

Last Friday we launched AllBabble, a social network for debating. It was built as a joint venture between Engine Room Apps and the innovative guys at Offficial. 

AllBabble is a bit like twitter, but discussions are focused around topics of debate. Debates are sparked by celebrities, including Jimmy Carr, Bri Smithy, Martin Lipton and David Badiel.

We’ve released it on iPhone, Android and mobile web (for BlackBerry). Engine Room Apps helped refine and expand the concept, and took it from design to launch.

AllBabble is built on cloud technology, which means it can be hosted at low costs and can survive a lot of traffic - handy for when we get a flash-flood of traffic.

By Tobin Harris

Engine Room Apps is a service company that creates mobile solutions for it’s lovely clients. We have 10-20 projects at any time, and like to measure how fast we’re getting through them; how fast we’re delivering useful stuff to our clients.

We call this measurement our velocity.

Here’s our velocity over the last 3.5 months (we’re 19 days into April)

The velocity indicates how much stuff we’re delivering to our clients. In ERA, “stuff” usually means “features for smartphone apps”. We also track internal projects as part of our velocity too.

Why measure velocity?

Measuring velocity brings many benefits:

Reflection: We know when we get faster or slower, so we can ask the more important question of why?  This allows us to reflect and improve.

Targets: We can set ourselves some targets and measure ourselves against them.

Not About Finances: Financial targets are great, but our productivity is not always aligned to our financial success. For example, when we invest in projects, we don’t necessarily make money from them straight away, so we still want to know if we’re being productive outside of our bottom line.  

Change Indicators: When the environment changes, we can see if it allows us to get through more or less work. Team growth, training, time of year, holidays and type of projects undertaken can all trigger changes in velocity. 

There are more important things than velocity

Despite the fact we measure our velocity, it’s not our key driver. Above all, we want to kick out quality work. Measuring speed is a useful thing, but it’s also dangerous to give it too much importance.

Measuring quality is a separate blog post I think :)

Constant visibility

Our velocity is no secret. We’re currently making this information constantly visible to the team via the information radiator, along with our company-wide work queue.

Everyone is encouraged to chip-in on the current state of projects, so that we can self-correct (this idea is based on the lean term: Kaizen culture)

How To Calculate Your Speed

The principle in calculating velocity is pretty simple. When we sell a project, we do so by giving it a cost in points. These points represent how much work the project needs us to deliver.  

Some rough examples:

• A small-ish app like iSight Test might be 10-20 points in size.
• A big app like ASDA Price Guarantee might be 40-50 points in size. 
• A full solution like the AllBabble social network might be 100+ points in size (for both the app and related back-end stuff).

So, as we progress through the project, we deliver working features to our clients. Just like a project has a value in points, so do the features. As clients accept those features as being complete, we know we’ve delivered X points in Y months. This lets us calculate how much stuff we’re doing over time.

By Tobin Harris

The growth of jobs in the mobile sector is booming along with all other aspects of mobile. We generated some live graphs from the indeed.co.uk job engine. They can’t be taken too seriously, but it’s interesting to see the indicators.

Mobile Web vs iPone vs Android vs Blackberry

This graph shows how Mobile Web is hottest right now, closely followed by iPhone and Android. 

iPhone vs iOS vs iPad

iPhone jobs are still hotter than iPad and iOS.

Yorkshire vs London

This is no surprise, but there is a staggering difference between job openings in London to Yorkshire.

By Tobin Harris 

One of our iMacs has been playing up by turning itself off at random times. Annoying when you’re in the middle of something. 

Chris phoned the Sheffield Apple store at about 10am this morning to report the problem. The conversation lasted about 3 minutes.

Within that time they’d diagnosed the problem and informed us a replacement would be with us within the next 3 hours.

WTF! 3 hours? 

We were expecting 2 days at least, and a reasonably large dose of hassle.

For example, we thought we might need to package up the machine into it’s box, do some paperwork, and arrange it to be couriered back to the store. And then wait for a replacement. Also, Sheffield is 40 minutes away. And our machine is custom spec. You know, all the usual faff…

At 1pm, 3 hours after the call, we got a call from reception saying we had a delivery. A cheerful dude carried in a shiny brand new iMac. The thing had even been assembled to custom spec to match the one it was replacing. And, he waited for 1 hour whilst we restored a backup, just to be sure we had everything.

After that the delivery dude merrily carried away our broken iMac. Problem solved. No faff.

To top it off, at around 3pm we got a follow up call from the Sheffield store to make sure everything was going ok.

As someone who’s running a company, it’s awe inspiring to see this level of service. It’s remarkable. Remarkable very much in a Seth Godin Purple Cow kind of way.

P.S - Sorry for the Apple fan boy post, but we’re impressed :)

By Tobin Harris

Now that we’re in the new office, we’re taking the opportunity to sort a few bits and bobs out. The first is the information radiator, a tool which helps us feel the heart beat of the company.

Chris and I are huge fans of information radiators.  The concept is simple. Put up a big screen in your office and make it show critical project information, visible to the team at all times. 

The team can see what’s in the production pipeline, and where it is. We’ve got a 27” screen, but a 60” screen would be much better :) 

Tracking Up To 300 Work Items

We’re typically working on 10-20 projects at once, across 8.5 man team, tracking up to 300 items of work (called stories). 

The first screen we’ve developed shows the status of our work items in columns, from left to right. Since we develop software, our statuses are 

• Backlog (work scheduled)
• Started
• Finished (ready for Quality Assurance)
• Delivered (sent to customer for review)
• Done (customer gives the thumbs up, woohoo!)

The more items on the right, the better. That’s the “done” column.

More Screens

We’re developing more screens to show on the information radiator too. Our current screens are custom made to mine information from our project management system - Pivotal Tracker. We are also looking to connect to our CRM system (Highrise) to visualise sales statistics. I’ll be implementing this soon, with the help of Lee, so watch this space! 

Commercial Projects 

We’re currently rolling out similar tools at a Yorkshire NHS trust, in 3 separate departments. These tools will allow the lab staff to see their 3000 specimens and cases moving between various stages of their process. It will then help them spot bottlenecks and problems, and take steps to correct them.

Our workflow visualisation tools can display information to any business system, so if you’re interested in getting an information radiator for your business, give us a call.

iPad and Mobile Information Tools

Engine Room Apps is primarily a mobile studio, so of course we’re playing with bringing critical project information to ourselves on the move. Chris already has an ace working iPad app prototype which lets us view the state of all projects in the long term. It’s really funky. Again, we’ll post about that soon.

By Tobin Harris

Yesterday we moved into a slightly larger office space here at the Round Foundry.

The new Engine Room Apps office, at the Round Foundry Media Center

Despite a few concerns, we’re all really happy in our new home.

The wall at the front of the room is the only original red-brick still visible in the building. It looks cool with the sections of wood panelling scattered around the walls.

We’ve also got some epic windows with a direct view of the pub, hurrah.

There’s still tons of boxes and junk lying around (how do we collect so many cables!), but we hope to have it Zen-like within the week.

Last week we did a bit of 3D modelling in Sketchup to see how the layout might look, and to see where the light falls. Handy for planning.

Planning the office layout with a 3D model

The real thing is not quite as Zen, yet.

On a more geeky note, I’ve finally got my information radiator set up. It’s a 27” monitor showing team progress across all projects. The idea is to make important information highly visible to the team at all times, so we know when we’re faltering, or flying. I’ll be blogging about this soon.

The Round Foundry Media Center is a very flexible place for a growing business (or shrinking one!), and our thanks to Sharon and the team for continuing to be really helpful with our erratic office movements :)

P.S - Thanks to Lee, John, Chris, Richard and Thomas for doing most of the hard work :S

By Tobin Harris

Engine Room Apps is in an interesting position.

1) We’re in a market that’s exploding. We originally thought that mobile was a fun and interesting market to play with, but it’s kicking off big-time now. Let’s just say the phone rings very regularly, even though we don’t do any marketing. 

2) We’re new to growing a business. Not been there before. Not done that before. So, we make lots of mistakes. Most mistakes cost us hard earned cash, because it’s not fair to let our customers suffer. Staying afloat in businesses isn’t easy for the inexperienced, no-matter how many books you’ve read, nor how many people you seek advice from.

3) We want to offer an amazing service with world-class quality solutions. We’re perfectionists (well, I’m the worst for that), and we want to make stuff that really does improve lives, save the world and be slick and sexy at the same time.

4) Our business is becoming attractive. It’s not just a few guys playing around anymore. We’ve gained a ton of in-house experience, resource and skill in this market. We want to do great things.

Now!

This cocktail of factors means that we want to create the dream company now. That means getting help. Possibly of the financial variety. We feel that bringing a dollop of outside cash and business brains will accelerate our growth, and give us guidance in our business decisions. It will mean we can build the dream faster, and get a foothold in the market before the competition goes crazy.

“Funding is the business equivalent of rocket fuel.”  
    Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA

Right now we’re in talks with an investor. It’s fun, but scary too. I’ll be posting about it along the way…

By Tobin Harris

We recently posted up some lessons learned in our attempts to hire some iPhone developers without using recruitment agencies. It describes the dirty tactics we’ve seen recruitment agencies taking: Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned: Part 1

Our original post caused an interesting discussion on news.ycombinator.com - we got to position 20 in the ycombinator rankings! 

I’m logging the key take-aways from the thread for my own benefit, hopefully you’ll find them useful.

Candidates Suffer Too

A few people noted that agencies are not only cloning job posting to drown out the real-deal, they’re also cloning candidate profiles. That makes it harder for a company to find a candidate directly, they get piped through to recruiters instead. Dirty. 

Get the Salary Right

One opinion was that we got the job title, expectations and salary wrong, by as much as £5K - £10K. Basically, some thought we weren’t offering enough salary for the skills we’re asking for (others thought it was reasonable). Perhaps we should have asked for a “Middle Weight” iPhone developer? We really just want someone who’s got some of the best practices nailed, and has pragmatism/experienced approach to their work. I.e. not a “junior”.

The bottom line is, the salary has to match the position to draw the right attention. Right or wrong, we should do our homework when setting salaries and job descriptions. 

Recruiters Lie About The Candidate’s Desired Salary

One poster on ycombinator noted that:

Even if you’re willing to pay the recruiter’s fee, you’ll sometimes get to the point of making an offer to a candidate and they’ll essentially be offended by the offer, since it’s lower than the amount listed in the recruiter-overhauled job description that they saw.

We’ve seen this too, where salaries on CV’s are lower than the candidate wanted. They’re widening the net to catch more punters, it’s a numbers game.

Some Recruiters Do Have A Clue

One poster on the thread mentioned that some recruiters can be pretty good, I can believe that. He also noted where you might want to use them.

More companies might be able to ‘go direct’ without needing a recruiter, but many don’t know how to sell their own company to a potential employee. Money helps, certainly, and they’d be able to offer more if they weren’t involving a recruiting agency, but it typically takes a committed involvement from the company to do the initial screening.

I used to think recruiters had no place, and that companies should always go direct. I’ve found that strategically, it makes sense in a few cases if they need a specific skill and don’t want to broadcast to the wider market (their competition) about upcoming plans. However, those instances are pretty rare

So, a few nuggets there, but nothing ground breaking. 

CoderStack

Another thing, it was nice to see the guys at coderstack.co.uk being active in the discussion, they’re doing some good stuff :) Would recommend you consider them for publishing your IT job descriptions.

On A Lighter Note…

recruitMENTAL has some shocking and hilarious stories about UK recruitment agency dirt-tactics. Worth a read (and run by a fellow frustrated Yorkshire company).