Zauber Blog

Our new Design & Usability area at Zauber

2010-07-20T12:21:00.004-03:00

We are happy to announce the public launch of our new Design & Usability area at Zauber.

We want to share with our clients and public en general our experience in building amazing software products, by applying the most well-known user centered design techniques.

In many cases, for both internal and external projects, we have been deeply involved in the research of user experience, information architecture and usability patterns.

We fell it's now time we can put all these knowledge to work in new kind of projects, whether it's part of a complete software development project or just part of its inception.

With the creation of this new area, we are reinforcing our commitment to building great software products, not always because of its technology and architecture but also because of it's user experience, iterative design and usability.

World Cup Social Project for Coca-Cola

2010-07-14T14:41:00.025-03:00

The World Cup days are gone now and although Argentina could not make it to the finals, we are happy about one of our most recent projects: our social coverage and Twitter mashup for the World Cup celebration for Coca-Cola Latin America deployed at the fancy URL of http://celebra.cc

What we did

We captured tweets in real-time mentioning the teams playing each match, as well as tweets with photos taken near the designated stadiums. We also captured tweets using certain keywords and hashtags related to the World Cup and its celebration worldwide.

We developed a real-time chart with trends of mentions for each team playing during a match (called in Spanish "Juegómetro"), together with a slideshow of photos shared on Twitter.

Visitors to this site were able to discover cool photos taken worldwide by fans, specially by those in South Africa. See examples here, here or here.

Our goal was to let everybody, no matter where they were located, feel a little closer to this celebration, share it with friends on Twitter and Facebook and of course give their support to their teams.

To promote this application, which was built almost entirely during the first week of the World Cup, we also employed TweetDiscover to connect with users on Twitter and those checking in at certain venues on Foursquare. TweetDiscover allowed us to reach users in different locations in real-time and connect with them through @CocaColaLatam account. Here's Coca-Cola twitter account welcoming everybody to the Stadium

The results

During almost 3 weeks of World Cup we processed and displayed in real-time almost 17.000 photos shared on Twitter and published by users at these 3 main sites: Twitpic, Tweetphoto and Yfrog.

Average amount of processed tweets mentioning any of the teams playing during each match was around 150.000.

Total tweets mentioning teams only during the hours of matches processed at Celebra.cc was over 5 million.

Here is a more detailed chart of team mentions from the Round of 16 until the Final. Guess who's the winner on Twitter ? It's #JPN with more than 200.000 mentions during their match against Paraguay.

All these results are based on our usage of the Twitter Streaming API with its standard access limits.

Here is how the whole product looked like!

TweetDiscover is a finalist at La Red Innova

2010-06-05T12:01:00.012-03:00

At Zauber we are excited about the announcement of our most recent venture: TweetDiscover, a real-time marketing and Social Media automation platform for Twitter. And we are proud for the news about our new project being elected finalist by Endeavor for the Startup Competition at La Red Innova

TweetDiscover manages online marketing and Social Media campaigns on Twitter by finding highly targeted users based on their tweets in real-time and enabling programmed interactions to connect with them. TweetDiscover helps companies of any size to build their brand and engage with potential new customers on Twitter.

TweetDiscover is currently on private Beta, and we encourage you to sign up and stay tuned, since we are granting access to a certain number of users every week. If you want to know more about our platform, you could check how it works and our currently supported features. We are excited about the technology we are building and how we could improve the way everybody does marketing and social media actions on Twitter.

This is a great achievement for our us, that reinforces our vision of building a company that combines the offer of highly specialized software development services with the incubation of new products and ventures. This is just our first milestone towards that path.

We would like to thank all of you who have supported us on the last weeks by joining our Beta, testing our platform and giving us feedback. And huge congrats for the complete Zauber team, which is doing an awesome job!

See you all in Madrid on 14th/15th June for La Red Innova.

Our Social Media experiment for Argentina's Bicentennial

2010-05-27T12:21:00.019-03:00

Last days were special in Argentina. We commemorated the 200th anniversary of the May Revolution, a sequence of historial events that initiated our history as an independent country. Lots of celebrations took place in our country, specially in Buenos Aires, from May 21 until May 25. As part of this celebrations, different venues in the heart of the city were established as a meeting point to discover a piece of our history. Moreover, the historical Teatro Colón (one of the best opera houses in the world) was reopened after years or hard work of refurbishment.

At Zauber we wanted to be part of this celebration and, as we did last year for the national elections, we thought of a tiny experiment of technology applied to Social Media to commemorate the Bicentennial.

What we did

We added the designated venues at Foursquare with tips and to-dos about the events taking place each day.
We created a Twitter account @BicentenarioAR and automated its behavior from May 21 to May 25 to deliver short pieces of information in 140 chars about different subjects of our history. We aimed to spread through Twitter a bit of our history and revive those historical events of the May Revolution 200 years later.
Historical tips and messages were delivered to twitter users tweeting about the Bicentennial in our region and to Foursquare users sharing their check-ins in our venues through Twitter.
Every day a different set of messages was planned to be sent, according to what happened on that historical day 200 years ago.
Historical facts about the Teatro Colón were delivered to those twitter users mentioning this opera house during these days.
Scheduled reminders and tweets were sent from @BicentenarioAR 30 minutes before each event was planned to start.
We deployed a simple wesbite to promote our idea together with a real-time stream of tweets mentioning the Bicentennial.

How we did it ?

We came up with this idea on late Thursday May 20 and we had it online on Friday afternoon May 21. We applied some new platforms we are developing to create social media campaigns on Twitter and configured 20 different automated campaigns and almost 90 scheduled tweets that would be running on Twitter until May 26. We wanted to experiment news ways of engaging with users and some cool technology we are building. And we wanted at the same time to feel we were part of this celebration and revive the history of our Nation.

The results

546 followers for @BicentenarioAR (started with zero on May 21)
187 mentions for @BicentenarioAR (see examples of replies here)
720 historical messages delivered to twitter users (see examples here and here)
1093 followed users
2890 tweets processed
90 scheduled tweets sent (see example here)
Average CTR for links included in messages was 95% (we provided short-links for further information on Wikipedia and Teatro Colón websites)

We are really happy with our tiny experiment, considering the short time we had to build it and the nice feedback and comments we received from Twitter users. Thank you to everyone who joined us.

3scale partners with Zauber

2009-11-04T22:15:00.004-03:00

We are happy to announce our partnership with 3scale to provide plug‐and‐play  API  management  solutions and API development.

3scale enables  Internet‐based  businesses  with  a  secure,  scalable  and  efficient  SaaS  platform  to  manage  their  APIs  and  reduce  time‐to‐market.  3scale’s  on‐demand  infrastructure  platform  lets  customers  capitalize  on  their  Web  Services  to  increase  revenues  and  exploit  the  full  potential  of  the  API  technology.

At Zauber we understand the need for providing our clients with managed APIs for every Web project, thus this partnership will allow us to accelerate and empower the API strategy of Internet companies, as it targets a stronger ability for Web Service providers to increase their market reach through APIs.

You can download the complete Press Release here.

Barcamp Buenos Aires - Open Data & Mashups 3.0

2009-11-02T14:32:00.006-03:00

Last saturday we attended Barcamp Buenos Aires, the third edition in Buenos Aires of the unconference that gathers Web developers, designers, entrepreneurs and anyone related to the Internet and Technology industry. Juan F. Codagnone, co-founder at Zauber, had the chance to present a talk about LinkedData and Mashups 3.0, where he talked about the needs to openly expose information in raw formats and facilitate the exchange of information, linking them in RDF databases. His presentation highlighted projects like Freebase.com, DBPedia.org, New York Times Open Data, among others. Check out his slides here:

Barcamp Buenos Aires - LinkedData & Mashups 3.0

View more documents from Zauber.

Our first native iPhone Application - iFlof

2009-08-04T16:37:00.010-03:00

Directly from our Zauber Labs, the space where every member of our staff can devote its 10% time to work on a personal Research & Development project, we are pleased to announce that iFlof, our first native iPhone SDK Application, has been approved and published in App Store.

iFlof is still Beta and we are planning to add more funtionality in the near future. This first version is a front-end for Flof that enables users to:

Search places nearby using your GPS (search for places stored in Flof.com.ar such us ATMs, gas stations, banks, bars and restaurants and a lot more)
View details of each place (tags, reviews, address, website)
Send details of each place by email to a friend that feels lost
Find every place on your Maps Application

Check out some screenshots of this first version of the Application. For enhanced functionality, register at http://flof.com.ar and add your own places of interest.

Real-time Data Streaming for Argentinian Elections Coverage

2009-06-29T11:50:00.016-03:00

Yesterday we had congressional elections at Argentina and online media prepared to cover it in different ways on the Web. Argentinian Twitter users agreed to use the hashtag #urna2009 in their messages, creating this way a better way to track elections-related messages.

At Zauber we decided to develop an experiment to follow the elections in real-time, digging into some technologies we have been researching lately. We developed a simple web page that integrated Facebook Connect, Twitter Streaming API together with our technology of Events and Messages Bus, XMMP messages routing and HTTP persistent connections. The result was a product capable of showing in real-time the stream of tweets (those referrering to certain keywords and hashtags) together with updates from external RSS sources with elections-related news and real-time trends of mentions to our candidates and some other keywords.

You can see some screenshots here:

See it running on iPhone also:

We are really pleased about how the community engaged with our technology and the wonderful comments of support we received .

Now we have shut down access to the Zauber Stream for a couple of days, while we keep on working on improving performance and scalability and thinking of new features to add, planning to provide real-time data streaming on new occasions. Stay tuned !

ISO 9001:2008 Quality Certification

2009-06-22T10:04:00.004-03:00

After months of hard work, at Zauber we are pleased to announce that we have obtained our ISO 9001:2008 Quality Certification, recognized by Bureau Veritas. We are really excited about this achievement, given the fact that we were able to combine our agile processes based on Scrum together with the requirements of an international quality policy like ISO. Congratulations to all our team and keep it up !

Recent projects for our clients

2009-06-13T16:28:00.013-03:00

These last months we have been working in various development projects for our client Clarin Global, the Internet company of Grupo Clarin, one of the most important news and media companies in LatAm.

We are happy to announce that two of these projects are already available online:

VendedorPro 2.0: this is a completely new version of the tool VendedorPro for MasOportunidades.com. This tool allows big sellers to manage big amounts (plus 10K items) of products by means of a Desktop Application that connects securely with MasOportunidades services. This tool was developed using Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) on Java 5 together with open source technologies such us: Spring Dynamic Modules, Hibernate and CXF.

Guía Clarin 2.0: another completely new version of the Internet website Guía Clarin the most complete online guide of Argentinian shops, available in a vast range of categories. This project was developed using Java 5 technology and a stack of open-source technologies such us: Spring MVC, Apache Wicket and Hibernate.

In both cases, we developed from scratch new versions of these products using cutting-edge technologies to support them. We are really happy about these two projects and hope to keep on announcing new releases in the future.

Entreprenerds

2009-03-13T15:06:00.005-02:00

Zauber has been featured on the March '09 edition of the business and technology magazine Information Technology . Our company case has been published under a section with a very funny name: Entreprenerds. Fact is, we really love that name: we consider ourselves both Entrepreneurs and Nerds, so the neologism is quite accurate for us.

Photo: Gabriel Baños and Juan Codagnone (Martin Márquez and Mariano Cortesi couldn't make to the photo session due to traffic jam, Andrés Moratti was on holidays and Fernando Zunino was felling sick)

We are really happy about this mention and just wanted to share the good news with all of you. We are proud of the team we have built since we started up and thankful to all the clients and friends who have supported us.

Welcome to our Blog

2009-02-24T10:59:00.000-02:00

We are pleased to launch our company blog, something long due in our pipeline. From now on, this will be the space where you will find news about the projects we are working on, our new ventures and any other news related to our company and our business. For the moment, it will be written only in English: we are sorry for that, but the effort of writing the same post, both in Spanish and English, makes no sense. Remember that you can also visit our Zauber Code Blog, our technology blog with more technical news about our Open Source Projects and our research and development initiatives. If you are into the IT or Web 2.0 business, if you are already one of our clients, if you are considering becoming one of them, or if you just love programming and building software as much as we do, then this blog is intended for you. We hope to see you around.