Michael Carøe Andersen

Tag: Arb Design

  • Arb Design is blogging

    In the last year or so in Denmark blogging has changed from being something the established media and companies would talk about to be something they read and used. (Links in this post will be to Danish sites)

    I find it very interesting what is going on right now as people in companies are blogging. There are some great benefits from communicating in the form of a blog:

    • Informal way of communicating passion
    • Gain information about costumers through a dialog
    • It can underline and enhance your brand
    • Let the company have a human face and voice

    On the other hand there are some drawbacks or pittfalls as well. Blogging as a private person is different than blogging as part of an organization or a company. Andreas Johansen, former Synkron blogger wrote about some of the difficulties about blogging for his company.

    • Finding the proper voice – not too personal and geeky, not too corporate and marketing-speak
    • Its difficult to get comments so the costumer interaction stays one-way
    • It can be difficult to find the ressources to blog
    • Your boss, colleague, cotumer does not understand the blog format

    All this said we have decided to start Arblog, the blog of Arb Design. Right now it is easy to find stuff to write about because Rotaboard is getting started and getting attention from interesting places.

    Now go read, subscribe and comment and I will be happy :)

    Arblog - The blog of Arb Design

  • Arb Design Photos

    Several people have told us that they want to see some photos on the Arb Design website – and we are now ready to comply :) Together with Søren Sunnyboy Sohl we went out to the streets of Copenhagen and shot a lot of rounds. We started out at Danish Design Center and continued past the parliament through The Royal Library Gardens and ended up by The Black Diamond.

    At the turntable

    Show us some teeth

    Femi and Michael

    Femi and Michael

    Corner of The Black Diamond

    Arb Design guys

    We had a lot of fun running around and posing for these photos, See more photos from the session here.


  • Agile planning tool on Rails

    We have recently been working with Ruby on Rails and started Digital Planning Board a small pilot project to see what we could build with the Rails framework while building an application we could use for our project planning. We have been working with Ruby on Rails since we went to see David Black in Malmø and it has been a great experience so far and we will probably use it for a couple of our future projects.

    The Digital Planning Board is basically an online edition of the analog originator that we used for planning at Menlo Innovations:

    Analog planning board

    The result became this online application:

    The Digital Planning Board

    The Digital Planning Board has a few rules it works by. It is for planning one week iterations using these basic rules:

    • Blocks represent a task
    • A lane represent a person or a team.
    • The size of a block displays the estimated time to complete the task.

    The colors indicate the status of the card:

    • Not Started
    • In Progress
    • Complete
    • Blocked

    Tasks can be moved around freely but adding a task to a lane will push the subsequent tasks further down the list.

    Further development
    Since this is just a side project I am not sure how much further we are going to develop it but based on some of the feedback we have received so far here is a couple of things we could implement:

    • Update board state real time so changes made by others show up on other collaborators views(without doing a browser refresh)
    • Current time indicator (some kind of way to show how far in the week we are now)
    • Hover on a task would show all the details
    • The equivalent of sticky notes could be added to show additional information and draw more attention
    • Faster editing of task details (right now you have to open a card and click edit)
    • Find a way to preserve the cards history. In real life you can cross out things or scribble additional info.

    Read more about our planning board or feel free to try it out [update 27/06/07: Sorry the prototype is not live anymore] and please let us know if you have any feedback :)

    Yesterday we spend the afternoon hanging out with Copenhagen Ruby Brigade at the office of Capteco for a hacker workshop. It was a nice laid back afternoon and the first time I met these guys but definitely not the last time I join the Brigade for some geeking.

    IMG_0016.JPG


  • Aalborg Inspiration

    About a week ago Femi and I went on a road trip to Aalborg in the other end of Denmark (250 miles away). Aalborg is my college town and there is a lot of interesting things going on up there. Being set in Copenhagen it is easy to overlook or forget the things that go on other places.

    Some of the people we met during the days in Aalborg were the CommunicateIT boys that have set up a thriving IT business in short time, the two wizkids Martin and Torben starting up there own thing and Andreas Haugstrup a Danish vlogger pioneer :) and organizer of VlogEurope. We ended up spending almost a day each place talking about setting up businesses and geeking about. I hope we have an excuse soon again to go up and play again

    We also toured some of the departments and met up with Jan Stage and Ivan Aaen of Dept. of Computer Science. We had a very interesting discussion with Ivan about the paradigm of agile software development. The Software Innovation Research Lab they are setting up sounds like a really interesting project about how to facilitate continual innovation in a software project, and hopefully they will set up a blog so we can follow along in their experiences. At E-Learning Lab we ran into Thomas Ryberg who is doing the last stint on his Ph.D. on young peoples use of technology.
    IMG_0003.JPG
    We spend an afternoon at the VR Media Lab that has some very neat 3D facilities. For the first time I had a chance to try out the 3D cave. This was an amazing experience I especially enjoyed the 3D drawing program where I could draw all the way around myself or draw an object and walk around it. Peter had arranged for our tour and we all had a blast. There is a lot of potential in 3D imagery but there are still a lot of difficulties in getting this technology out of the academic setting and in to entertainment – but maybe Peter is a man for changing that

    IMG_0008.JPG

  • From talk to action – an idea becomes real

    Most of the decisions that have defined my life up until now have had their beginning in the small hours after a good night out – and this is no exception. My one year internship in Ann Arbor, Michigan was coming to an end and it had been a most amazing year – a very interesting job, lots of cool friends and lots of greats experiences. One night on the way home from the bars I walked with a fellow intern and we were talking about the ever-more threatening return to The Real Lifeâ„¢. Both of us graduated from our academic programs just before coming to the States so on our imminent return home we would be looking for jobs and settling down and all that stuff.

    As we were walking home that fateful night the discussion turned to how sad it would be to get into the everyday life after this incredible year we had just experienced. And then my friend said – “we should start our own company together, do stuff we want to do and use all the great things we’ve learned here”. The talk got intense and we had a lot of crazy ideas (as only drunk friends on the way home from the bars can have). We promised each other that we had to try to start our own company – if we failed then to hell with it – we are still young. No matter what it will be a great experience.

    Five months later my friend Femi packed one bag and flew from Belfast, Northern Ireland – his home town – to Copenhagen, Denmark were I am living now. Our company Arb Design was made official September 1st. Sometimes I have to pinch myself, sometimes I wake up and think “what am I doing?!” and I’m not sure we fully understand what we set in motion here – but trust me we are having a lot of fun :)

    Stay tuned for more on the story of the life as an entrepreneur.