Roundarch proudly co-sponsored the Boston Interactions Fifth Annual Winter Party this past Tuesday evening (1.24) in Cambridge, MA.  Boston Interactions is a loose consortium of Boston-area HCI-related organizations, including BostonCHI,UPA Boston, UPA NH, Boston-IA, IxDA Boston, NEC HFES, Refresh Boston, STC Boston, NEASIS&T, and IEEE/Greater Boston ACM.  The sold-out event was a great time and a perfect opportunity for the community to network over food and drinks.

Lulu Chen and Astrid Chow

Sarah Wilkins, Paul Buranosky and Kate O'Connor

The sponsors

Over 150 New England area UX Professionals, including some read more

Leaders in the Flex community recently gathered at Adobe’s San Francisco headquarters this week. I’ve covered my thoughts to the conversations that went on during those two days. The goal was to discuss Flex and it’s future as an Apache project, but other topics included: HTML5, Adobe’s new corporate strategy, and the future for the Flex community.

Apache is the the future for enterprise class Flex. For those highly skeptical and critical of Adobe, my message to you read more

CIOs have a tough problem to solve.  It is typically their responsibility to maintain all of the applications within their network, safely and securely.  This means CIOs have to say ‘no’ a lot.  Lately, however, CIOs have been using a secret weapon that can help them reduce risks, bounce back from downtime and manage several times more computer resources at once.  In essence, they are able to say ‘yes’ much more frequently.  This is a dream state for both businesses read more

Over the past week the Flash and Flex community have been on a roller coaster ride with announcements by Adobe regarding the Flash platform.  As a technical director at Roundarch this is a topic I follow very closely since it directly affects the digital solutions we design and develop for our clients.  I’ve shared my thoughts on Flex and the future of developing rich internet applications in a post on my blog.

I am fortunate to be surrounded with technologists, user read more

I recently attended the SharePoint 2011 conference held in Anaheim, CA.  The event hosted about 7,500 attendees with broad ranging backgrounds.  The topics covered were targeted to business executives, business users, IT executives, SharePoint Admins, FAST Search Admins and SharePoint Developers.   A whole conference dedicated to one product?  This is a testament to the size and complexity of SharePoint, for sure.

Here are just a few metrics about the current state of SharePoint from the keynote:

125 million licenses;
65,000 customers read more

Roundarch is proud to have hosted a special event for the Interaction Design Association’s (IxDA) Chicago chapter this past Wednesday. IxDA is a global network dedicated to promoting user-centered design, most visibly through its annual Interaction conference, but also through active local chapters like ours. I’ve had the privilege of being a board member of our chapter for the past two years, helping to organize our monthly events to promote and share the great work of Chicago’s designers.

Kicking read more

Last week I attended Web 2.0 Expo in New York to give a talk about dark patterns in user experience. This talk was somewhat the sequel of a talk I gave at SxSW earlier this year about “behavior design,” or the ability for technology to influence us so we live healthier, better lives. Just as we can use the web to improve our lives, though, the same persuasive techniques can be used against us.

This talk came about in read more

“Be the change you want to see in the world” a quote by Mahatma Gandhi stands as a focal point on one of the walls at the iMentor.org office in new york city, a non-profit organization that matches students from underprivileged communities with successful adults to guide and support them through the difficulties and challenges of high school life, both on a personal level as well as academically.

Two years ago I applied to iMentor and was matched with Jordan, a read more

Today we are happy to announce the release of Music Mine, a free iPad media discovery application designed by the team at Roundarch for KCRW, arguably one of the most forward-thinking and well-respected radio stations (if not music brands) in the country.

For those that aren’t familiar, KCRW is a Los Angeles-based radio station and product of Santa Monica College. The station is generally known as Southern California’s leading National Public Radio affiliate, featuring an eclectic mix of music, news, information read more

Whether Adobe represents an aging dinosaur in an online world that is quickly passing them by or a force still to be reckoned with in a battle of giants for control of the world of rich Internet application solutions was the central theme of a panel discussion in which I recently participated at the Pacific Crest 13th Annual Global Technology Leadership Forum, in beautiful Vail, Colorado.  The questions asked of the panelists, all of whom represented digital agencies working in read more