At last week's unConference in Boston, presented by the Mass Technology Leadership Council, I attended a great discussion about Mindfulness and Authentic Leadership at Work. The topic gathered a large and disparate group of participants...
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AgilityFeat at Lean Startup Conference
We're excited to announce that our resident rockstar, Arin will be make a repeat appearance at the Lean Startup Conference. He's been asked to return to the conference, this time as mentor following his electrifying "Just Deploy It!"...
Agile Innovation: The Art of Ideas
Last night I had the pleasure of attending Boston's Lean Startup Circle, titled "Sprinting Towards Innovation". Lead by C. Todd Lombardo the Principal Innovation Catalyst at Constant Contact, the evening was a very hands-on event that...
3 ways to make or break your startup pitch
I've spent some time this week at the Tech.co Celebrate event in Las Vegas, NV. Celebrate is an annual startup competition, where hundreds of startups around the US competed at regional pitch competitions to win a chance to attend the...
10 Resources for the new WebRTC standard
Bringing Real Time Communications to the browser WebRTC was one of the hot topics at the HTML5 Developers Conference that I attended this week, and for good reason. WebRTC is a promising new standard that makes it easier for you to...
Agile Thinking Outside of Development Organizations
Agile methodologies in software development have been around for a long time. The Agile Manifesto was written almost 13 years ago in fact. Initially a hit with developers who were struggling to find a better way to build software, Agile...
B2B marketing with top 25 lists
How can you reach the C-suite of your ideal customer? Public flattery may just be a good tactic to consider in B2B marketing. At the Mid Atlantic Marketing Summit in Baltimore, I met Trevor Lynn, Marketing Manager at Social Tables. He...
5 reasons you’ll love to hate agile development
If agile development were easy, everyone would be doing it. Or at least doing it better. On October 18th AgilityFeat CEO/Founder Arin Sime (that's me) is presenting at InnovateVirginia on "5 reasons you'll love to hate agile development."...
Six Things Entrepreneurs Should Do Before Opening Their E-mail in the Morning
If you are an entrepreneur, you are likely one of the lucky people on this planet who jumps out of bed, passionately inspired to greet the day. After all, you've got to love what you do to generate the energy to run a business! However,...
AgilityFeat speaks on Real Time Messaging at Mo-Dev East
I'm excited to announce that AgilityFeat's own David Alfaro and Arin Sime will be speaking at MoDevEast in December in McLean, Virginia. MoDevEast is the premier East Coast mobile event spanning consumer and enterprise markets across all...
Don’t be average – be an entrepreneur
What do you really want out of life? What is the driving force behind your startup? What really motivates you? Being an entrepreneur is not an easy life, but it can be very emotionally rewarding. Hopefully financially rewarding too. It's...
4 Outsourcing Tips I Learned from the Lean Start-up Machine
Last weekend I attended Lean Startup Machine in Boston. It was a learning-packed 72 hours and I think all entrepreneurs should attend one. In addition to the hands-on exercises applying Lean Startup Methodologies, it was a great way to...
Software as Art
"So how do you ever tell your customers how much something costs?" My cousin asked me that question as I tried to explain to him what we do at AgilityFeat. My cousin is the CFO of a major division of a large multinational European...
Learn UX to lead better
Last week I read an excellent article by Robert Fabricant on “The Rise of UX Leadership”. The article heralds the rise of UX in business and suggests that UX-Centric organization has supplanted the Marketing/Sales driven organization in...
Ruby hiring is our problem
"I want to make Ruby hiring your problem." One of our current clients said this to me in our very first phone call. He was looking for software development teams in Latin America that could handle Ruby on Rails development, and naturally...
Interview with David Blutenthal – Founder & CEO of Moodsnap.fm
As a friend of mine likes to say, music and technology are the two coolest industries on the planet. Last month, I went to my first Music/Tech meetup in Boston where I met the organizer, David Blutenthal. David and I got to talking and I...
How to make your web business idea a reality (for non-technical Entrepreneurs)
At AgilityFeat, we spend lots of time speaking with entrepreneurs about their ideas. As our tagline says, “it’s in our DNA”. We’re a company that is often approached by entrepreneurs, filled with passion but stuck on the steps to take to...
7 Things about #UX I learned from @DanRubin
Yesterday I was in Freiburg Germany for the Smashing Magazine conference, where I attended Dan Rubin’s excellent workshop on User Experience design. Dan is a very noted UX designer, author, and a great photographer too. The workshop was...
Lean Startup Advice for Entrepreneurs
Eric Ries recently posted an article on LinkedIn called “Five Ways You May Be Failing Your Company (Or Making It Fail Itself)”. The takeaways were culled in-part from last year’s Lean Startup Conference. The article offers succinct,...
3 Lean games for your next company retreat
Has your company adopted lean or agile, but it still hasn't quite sunk into your culture? You may want to incorporate some lean games into your next company retreat or all-hands meeting. Games can be a great way to have fun, do some team...
4 tries with real time frameworks
A common thread in many of the applications we build at AgilityFeat is real time messaging. In the traditional client-server request-based communication pattern, the only way a client receives a message from the server is because the...
Announcing Product Consultations
One of the most fun things that I get to do is to speak with entrepreneurs about their business ideas. Most of the time, they are contacting me to find out how much it will cost to build their idea (or re-build their product). As one...
Why Entreprenuers Should Learn to Code
It may seem odd initially that someone who sells software development to businesses would encourage other entrepreneurs to learn one of the skills that AgilityFeat offers. Why would I want more people to learn to do what we can do for...
Get inside your users’ head with UX “Think Alouds” (Video)
For all the analytics that exist now to measure how users are using your web application, there's still one gray area that is hard to measure. What exactly is your user thinking? Why did they find that interface you designed so hard to...
Branching Strategies for Agile Teams
Branching code is a bit of a pain. And agile teams need to do more of it typically. This is because we are balancing new features with production bug fixes, and working in short scrum sprints while also keeping an eye on longer term...