Hey guys! Just wanted to share with you a little of what we have been doing. Among the projects we have been tackling, there are some that involve the Facebook Platform. Yes, we have been developing Facebook Applications! I would like to share the ones we have put together thus far.

Group Gifts

This application was done for a client. It makes giving gifts to friends a snap! A few clicks and you have already organized a gift for friends to contribute. The application is secured though SSL and money transfers are through Google Checkout, so don’t be afraid to contribute to a gift. Also, there are many gifts in our library to choose from.

My Yelps

This application was also done for a client. It bring together Facebook and Yelp. All you do is enter your Yelp UserID and the application will import your reviews and displays them for your friends. You can go to your friend’s myyelp to read and review them.

Cosmopolitan Wall

I have saved the best for last. This is our pride and joy! As Bigi mentioned earlier, this application won us a sweet award. We had originally planned to develop another application (which we have in the works) for the contest, but given the restrictions of the application (educational and international), we devised an “international wall” of sorts. Basically, you can write a message to a friend in one language and have it translated to another language before it is then saved onto his or her Cosmopolitan Wall. Since the contest, we added a few more features, with the biggest one being users can translate the message back into another language for ease of reading!

We have also developed a few other applications on Facebook beside these. They include Fantasy Challenge and Jetset Trivia, both of which were developed for our Bay Area clients. We have a few others on the way, so please come back and check them out!

It’s time for another blog entry, as we just came back from another conference this past weekend. This is Bigi at Pure, and this is the first entry I’ve written here!

The conference we attended was Platform, hosted by CommunityNext, down in Sunnyvale. Before I mention anything else, I thought I might bring the good news first. There was an iron coder contest at the conference, and the goal was to create a Facebook application and market it within 24 hours. The group with the most users get the top prize of $5,000 in cash, and the top quality application gets a prize of a Mac Mini. The contest had about 10 groups (or individuals) competing.

Well, we were 31 users short of winning the most users (placing in a close 2nd!), but we certainly brought home the top quality award! I have always been fairly confident in the quality of the applications we produce, as, being the perfectionist frontend developer as I am, I make it a point to make our products as professionally-looking as possible. It is really nice to be recognized for that! I am quite proud of what we accomplished, as we had literally less than 24 hours to do it — coding through the night until 6am, and everything. CommunityNext putsa spin on the contest by making it having to be both international and educational — certainly something we didn’t expect, and certainly, all of the contestants had to come up with ideas and code on the spot (rather than having preparations in advance).

We came up with the idea of an “international” wall, where you can post messages and have them translated to different languages. So here I present our award-winning Facebook app: Cosmopolitan Wall.

Besides the contest, the conference had quite many interesting panels. Topics range from how to create a successful Facebook app that attracts users, to how to monetize off your application.

One interesting idea that I really liked was that somebody mentioned the importance of virtual currencies. I can’t really remember the person who mentioned that in his panel (sitting through 2 days of conference and midnight coding..), so I’m sorry for not giving the appropriate credit. However, he made many good points about the system. Virtual currencies help a lot in both marketing your application and monetizing it (actually, even maintaining server load!). It is a human psychological thing to want to gather up some sort of money and spend them on nice things. “Trading” real money for virtual currencies is always a good alternative to ads for monetization. And with virtual currencies, you can pretty easily limit how many actions a user can do on your app daily, thus controlling server load in a way. That’s hitting 3 birds with 1 stone. Implement it properly in appropriate areas, and it could help tremendously.

I should probably refrain from writing about the entire conference’s talks, so I will stop here. (as the entry is already getting fairly long ) All in all, it was a very useful conference to have attended. We have all learned a lot on the business side and high level development of Facebook apps. Plus, we got to meet a lot of new people (quite a large part was due to the fact that we won the top quality award in the contest! ). We certainly wouldn’t mind attending one of these conferences again!

It’s over a month since our last post. And since our last post, we’ve had one heck of a time. From visiting the EA Headquarters in Redwood City (next to Oracle) and cruising over to Menlo Park for the TechCrunch party later that same day to late, late nights in the office, to finally being able to go out with the guys to experience the night life in D-town (that’s Davis for those that do not know), we have stacked our schedule to the top! We find it pretty darn difficult to keep up solid work in our office and giving our readers some insight on our progress. While we should follow up with a more meaningful post (and one that shouldn’t be written at 2am in the morning), we do want to say we’ve been very busy. While our ink (agreement) keeps us tight-lipped, we’re very excited about first launch of this application we’ve been building over the past month! Check us out on Facebook and you’ll will soon find out what the application is!

In some other news, we will be welcoming Aleck back to the team. He took a leave of absence to travel over the past three months. Now refreshed and jet lagged, he will be coming back in full force right after Labor Day. We changed some dynamics and structure in the company in which, I think, has yield increase in productivity and results! We have goals to meet in the near future as we prepare some bigger moves with our team and we are all on the same page ready to drive forward together.

In due time, we’ll post many updates pertaining to our projects that have either been completed or are being completed. So hang on tight!
Before we call it a night, here’s a neat little widget that is better than a site like GoDaddy. This widget allows you to check out available domains in real time. I figured this would be useful for ourselves and maybe some of you:

We haven’t been able to update our blog in a while. There’s no excuse for that. What we can do though, is give a run down at some of the important happenings with Pure Web Applications since our last update.

One Out, One New Member In

We’re happy to announce that Bigi Lui has joined our team! Originally a member of the Core Two Duo Product Engineering Team at Intel for two years, Bigi decided to switch careers and now has joined on with our team. While you can read a little more about Bigi’s technical expertise here, it’s safe to say that Bigi is an excellent addition to our team that will help us on many fronts with his vast programming experience. Now, after eight weeks, Bigi is fully up to speed with our team’s operations and has already been multiprogramming with several small client projects.

GeoTrust vs. Verisign – Save yourself some money

Our lives revolve around the internet so much these days. There are companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and that have invested so much money and knowledge to understand our personal information and know how to monetize this information. Frankly, I’m not too worried about them. I’m worried about the small number of hackers (relative to # of users) that make a living by exploiting our information, using SPAM and other identity theft tactics.

Because of these hackers, companies like Verisign exist for e-commerce sites. Sites pay a lot of money to ensure encryption (SSL – secure socket layers) on sites like online banking and payment processing. Verisign charges $695 for a two year SSL certificate just to ensure your website is encrypted. However, I’m proposing another solution: GeoTrust. From doing some quick research, I find that Verisign and GeoTrust are the big players in offering digital certificates (otherwise known as SSL). But in late 2006, Verisign bought out GeoTrust. Currently, one offers a two year purchase for $695 (Verisign), the other for $436 (GeoTrust). One company, two different prices. Your choice.

Pure Web Applications Website (nearly) complete!

One of the biggest decisions I felt we made bringing it to the team’s intention to restructure our focus in what our core competencies are. That’s when Pure, Inc. dba Pure Web Applications was born. I collaborated with our graphic designer, Jo, to discuss some of the points we wanted to portray as a company. She made our words a reality. Sure, there are many updates still that needs to be made about our team and about the latest projects we’ve developed, but for the most part, our website and image branding are complete to reflect what this company is about.

Spotlight: Latest Projects, from Facebook Applications to Social Networks

If you are frequent visitor of Facebook, you would have noticed that there are a plethora of neat applications that you could freely add to your personal profile page. Basically, Mark Zuckerberg announced opening up of Facebook’s platform to all developers. They can make anything they want to be placed within your own homepage. This changed the game for Web 2.0 startups. It’s not hard to see what the wonderful business opportunity is here – access to a wide number of audience, next-to-nothing for marketing, and the buzz from all the bloggers that take note. A simple search will yield many articles covering this topic. Some of VC blogs that I read, expresses their view on this.

Fast forward two months later – we’ve been able to capitalize on this opportunity as we produced two Facebook applications:

Jetset Trivia and EA Sports Madden 08 Countdown

Now, it’ll get to a point where there would be so many applications that it would take a real clever idea and one that adds value to a user that would get it off the ground. But, on the mean time, everyone is riding the wave of this marketing gold mine and we have happy to be a part of it and getting our fingers dirty with the technical development there.

Finally… EA Sports Visit & TechCrunch Party 9 – Someone say, Team Trip?!

Our last team trip was two months ago. Keeping constant with my last post in which I speak that it’s necessary and healthy to make team trips to some of the Web events in the Bay area, it’s fitting that Team Pure is set on making a trip out to the Valley this Friday. Our first stop is to EA Sports. We’re going to get a quick tour of the facility and also take care of some loose business ends. Afterward, there will be some dead time before we will all head to TechCrunch’s TC Party 9 held at August Capital. I was lucky enough (and quick enough) to get in on four tickets. It’s a trip I’m sure all of us are looking forward to. Fun in the bay soon… but that means hard at work now! Ciao!

One of the many tips I’ve picked up in working or leading teams is to change things up from time to time so the team will continue to be eager and innovative – spontaneity spurs creativity. This is especially be true for small teams, where it’s easy to fall into a routine and prevent out-of-the-box thinking. Mixing it up by throwing in brainstorming sessions and holding free discussions on topics of interest are just a few ways to shake us out of the daily grind.

That said, yesterday morning, Monday, May 7th, my team and I abandoned our routine of Monday morning team meetings and headed west to San Francisco’s The Westin for Startup Camp 2. A little background about Startup Camp 2: it is an unconference-style one day event dedicated to bringing together various members of the startup community for a face-to-face collaborative meet-up, a free conference part of CommunityOne sponsored by Sun Microsystems.

What exactly is an “unconference” you ask? Simple: a conference with no pre-planned agenda, but rather a community-driven process by which we decide what we’d like to hear about. With over 500 attendees, I figured this would be a perfect opportunity for us to see our industry up close, stimulate our minds with good old technical and business richness, participate in some relevant discussion topics, and enjoy the goodies that Sun and its sponsors had to offer.

While I attended a few business related sessions, namely Startup Financing 101 by Jeff Clavier (SoftTech Ventures), Bootstrapping by David Young (Joyent), and Software as a Service by a fellow from Navisite, the technical guys branched off and jumped into the technical sessions that most related to their interest. For instance, Josh and Wilson enjoyed the session on Scaling Infrastrucure for Web Applications and Database Optimization led by Josh Berkus (Sun) and Jason Hoffman (Joyent) while Aleck found the session on Atom Syndications (RSS) most useful. I’ll spare our readers from the technical details that those guys gained from the sessions and sum it up by saying the experience for us as a web team was a very positive one both in knowledge and in team cohesion. We also took notes, so we’ve got some great fuel for our brains.

To some of us, this is our second trip to the Bay Area to attend an event sponsored by Sun, and they impressed us again – it wasn’t just the free T-shirts they gave us for registering, or even the free lunch they provided. The open and comfort setting along with the 500+ eager entrepreneurial attendees created an excellent environment for us to be a part of. Walking around, there were plenty of Sun and other sponsor employees conversing with the crowd. It was an even more pleasant surprise that at this event, as with the last Sun event, we came across Steve Staso, web technologies in Europe and Asia for Sun, again during lunch break.

Led by their CEO, Sun is bridging the learning and marketing gap of their technology and the developers. Judging by the excitement of the attendees and my team, we’re enthusiastic about Sun and the tools they give us to build our vision and events like these are great resources to empower young entrepreneurs to believe that they have the skills, tools, and support to make great things happen.

Since the last time we blogged, we’ve been quite busy over here. Amidst having a few unexpected scenarios pop up that were unavoidable, we were able to finish a fun and little project for our client. The end result? We rolled out:

A site dedicated to celebrity gossip! We built the back end from the ground up and modified the front end design tailored to our client’s specification. The result is a Digg-like website pulling the latest and hottest celebrity news. Armed with a voting algorithm, user accounts, and tags, we helped our client build his vision — a site that eases the end user’s navigation in finding what they’re most curious about. Oh, don’t worry. We’re still working on Shindee too. To read all the features that we keep adding to our invitation site, you can always visit our Shindee blog. But, if you don’t feel like reading another blog, the important features that we pushed out are:

• Google Maps and Directions within your invitation.
• Ability to re-send invitations after invitation edits.
• Guests can invite their friends, too!

We appreciate the feedback — please keep them coming. I assure you we are working to make your voices heard, thanks!

Shindee is a tool to make inviting people simple. This is a project that we here at Pure, Inc. are developing along side the client work that we immerse ourselves in. While we like to develop our client work and are loyal to them, nothing beats being able to create and put in 100% creativity and effort to a project where you know it solves a problem that you have and indirectly, possibly solve a problem others may have as well. With this project, we wish to take a no-nonsense approach when building the site, and this means we have the user experience foremost in our minds as we make decisions about the front-end design and how the back-end will support what is visible.

Launched on March 1, 2007, we will continually be updating the site and adding new features that many of our users request. Got a feedback? Don’t hesitate to suggest something. We’ll read it, we’ll evaluate, and if it makes sense, we’ll implement it as fast as well can. You see, we spent some time working the foundation of Shindee’s development which delayed our launch date. But now, we feel we can deploy new features quicker. So check us out, give us feedback, and make us work!

Aleck Lin, another UC Davis graduate and a former GDA Technologies Embedded Systems Engineer, has joined our team. He graduated with double degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering in Winter of 2005. He brings a solid background in firmware and understanding of programming. He is also the only member on the team that will not be thrown off stage if asked to sing a song. Aleck will slowly be integrated onto our internal project, which is yet to be revealed.

Johanna Su, a UC Davis undergraduate major in Design and minor in Computer Science, also came on board. She adds diversity to our predominantly male company in addition to her crafty design skills. Jo will provide valuable ideas while she continues to improve her web skills.

It’s a given that we are very fortunate to have such wonderful people join our team as we continue to grow our business and our skill sets. On behalf of Team Pure, welcome!

December 28, 2006

Our old office just didn’t cut it for us anymore. We heard the stories, we’ve been warned, and we knew we would feel the pinch in the company’s budget as we made the bold decision to move out of our old office in Downtown Davis to a brand new and bigger office suite in West Davis. The office suite is located right across from Sutter Hospital and next to the coffee shop most famous for the Davis cops that hang out there sipping on their coffee and pastries every 5am and 10pm. That’s actually a pleasant surprise – it feels like we have bodyguards protecting our office building. I guess that’s how our tax dollars will pay off.

Back to our decision to move. I guess it’s against conventional start-up company wisdom to add to our overhead expenditures. But it’s not as though we didn’t try. We tried hard to make it work. I used many of the frugal rules my parents made me embrace as a child in our company to keep our costs down. But actually going through this experience of starting up a company where our only real assets are its members and the blackboxes that rest beside them, I can attest that its alright to go against conventional wisdom. We tried to work in a “high-tech sweat shop” factory setting from June 2006 until our office rental agreement expired. Seeing productivity affected because of the conditions there, we made the decision to ditch our old office for a bigger one despite knowing that overhead costs will rise three-fold. We decided to look out for ourselves for once; there’s no point having unsatisfactory work conditions resulting in unproductiveness.

We believe the ROI on getting a bigger office will yield exponential productivity. We are committed in proving our thesis correct.

Say goodbye to 423 F Street, Suite 108, Davis, CA and welcome:

2050 Lyndell Terrace
Suite 200
Davis, CA 95616

Feel free to come by to visit us – we can grab coffee at the near by Starbucks, grab a bite to eat that the Quiznos there, or simply, just keep us on our toes!