Common Media, Inc. » Clients

Under-Promise and Over-Deliver

noah — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:18:30 +0000

While most potential clients are wary of the lowest cost solution, why aren’t more wary of the vendor that says “Yes” to everything? I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve come in to clean up a broken relationship when the specs were not clear enough and the developer over-promised and under-delivered.

Our rates are professional (but reasonable, especially in relation to New York, Boston and L.A. firms), and we make a point of writing good specifications. We make sure the client knows what they’re paying for and what is “Phase 2,” we hit deadlines and we come in on budget. We’re hoping our proposal recipients see through the lowball bids and the bidders who promise the world on an unreasonable schedule – not just because we’d love to work with them, but to save them money and grey hair in the long run.

Project: Happily Ever After now in print

pjmorse — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 18:50:52 +0000

We mentioned in 2009 that we’d done some WordPress work for my former colleague Alisa Bowman on her blog, Project: Happily Ever After (or PHEA, as we called it).

The book Alisa wrote based on the experiences which spawned the blog is now in print and on sale. Congratulations to Alisa for making the jump from blog to book!

Baseline Solutions Demo

noah — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:19:54 +0000

We’ve mentioned Baseline Solutions before – it is a project we’re very proud of.

Baseline® is a suite of tools which allows a contract reviewer to integrate best practices and shared knowledge directly into a document. The tool is for use by anyone who reviews contracts — controllers, CFO’s, CEO’s, paralegals, contract administrators, contract managers and lawyers.

Baseline works by reading the uploaded contract and then generating a snapshot summary of the contract. With a further click of the mouse, Baseline generates a markup of the document incorporating best practices into the document in Microsoft Word track changes mode. The best practices take the form of inserted clauses, deleted clauses and hyper links to a Knowledgebase with a further explanation of the clauses.

Scott Soloway, founder and President of Baseline Solutions Corporation, has recorded a video demo if you’re interested in seeing exactly what the app does:

Quick HTML/CSS demo

noah — Fri, 07 May 2010 14:26:44 +0000

People often ask us what we do when a designer sends over a PSD, so I made some screen captures from the early stages of a recent build. Next time we’ll do a longer one, right through getting all the fonts and images perfect.

Design by our friend Justin Zucco, and I’ll post a link to the live site (Balmat Law) when it goes live in a week or two.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSC84CUx_Uk

26.2 miles of data

pjmorse — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:36:17 +0000

We work on an occasional consulting basis with the B.A.A., organizers of the Boston Marathon. The 114th running of that venerable race happened on Monday, April 19th. Quite a bit has changed in the operation of a major marathon since 1897, and Network World produced this report on how the B.A.A.’s other technology partners handle the information stream created by ~25,000 runners (23,176 starters and 22,678 finishers according to the B.A.A.) who, despite participating in one of the world’s oldest and simplest sports, have since the mid-1990s been accompanied by RFID chips.

If you’re curious about transponder-based timing technology, I wrote an article for New England Runner in late 2008 which, while already obsolete in terms of the current state of the art, pretty much captured things at the time. The video above was brought to our attention by Josh Merlis of Albany Running Exchange, whose event production team does some pretty nifty stuff with transponder data, PHP, and occasional peripherals like on-course digital cameras.

New Client Site: TABBForum

noah — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:27:50 +0000

If you’re interested in capital markets, check out our newest client site, Tabb Forum.

YouthBuild Providence launches!

noah — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:29:39 +0000

YouthBuild Home Page

In conjunction with the fabulous design team at PopKitchen, we’re delighted to announce the debut of YouthBuild Providence’s brand new website!

It’s always fun to be on board from kick-off to launch, and this was no exception.