• Read more about Working Remotely

One of the main questions I am asked about my job is how I manage to stay productive while working from home, especially since the company that I work for is a group of app developers in DC. I live in  Argentina working as a graphic designer for Mobomo’s Design Team and have been since October 2014. Even though Mobomo is a U.S based company, I can honestly say I have loved working remotely for a company that truly invests in their employees even though they are thousands of miles away. Working remotely is only possible with professional and reliable people. I can admit, working from home is a skill that needs to be developed because it requires knowing how to manage your time without someone supervising you 24/7. It also takes someone that knows how to take calculated risks without asking for permission, and making that solution work.

Even though it’s not your traditional office setting, we have our own ways to stay connected. Our design team meets each morning on Hangouts to discuss what each of us are working on that day and if we need help with something then would be the time to ask. Some would ask ok but how does your team keep your tasks tracked? We use tools like Jira to help us stay organized with our to-do lists and it allows you to know who’s working on what and when it should be completed. When we want to communicate in a more relaxed way with our co-workers, we use Slack as our ‘water cooler’ we share gifs and talk about music or which new game we are playing.

From time to time, we have ‘Mobomo Days’ where we get together and work in an office. Recently we had an end of the year party where we spent a day at a rented country house where we could enjoy a pool and a dinner together. It is great being able to come together as a team to share laughs and jokes even though we don't see one another day in and day out. 

I have had an amazing experience working for Mobomo this past year, it has helped me grow professionally in many aspects, and it has given me the opportunity to meet awesome people, not only in the Buenos Aires team, but also in the U.S. I’m really excited to see what 2016 has in store and I’m fully charged to tackle on the new projects that come along.

• Read more about Responsive Tables: What Happens When the Data Doesn't Fit?

By nature, tables of data have a rigid structure and capitalize on screen width. When screen size is limited, table data will often not fit on the screen at once. This has been an interesting challenge throughout the brief history of responsive design since a key feature with responsive design eliminates the horizontal scroll factor.

The simplest way to work with tables that exceed the width of small screens is to place them inside a scrolling container. This generally works and it allows the table structure to be maintained. The only drawback is that it results in horizontal scrolling which we are often trying to avoid in responsive design. With that said, the value of simplicity makes this option a great default setting for tables across a site. This is the method employed by popular frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation.

More complex solutions should be used on a case by case basis for tables that require more attention. You should test the experience of using modified tables at the relevant screen sizes to catch any unexpected issues like text wrapping or overflowing.

If you are seeking to eliminate horizontal scrolling but do not mind a potentially enormous increase in vertical scrolling, the following solution may suit your needs. It is an elegant yet fairly simple solution that stacks every item within the table vertically and cleverly places a label next to each item using some css trickery. The downside to this approach is that it is not easy to scan multiple items in common categories at one time.

An easily scannable solution that also prevents horizontal scroll will require significantly more complexity to strategically hide and reveal portions of data using javascript. Advanced responsive table plugins such as FooTable and DataTable allow developers to choose which columns are hidden at specific breakpoints. A user can then quickly scan through the existing columns to find an entry and reveal the hidden column data for that entry. Once we reach this level of complexity, we gain access to a variety of features like sorting, filtering, and pagination.

• Read more about New Year, New Resolutions

Each New Year brings new resolutions that people promise to keep whether it’s hitting the gym, saving money, eating healthy, the list is endless and I am sure everyone has heard their fair share. While strategy and commitment are key components to resolutions, keeping yourself focused and on track are just as important.

Mobomo had quite the 2015, if you haven’t heard we merged with another web & mobile app development company, Intridea! Aside from the merger we found ourselves hiring new employees each month and reaching new heights and potentials in the tech world that we never could have imagined. Although the past year seemed to be full of change, we made sure that our focus was in check so that we could strive as a new identity. We made it our mission to take our energy and direct it towards our clients.  Seems pretty simple, but it’s not always the case with employees working all over the world, two companies becoming one as well as producing successful products for our clients.

The tech world is not slowing down in 2016 and neither is Mobomo, so for us our outlook for 2016 is relatively simple. We wanted to share a few resolutions that our brand has adopted, if you are in the market for some fresh resolutions feel free to join us in our commitment.

Fully Charged: Energy for us is never an issue. We want to keep implementing our energy and poise that we put forth towards each project. We will continue to take our energy and passion for this field and portray it through our work. Who wants to work with someone who is boring? That’s why you can always count on us to bring the spunk and enthusiasm in each project.

Reshape Reality: Can anyone really tell you what reality is? Reality can be anything that you perceive it to be; people can view reality through different lenses, why let someone else try to tell us what reality it when we can create our own.

Limit Limits: Who says you have to have a limit? When you have limits are you really reaching your full potential? We have adopted this outlook to ask ourselves why limit limits? Sounds crazy but think about it.. If you are limiting your potential how can you find out the potential if it is limited? We are encouraging ourselves to constantly think and reach new potentials not just stopping at our limit. 

To put it simply, we are not settling this year, why settle when we can create, design and deploy new and exciting projects with our clients that are innovative while potentially hovering over “the next big thing.” We could not be more excited to start 2016... with a jolt of energy of course.

• Read more about Load User Status... What’s your Limit?

Clients come to us with an array of problems that need innovative solutions. Recently one of our clients came to us with an issue, their website was not configured to auto scale. To those of you that are not familiar, auto scaling ensures that your platform has the correct instances of servers to account for traffic or load. Due to the industry our client is in, breaking news and events can occur instantly which results in an increased amount of traffic to their website at any given time. Their site could be manually scaled; however, this retroactive intervention isn't always fast enough. We were able to create a solution to account for sporadic increases in traffic to their site that would be successfully maintain platform uptime.

In order to do this, we used a multi-server locust setup to run load tests against which allowed us to test multiple different slow and fast test scenarios. These different tests allowed us to see how much further we could scale instances to maintain acceptable uptime rates then we ever could do before. Once we decided on the type of tests that we wanted to run, it was then time to identify our “standard” for how many users we wanted to test at once. We ultimately decided to test for 100,000 concurrent users to account for usage traffic seen hitting our CDN during high traffic events. We then collected a list of our 2500 most requested queries for our test users to use during the tests.

We experimented with the slow test first, which meant that we gradually added users in a more predictable and normal situation. This test added servers as needed and overall there was no immediate impact to the speed that the content was handled. Overall pretty dull…Which was wonderful! 100k users a minute and all statistics showed a happy healthy site.

The fast test allowed thousands and thousands of users to visit the site within a few minutes. During this test we went from 0 to 100k users in roughly six minutes. This caused the site to serve 500's while the servers were being added. Our 500’s are mostly absorbed at our cache layer which is where we served stale content until the requests were fulfilled. Our findings proved that when we increased the speed of users it caused a tremendous amount of stress on the server. Our auto scale group added two servers every three minutes until we got to nine servers, through prior testing we knew this was likely the appropriate amount of servers that could handle the load. Once we reached around five servers the 500's disappeared.  After we reached nine servers the request queue cleared up latency between our cache and application layer looked nominal. All in all this process took about 20 minutes to become "normal" at 100k users per minute.

During the peak of the quick test when the servers were under the most pressure we decided to do the unthinkable and clear our drupal site cache. I know, sounds like a great idea, but we love a challenge. We pressed the clear cache button and waited 10 to 15 minutes but to our surprise nothing happened.. the drama that we were anticipating never played out. The application saw a slight jump in latency and the statistics were raised or lowered by about 5-10% for about one minute and then returned to normal. That was it...no fireworks, only the lingering taste of sweet sweet success! This is due in large part to the site being anonymous, but cache policies still require frequent invalidation.

Overall both tests to 100k users is above and beyond the highest traffic we have seen in an hour timespan due to the CDN layer. We were able to successfully complete the 100K users a minute test, which we roughly estimated at one request every 10 seconds. We found that the results of each test to be relevant because of the scale our client can now operate; they can go from a site having minimal traffic to 50x that amount of traffic in a short amount of time. Problem solved!

• Read more about Ken Fang Named to Monte Jade Board

Monte Jade DC has recently announced that they have nominated Mobomo’s President, Ken Fang, as their Chairman of the Board. Ken has been on the Monte Jade DC board since 2013.

“It is indeed a great honor to be nominated to lead this great organization. Over the past few years of involvement with Monte Jade, I have seen incredible relationships grow as business owners connect, students and mentors learn from one another, and professionals network to build bonds with one another. It is a fantastic connection for the Asian community in DC."

Monte Jade is an organization that aids in resources for starting, funding and growing high technology businesses. Their commitment is to assist future entrepreneurs, students, researchers, scientists, scholars and business people to advance their careers in becoming leaders and executives in their organizations or assist those that have interest in becoming entrepreneurs and business owners. They accomplish this through the experience and knowledge our prestigious board and other key members that include C-level executives, managers, and directors leading, operating, and developing some of the most successful science and technology firms in the Greater Washington area.

Ken Fang is the President of Mobomo, primarily overseeing the strategy and operations of the company. He works closely with clients to create mobile solutions to meet their strategic needs, and is adept at developing apps on all major mobile platforms, including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, and mobile web. In addition to running Mobomo, Ken is the founder and chairman of Altum, Inc., the market leader of enterprise grants management and performance management solutions for federal and philanthropic organizations. Ken has published a number of titles and articles in educational software and advanced computing technology. He holds a B.S. and an M.S. in Computer Science from Pennsylvania State University, an M.B.A. from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a certificate in Bioinformatics from Stanford University.

• Read more about Ionic Mobile Framework Featured at ModevCon

Modev started in 2008 as a Meetup group and over the years they have led the industry by organized conferences,strategic initiatives and provided executive leadership coaching to ensure those we engage with operate at peak performance.We were thrilled to have the opportunity to speak at the fifth annual Modev Conference on December 10th. Adam presented on the Ionic HTML5 hybrid mobile framework, where he talked about the framework’s background, as well as provided a quick dive into Angular.js, the popular javascript framework it’s built on.  

Be sure to visit http://withinsight.github.io/modev-ionic/ to see the full presentation 

• Read more about In-App VS. Apple Pay

Let’s first start with the question, what IS In-App and Apple Pay purchases?

In-App purchases are extra content and subscriptions that you can buy in the apps on your iOS device or computer. However, not all apps offer in-app purchases. For example with some apps you can buy additional content such as a key that unlocks more features on a free app or a sword that gives you more power in a game.

Apple Pay purchases is a service that enables mobile payments and digital wallet apps that initiate secure payment transactions between contactless payment terminals and Apple iOS devices like the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Watch. In other words, you can make purchases at a store without your wallet, just with a simple touch of an app.

Now let’s really dig into the different items that you can purchase using either the In-App OR Apple Pay. Below are a few key differences between which items you can purchase by using either app-

In-App: sells virtual goods such as premium content for your app, and subscriptions for digital content.

Apple Pay: sells physical goods such as groceries, clothing, and appliances.

These days it’s ALL about cost so let’s cover the difference in cost of using the two products?

In-App: 70% of the purchase price of each item you sell within your app is paid to you on a monthly basis- NO credit card fees are applied

Apple Pay: FREE! (Credit card fees do apply)

Make sure to let us know which you find easier to use, In-App OR Apple Pay.

See: iPhone App Store Submission Checklist

• Read more about Our Journey to a New Brand

WHO WE ARE

Rebranding for any company is an evolution of itself. It can mean a new logo, name, symbol or design conformed into one new identity. Once known as two separate companies, Intridea and Mobomo officially became a single website & mobile application development company around 5 months ago. Instead of renaming the company we decided to keep the name Mobomo (we liked their name better)!

After the merger was finalized the next step was to develop a new identity for the our newly formed family, we had to figure out “who” we are as an agency. Luckily, we shared the same vision for “who” we wanted to be which made things fairly straightforward, but I know that this isn’t the case for all rebrands. WE are energetic, WE are agile, We ARE MOBOMO!

Any company whether they are rebranding or not should be eager for new changes and ideas that can further propel their brand which ultimately leads to success. A company that is stagnant or doesn't have the drive or push is destined to fail. A key to any rebranding process is taking all your learnings, both internally and externally, and applying them to your new identity. Along with applying your best practices learned through experiences it is important to listen, be open to all ideas and try new concepts, if not change will never occur thus a stagnant company is inevitable.  In this post I’d love to walk you through our REBRANDING process as well as our newest developments to our new brand that makes it what it is today.

OUR LOGO

A logo or icon represents a company's name, when someone sees that logo they immediately associate with a particular company or brand. As a newly formed identity, we decided a new logo was an immediate next step. After weeks of deliberation, our new company logo was decided on- the hummingbird. A hummingbird to us perfectly combines the energy we put into each project, with the gracefulness and agility that comes with a team who is able to rapidly shift to the needs of our clients.

The new Mobomo word mark, is a custom typeface that is strong and commands attention. Capable of standing out in an overly crowded space, and infinitely versatile, the Mobomo word mark stands as a strong foundation of who we are.

Finalizing THE BRAND

Selecting the right font can be detrimental to a new brand and as the first rule of thumb.. it should always compliment the new logo. For our primary font we chose FF Real for it’s simple and elegant, yet strong appearance that translates well across a variety of different mediums. Our secondary font choice is Source Sans Pro, which was selected because it compliments FF Real perfectly and is a great display font.

The color palette we decided on supports our core beliefs illuminating our agile and energetic spirit towards all of our work.

And no redesign is complete without iconography to help tell it’s story. We chose an icon library that works well both on and offline, it is one that’s simple in it’s level of detail but strong in it’s ability to be recognized.

Combine all of our efforts and you get our final product...!

By: Mike DelGuidice

• Read more about Takeaways from Microsoft IPC’s Bitcoin Breakfast

By: Malena Lopez - Project Manager

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak at Microsoft's Innovation and Policy Center on Bitcoin and the potential for banking the unbanked with some awesome people - Brian Forde from MIT's Media Lab, Brian Hoffman from OpenBazaar, and Jerry Brito from coincenter. While I consider myself a Bitcoin novice, I have quickly noticed the equalizer this digital currency can be in the financial landscape. It's truly a breath of fresh air as long as we keep the conversation inclusive and diverse.

That said, Bitcoin and the Blockchain are changing the way we think about currency, digital assets, and identity. During the panel, all speakers touched on thought-provoking and telling points.

1. Bitcoin is freedom for currency.
In a place where regulation is second nature, freedom brings us home to the realization that we can take control of our currency with its decentralization and permission-less trade.

2. Bitcoin can bank the unbanked -- using mobile.
McKinsey estimates that worldwide “2.5 billion of the world’s adults don’t use formal banks.” Let’s compare that with mobile penetration worldwide. At the end of 2014, there were a “total of 3.6 billion unique mobile subscribers.” That’s over 50% for mobile Bitcoin potential.

3. Bitcoin has a future.
Think about the Internet - It eliminated the middle man to access and put out information. You no longer had to be a doctor to learn about heart disease; you could do it yourself. Today, we depend on this decentralized model. Bitcoin finds its future in this same way.

• Read more about Inc. 5000 Ranking #2026

It's here! Inc. 5000 released their list of the fastest growing, privately-owned companies for 2015. With a focus on job development, revenue and year-over-year growth, Inc. Magazine ranks the best of the best in the entrepreneurial world.

Coming back for another year, Mobomo has made the Inc. 5000 list once again!  With a revenue of $5.6 million, 50 additional members to the team, and a three year growth of 194%, Mobomo is full-steam for 2015.  Woo hoo!

Want to learn more? Chat with some Mobomo folks? Or heck, just say hi?  Tweet, FB, or contact us! We'd love to hear from you.