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November 8: Web accessibility & Social media for good

November 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Web accessibility: What is it and why does it really matter?

Presented by Mike Squillace, IBM Research Software Engineer, Cloud Computing Strategic Initiatives

People with disabilities make up a large, untapped market when it comes to web commerce. Accessibility is the degree to which products and services are usable by this population. With strengthened federal regulations, more robust worldwide standards, and pending litigation that may broaden the reach of the Americans with Disabilities Act, now is the time to learn what accessibility means for your web presence and applications.

Social media startups for social good

Presented by David Neff, Erine Gray and Ehren Foss

Join HelpAttack! and AuntBertha for a behind-the-scenes look at how some Texas startups are pursuing a strategy of doing good for people and the planet while making a profit. All the while trying to grow their startups into profitable and thriving businesses.

Nov. 8, from 7-10 p.m. at Buffalo Billiards (6th and Brazos)

RSVP on Facebook. (It’s not required; you’re always welcome.)

Special thanks this month to Spiceworks for sponsoring this month’s drink tab!

Filed Under: Events

October 12th: Social Interaction Practice

October 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

October: Social Interaction Practice

Hi everyone, we’ve been bumped from our normal meeting spot, and our backup location won’t be able to host us this month, so we’re going to change gears. While we won’t have a good venue for topics, we still want to gather and socialize, so please join us at the Gingerman Tuesday evening to meet up, geek out and enjoy a bit of beer.

We’ll return to topic-focused meetings for the November 8th Refresh.

October 11th, 7 – 10pm at The Gingerman

RSVP on Facebook (it’s not required, you’re always welcome)

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September 13th: Tools, Tips and Tricks

September 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Tools, Tips & Tricks

Hosted by Alex Jones

It’s time once again for one of our most popular topics – the Refresh Tool Roundup. We’ll divide this one into 5 minute segments to give you the chance to brag on your favorite tools, share a tip or reveal that secret weapon that takes a project from good to great. Anyone who’s interested will have up to five minutes to show off an app, service, tool, plugin or method that they think others would find useful. The tools can be for developing, designing, writing, running a small business or maintaining your sanity.

Some Quick Guidelines
No self promotion
No demos that requires a ton of bandwidth (video conferencing etc.) as we have a small pipe to work with at BB. If you just want to talk about a tool that uses a lot of bandwidth, that’s cool.
Be prepared – bring a laptop if what you’re going to show off is an actual app, otherwise, make sure to have the URL with you at the meeting.

We have 12 slots available, so if you’re interested in presenting, drop me a line off-list and I’ll put you on the agenda.

September 13th, 7 – 10pm at Buffalo Billiards (6th and Brazos)

RSVP on Facebook (it’s not required, you’re always welcome)

Filed Under: Events

August 9th Refresh: Social Meetup at the Gingerman

August 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

!important Change: Socialize at the Gingerman

Hi everyone, we’ve been bumped from our normal meeting spot, and our backup location won’t be able to host us this month, so we’re going to change gears. While we won’t have a good venue for topics, we still want to gather and socialize, so please join us at the Gingerman Tuesday evening to meet up, geek out and enjoy a bit of beer.

We’ll return to topic-focused meetings for the September 13th Refresh.

August 9th, 7 – 10pm at The Gingerman

RSVP on Facebook (it’s not required, you’re always welcome)

Filed Under: Events, Presentations, Roundup Tagged With: , , ,

July 12th: Scaling Dirty & Using Dexy to Document Your Code

July 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Scaling Dirty

Presented by Philip “Flip” Kromer, Infochimps

Details to come shortly

Refreshing Stories: Dexy for Big Data

Presented by Ana Nelson

You have an awesome dataset. You have great analytics algorithms. Now what? You will need to communicate your results and document your code if you want your project to be effective and maintainable. Dexy is an exciting open source authoring and automation tool that helps you do just that: document your code and communicate your results.

Dexy draws upon the philosophies of literate programming and reproducible research and realizes them in a powerful and flexible way. Smoothly incorporate source code, computational output and graphs into your research reports, blog posts, user guides, tutorials and emails. Typos, incorrect or outdated code examples and unreproducible workflows will be a thing of the past. Your projects will be maintainable, auditable and extensible. Interact with APIs to obtain data or publish output, and have complete head-to-toe automation of your project, its documentation and its deliverables.

You’ve found the stories in your data, Dexy will help you tell them.

July 12th, from 7 – 10pm at Buffalo Billiards (6th and Brazos)

RSVP on Facebook (it’s not required, you’re always welcome)

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June 14th: Don’t Forget to Kick Ass – Sketching & Prototyping for Product Innovation

June 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve seen Sara’s earlier presentations at Refresh you’re likely as excited as I am that she’ll be up on stage sharing her experience and approach to sketching and prototyping. While the focus may sound design-oriented, Developers, writers, marketing folks and entrepreneurs alike will all benefit from this presentation. This presentation will run longer than our normal topics, so we’ll focus the entire meeting on it and ensure there’s plenty of timed during and after the presentation to explore the possibilities.

Event Details

7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, June 14th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
RSVP on Facebook (it’s not required, you’re always welcome).

Don’t Forget to Kick Ass – Sketching & Prototyping for Product Innovation

Presented by Sara Summers

Process. Everyone has it, but not everyone has the chance to make award winning, wildly successful products people can’t stop talking about. We drudge through tight deadlines, organizational missteps, endless revisions and bug fix cues, and constant pressure to ‘get it right’.. But how do we know what the right experience is if we’re not sketching, experimenting and testing the possibilities?

Together we’ll learn how to summons the brightest ideas, prototype through problems and examine ways to stitch innovation into the product development process. Then, transfer our insights into powerful, collaborative concepts to share and test with clients, teammates and users alike.

Sara is a User Experience Evangelist for Microsoft who lives for big ideas, changing everything, breaking your toys and capturing new ideas.

Have you checked out the new Refresh Austin Facebook page yet?

Filed Under: Events, Presentations

May 10th Meeting: Facebook Open Graph & Building a Usability and Analytics Toolkit

May 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Howdy everyone, we have two great topics this month that will get your mind working and provide great ideas that you can put into practice.

Event Details

7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, May 10th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

Let us know you’re coming! RSVP on Facebook (it’s not required, you’re always welcome). While you’re at it, check out the new Refresh Austin Facebook page!

Building a Usability and Analytics Toolkit

Judd Lyon, Partner/Technical Director at Trifecta Interactive

Most of us probably agree that getting user feedback is important, yet why do many of our projects go without it? Judd will explore combining techniques and online tools that can help you drive improvements to your site/app.

Among the topics covered will be:

  • Web Analytics
  • Online Surveys
  • Remote User Testing
  • A/B Testing
  • Search Engine and Social Media Tracking
  • Reporting Dashboards

Using Facebook Social Plugins and OpenGraph for Fun and Profit

Jon Loyens, Director of Bazaarvoice Labs

Sure it’s easy to add a Like button to your website but what do you do with it once it’s there? How can you use Facebook Login to make registration for your site easier and get more user information all at the same time? What kind of data can you mine out of Facebook OpenGraph? In this presentation, I’ll take everyone a step beyond the basics of Facebook’s social plugins and demonstrate how to use the more advanced features of the Facebook platform and give everyone a glimpse of how much data is really there to be had and used.

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April 12th Meeting: Social Business & Cross Platform Mobile Apps

April 5, 2011 By 1 Comment

…and we’re back from South-by with two great topics!

Event Details

7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, April 12th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

RSVP on Facebook (it’s not required, you’re always welcome)

Building cross-platform mobile apps (with your existing chops)

Presented by Rob Jones, 2Sides Design

So your client asks you for a mobile app that needs to run Android and iPhone. While both platforms have their strengths, designing and deploying for both can be a challenge: The development environments are very different, and their interface patterns are different enough to require different interaction design. On a lot of client budgets (and for design shops that have traditional web dev backgrounds), this can be troublesome.

To solve this problem, mobile frameworks based on traditional web technologies such as HTML/Javascript have emerged. We’ll take a brief tour of Sencha Touch and jQuery mobile, two frameworks that allow you to build cross-platform apps. (As an added bonus, we’ll look at how designers can theme Sencha Touch using LESS/CSS).

We’ll also take a brief look at how you can use Phonegap to get your apps ready for the various app stores.

What is the buzz about Social Business? Is it the same as social media and is it here to stay?

Presented by Elizabeth Quintanilla, EQ Consultants Group, LLC

Be entertained as Elizabeth Quintanilla shares her unique approach to tech, business and social media. Learn her distinct point of view of “Social Business” and learn about a valuable concept that should be in every tech, entrepreneurs, biz leaders, analysts, and marketers toolkit. Learn why all of us now wear multiple hats such as customer support, PR, marketing, and more in this current environment of Social Media. Remember Social Business helps you get smarter not harder while (if well implemented) more effective.

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Refresh Kickoff Lunch at SXSW 2011

February 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

South-By is just around the corner, so its time to discuss how to start things right. Luckily, we have you covered!

As we’ve done for the last three years, we’ve set up a lunch for Refreshers from around the world on Friday, March 11th from 11:30 to 2:30pm, to kick off SXSW Interactive. This is a great chance to catch up with Refreshers you met in years past and make some new friends before the conference starts in full. The lunch will be at B.D. Riley’s, the same venue as in years past and will be a casual affair. We don’t have any sponsors, so you’ll need to pick up your own tab, but the pub is very accommodating and is happy to maintain separate checks. Even better, they’re giving us happy hour prices and may throw in some appetizers.

If you have any questions, please let me know. If possible please RSVP on FaceBook so we have an idea of how much space we’ll need. That said, feel free to drop in even if you don’t RSVP, all are welcome.

Let me know if you have any questions and please pass this on to other Refreshers who aren’t on this mailing list.

Facebook Event Page

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February Meeting: HTML Email: Coding like it’s 1999

February 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Howdy everyone, our meeting comes a bit sooner this month than most of us are used to, as the second Tuesday is the 8th, so it’s just a week away. Join us for Art Thompson’s presentation ‘HTML Email: Coding like it’s 1999′ – given how confusing this topic can be, and the tangle of support across the various e-mail clients, this is a can’t miss topic for designers, developers and entrepreneurs alike.

Due to a scheduling mix-up, our second presentation fell through, but as always, we’d love to have a second topic, so drop Alex a note if you have a topic in your back pocket that you could present on Tuesday.

Event Details

7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, February 8th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

RSVP on Facebook (it’s not required, you’re always welcome)

Filed Under: Events
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