It's been great building the National Lab Day website, and it's also wonderful to have the site recognized on whitehouse.gov. This makes two sites we've worked on that have gotten attention in the Innovations Gallery, since Peer to Patent was similarly recognized.

The video from whitehouse.gov (below) does a better job explaining the project than I can:

And yes, the voice on the video clip is our own Mike Grafton.

pre|central.net has posted their picks for Best Apps of 2009, and they've picked both of the apps we developed internally as must-have apps in their categories, with Tweed at the top of the list in the Social Networking category, and Scoop being edged out by The New York Times in the News category. (We will concede that they have a little more experience in the News world than we do. ;-) The AP Mobile app also gets a shout out in the News Category, which some of you know is another app we developed, in this case on behalf of a client.

Thanks to the pre|central folks for picking our apps, and to all our users for installing those apps, and for all your feedback.

President Obama today announced the establishment of an annual National Lab Day, a nationwide initiative to foster scientific and mathematic experimentation and invention in young Americans through collaborations between volunteers, students and educators. He also announced the opening of the National Lab Day website, a site that we had the honor of building with Jack Hidary, chairman of the National Lab Day and the Jack D. Hidary Foundation. The site connects scientists and engineers with students and classrooms needing their mentorship, their enthusiasm for science, and their spark.

National Lab Day will take place every year in the first week of May.

We are pleased to be able to contribute to this effort, designed to foster the kind of inquiry that brought us all into the world of technology. We encourage scientists and technologists across the country to sign up to volunteer. In the words of President Obama, "I want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it's science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent -- to be makers of things, not just consumers of things."

Recent coverage:

• Wired Magazine: Making Science Cool: Educate to Innovate
• The New York Times: White House Begins Campaign to Promote Science and Math Education
• The National Science Teachers' Association: President Obama Announces National Lab Day Initiative
• ReadWriteWeb: Obama, Kids, & All Tomorrow's Web Apps: President Focuses on Tech Education
• Or see all Google News coverage

We hope that this initiative plants the seeds of innovation in the next generation of young scientists and entrepreneurs.

We're excited that The Bold Italic launched into public beta yesterday. The Bold Italic is a local-content website we developed with Ideo for Gannett. As they describe it, "(Their) mission is to help people become better locals, equipping our members with rare local intel, backstory and potential adventures."

Given our focus on Test Driven Development, I was pleased to see the launch article was on Test Driving. (Test driving pickup trucks in this particular case, but it still made me smile.)

We've had a great experience working with the Gannett 11g team, and producing this powerful, flexible, and hyperlocal publishing platform with them and Ideo. We've been reading the great content they've been writing while it was in Alpha, and are excited that everyone gets to share it now that public beta is here.

We wish them well with their launch!

I just started my day with a chain of usability fail from the good folks over at Wells Fargo. It probably wouldn't have turned into a blog post if Carl Smith hadn't just come and given his excellent talk, "It's a Matter of Trust," on the importance of the customer relationship, just yesterday in our talks series.

It all started when wanted to open a brokerage account at Wells. (One, for the record, that I thought had already been set up after the half-hour long consultation with a banker at Wells.) I followed the link from my checking account page to what purported to be my brokerage account, only to be taken to an application page, not horrible, but still misleading.

On the application page, they tried to upsell me certificates of deposit. I was interested enough to see what the rates were, so I checked the box.

Trapped users abandon

After filling in additional account information, I was taken to a screen asking me how much I wanted to put into a CD. After entering a smaller number, entering a funding source account, and an account into which to deposit interest, I found out that the minimum was actually $5,000. I entered $5,000 into the field (which fortunately I had available in one of my accounts, god knows what would have happened otherwise) and found out that the CD rate at Wells was lower than my savings account rate at ING Orange, not a strong inducement to tie up my money for 9 months. But of course there was no way for me to remove this product from my shopping cart on this page All I could do was 'continue' or 'go back'. (More on the latter option in a moment.)

So I opted to continue, hoping (but no longer expecting) that there would be a way to remove this item from my cart before the end of the transaction.

I filled out the information to open and fund a brokerage account (which of course was the whole reason I was here) and a few clicks later was at the confirmation page.

And of course by this time you've guessed: There was no way to remove the CD product from my transaction. There was a link that looked like it may have let me change things, but all it really let me do was to save my application for later, at which future time I'm sure I would have experienced even more frustration at not being able to remove this under performing instrument from my application.

You can tell I was pretty motivated to do all of this, as most people would have abandoned much sooner. I really wanted to get that cash out of the under performing savings account it was in and into the market, so I really wanted this to work out.

It was at this point that I decided to see what the back button could do for me. I paged back, back, back, through all 7 layers of forms I'd already filled out, all the way back to step 2, where I'm verifying my address, all the while cursing that I can't just click on the handy breadcrumb trail at the top of the wizard that tells you what stage you're at. And then, as I get to step 2, the back buttons run out. This most basic promise of a back button, that you can keep going back, finally breaks its promise to help me undo this stupidity. And I'm mad.

20 lines or fewer

At this point, it's time to contact a real human person. There's a contact us link right there, which just takes me to their phone number, and email form. (Chat here would be nice, and contextual, and cheaper for them than having people on the phone.) No actual email address, of course, though in their defense they claim to want to keep conversations about banking matters secure.

So I write this email in their clunky email form, detailing what happened. And of course you can probably guess: After explaining in sufficient detail that they might learn from what's happened and actually improve things, I try to submit the form.

Any guesses? Yes of course, my email to customer service is "too long". (The actual error message is: You have exceeded the character limit in the Questions or Comments field. Please keep your responses to approximately 20 lines of text.) Someone really needs to explain to their dev team that it's ok to use something larger than a VARCHAR(255) to store things like, oh, the voice of the people who are giving you their money?

Oh, and by the way, their solution to the session timeout problem is to tell you up front: Please complete your email in 20 minutes, or we'll automatically log you out. Nice to feel like they really want to hear from me. (And of course you know this is a smell from the amount of hate mail they surely received before 'fixing' the problem by adding that text.) There are good, secure solutions to letting users extend their sessions. It's called JavaScript. They should look into it. (And just before anyone reminds me that having JS keep the session open would not be secure, I want to be clear: They could alert you 2 minutes before the session was ready to time out, and give you that 2 minute window to send an AJAX request to keep the session alive for another 5 minutes. A little annoying, but ultimately secure.)

In the meantime I've gotten he helpful email that reminds me I've saved my application, and encourages me to come back later and complete it. And I'm somewhat surprised to see that it doesn't come from an obvious noreply@wellsfargo.com-type address, but instead comes from mywellsfargo@wellsfargo.com.

Since I had the foresight to copy off my buffer to the clip board, I figured, what the heck, let's give it a shot! And I replied with my civil explanation of the problem.

And of course the email to mywellsfargo@wellsfargo.com bounced. Is it somehow poetic that the mail server at Wells Fargo replies with "User unknown"?

I then shortened my email to Wells, asking them to please let me know where I could send them something longer than 255 characters to explain a problem, and we'll see what they write back with.

Maybe in the era of Twitter, they will finally have to start listening to customers, or ignore them at their peril. Interesting how often the words "sorry" and "apologize" appear in their twitter feed already....

Rob and I were recently asked by a client for some help justifying the choice of Ruby as an implementation language for their SaaS product. They were very happy with the results, but wanted to be prepared to answer investor and customer questions about why Rails was a good choice.

One way that I've been talking about Rails is in the context of what I'm calling "The ARC Model": Agile + Rails + Cloud. I'll borrow from my abstract from my talk at BizConf:

The Ruby on Rails Revolution has been one of productivity and efficiency, and has coincided with an equally powerful revolution in the ownership of technological infrastructure. The Rails approach combines agile methods with a highly productive language to allow developers to focus on developing business value, instead of developing plumbing. The Cloud Computing Revolution at the same time has changed the economics of infrastructure, allowing computation to become a commodity not worthy of developer attention, further enabling developers to focus on that which is truly valuable, Innovation. These three factors, Agile, Rails, and the Cloud, combine to revolutionize the economics of software development and information management, in ways that directly impact return on investment.

The question should not be, “is Rails a safe choice,” but “[how long] can we justify the expense of traditional development approaches.”

I think this kind of approach plays nicely to the strengths of SaaS.

In terms of large enterprise deployments, it's early yet: Enterprises tend to be conservative (about Rails as they are about SaaS) so most of the innovation has been in the startup space, with companies like Hulu being good examples of the disruptive power of Rails.

But that said, there have been some major mainstream Enterprise success stories. AT&T chose to dump a failing Java yellowpages effort in favor of Rails, with excellent results in terms of scalability, time to market, code quality, and performance. (There's a decent write-up on BuildingWebApps.)

We are starting to see major companies develop ever more mission/business/revenue-critical components in Rails. BestBuy built Remix, their new public API app, with us using Rails. We have one major multinational client who is rewriting their entire ERP system in Ruby internally. We have another major hardware vendor building new products using Rails.

Large companies tend to be a bit shy about talking about new technology initiatives, and we suspect that most Fortune 500 companies have someone doing Rails somewhere in the organization. There are a number of others we've spoken to who are using the technology to their advantage, but who aren't ready to talk about it publicly yet. But you can also search for job listings from major companies and see how many big companies are hiring Rails developers. We see them all the time.

Hard statistics are harder to come by, but Mark Driver at Gartner projected that there would be 4 million ruby programmers by 2013. We're already seeing the smart companies get huge efficiencies out of these new development models: efficiencies of cost, flexibility, and time to market.

We're very bullish on Agile, Rails and the Cloud. In the current economic climate, the reduction in risk alone is worth the cost of admission. Coupled with the qualitative benefits of being able to out-flank your competition, it's no surprise that we're continuing to see adoption grow so rapidly. The results are too compelling to ignore.

Jeff Sutherland, one of the creators of Scrum, has just posted a new blog entry in his Scrum Log: Pivotal Tracker: Now with a Burndown Chart!

I first met Jeff when we were both presenting on Agile process to a forum of OpenView Venture Partners portfolio companies, and have been a big fan of all he has to say about the adoption and effectiveness of agile practices in the wild.

Many thanks to Jeff for his help to make Tracker a better tool for scrum. We'll keep working with him to make sure Tracker is the best scrum tool it can be.

I just spent a wonderful weekend with 75 of the brightest folks I know in the Ruby community. My hat's off to Obie and the Hashrocket crew for putting together a really great, intimate conference in a beautiful location. It's refreshing to really have to struggle to choose which talk to attend from so many choices at each session. I know too many choices are a Bad Thing™, but the format made for great small sessions, and a wonderful thing happened: Everyone got to really meet and get to know everyone.

Among many others, I had the pleasure of meeting CJ Kihlbom, who nails a lot of why these conferences are so important in his post, The Business Value of Conferences.

It was really pleasant to present to a community of business leaders who understand the value of agile, and who are serious practitioners in their own practices.

A lot of you have asked for the slides from my talk, Agile, Rails and the Cloud, so I've posted them here.

Those of you who thought about coming but didn't really missed out. Come next year. You'll be glad you did.

As we've been working on applications for the Palm Pre, lots of people have been asking us a lot of questions, most of which we couldn't really answer yet.

One of the big areas people asked about was what the phone was like. And we just weren't allowed to say that much to date. But with the launch only two days away, the press has been given a look at the phone, and the response has been overwhelming. And I'm not talking about the Palm trade press, but folks who have been pretty hard to impress, including some big fans of Apple products for years, people like David Pogue, and Walter Mossberg.

So I thought I'd share with you some of the recent articles:

• David Pogue, in the New York Times: Palm Pre, Elegant Contender
• Walt Mossberg, in the Wall Street Journal: Palm's New Pre Takes On iPhone
• Peter Svensson, The Associated Press Review: Dazzling Palm software beats the iPhone
• Engadget's Joshua Toplosky: Palm Pre Review

We're excited to see such leading journalists in the tech space share our enthusiasm for this great new platform. We're ready to build more great apps for the platform, too, so if you're interested in how we can help, give us a shout.

It's the first Wednesday of the month again, and that means it's time for the Pivotal Labs/Outside.In monthly Ruby Happy Hour. It's the first one since GoRuCo, so there's even more to talk about than usual. (Thanks Josh, Francis, and everyone else who made this a great conference again this year.)

Where: Outside.in, 20 Jay St Suite 1019 (10th Fl), Brooklyn, NY
When: 7-9PM today, Wednesday June 3rd
Who: If you’re a developer who uses Ruby and would like to meet some other Ruby folks, toss around ideas, or just have a few beers, we welcome you with open arms!

There will be pizza, beer, and great discussions for everyone. More details on the Outside.In Blog, and please RSVP if you can, so we know how much pizza to get.