About Jittr, Convergence of Mobile, Social, Local
Posted: July 20th, 2006 | Author: julio.luis.miyares | Filed under: Uncategorized |
Jittr is a collective of individuals banded together to create applications that not only serve the most important factor , “the customer” but in a way that leverages the varied technologies and techniques that have taken hold and manage this is in a timely and cost effective manner.
The principals of Jittr have experience developing Product Vision and delivering technology to bring that vision to life since the advent of the web as most people know it with key roles in the Product & Technology groups of well known premium brands like MovieFone and Digital Cities in the local space , AOL Casual Game Play & Discovery in the Games Space, AOL Latino in the Culturally targeted space as well as many other high traffic sites within the AOL Network .
Initially concentrating in the space of “Social Shopping” and “Social Gaming” with the intent of leveraging and adding utility to the mushrooming Location Services such as FourSquare and Gowalla as well as Google’s recently announced Places API which should give added momentum to a day when Local Data services around places or venues will coalesce around one distinct and authoritative source instead of the numerous feeds and local stores currently available. The product development model is geared towards the mobile device as the thing with the Web presence as a destination but not the critical factor. It’s about enhancing the experience when you are out and about instead of planted in front of a desktop running the standard browser experience.
The use of “Social” should not intimate the hubris of defining another Social Network. With Facebook, Twitter and an up and coming Foursquare centered around location as well established Social Networks with a plethora of straightforward to consume Web Services the intent of our product applications will be to give the user the choice of using the credentials of the social network of their choice to define their specific identity for the application but with the ability of interacting with other parts of their “social graph”
As a startup, We recognize the power of Cloud Computing services such as Amazon Web Services to provide low cost and on demand services for applications as well as the need to execute in a manor that seamlessly surfaces the experiences adapted to the medium that your users will be using be it the conventional browser, WAP devices, Smartphones etc. without a whole lot of refactoring for each individual medium.
Not unique in the startup space, the majority of the tools we use are open source and/or cloud based, from
- Pivotal Tracker to manage user stories in an agile development process
- Yammer to maintain an internal Twitter like network of short blurbs
- DropBox for maintaining a centralized accessible from anywhere repository for files
- GitHub for source code version management and tracking
- Backupify for backup of this Wordpress Blog site and business Jittr email accounts as well as personal stores like Photos on Flickr!
- We use Relational Databases such as MySql for most of our data stores but also implement MongoDB where appropriate when a key value store with replication & horizontal scaling needs apply.
Geographically speaking, we are all currently based in the United States mostly in New York City. We are small, real small so “mostly” doesn’t have much significance in this case. In our previous gig at AOL we were integrally involved in setting up large remote Publishing, Video & Search Development Engineering teams in India and China so we have the background and experience in the benefits as well as complexities and risks that come with building and managing remote development teams.
As we develop our projects, we will post the details here. In the meantime, we will use the space to comment on technology in general, emergent trends and how they are being used to meet consumer needs, new and old companies, and social media.
Currently Active Product Development Projects
Julio Hernandez-Miyares Resume