I did an Android phone photo shoot today. In a few days we will publish some shots of the very latest models. We develop for this platform.

I'm pleased to see Senr.net making a difference. Over the holidays, it helped one user capture video of someone stealing a wreath from their door. We hope the guy gets caught because that is such a lowlife thing to do.

We spent many hundreds of hours helping Adam Beguelin create Sensr.net from its inception early this year. We think it is very cool, and love to see it at work. Adam writes about this more on his blog.

Hours of Operation

With the exception of the these holidays, East Agile Vietnam (EAVN) is open from 9 am until 6 pm, Monday through Friday (IST, Indochina Standard Time, UTC+7).

Holidays

Our office in Vietnam has limited staff during the following holidays in 2010 (11 days).

1. New Year's Day (Tết dương lịch)
Friday January 1st.

2. Tet (Tết Nguyên Đán) [Sunday February 14]
Friday February 12th, (office holiday)
Monday February 15th,
Tuesday February 16th,
Wednesday February 17th,
Thursday February 18th,
Friday February 19th (office holiday).

3. Hung Kings' Commemoration. (Giỗ Tổ Hùng Vương),
Friday April 23.

4. Reunification Day (Ngày Thống nhất)
Friday April 30th.

5. May Day (Ngày Quốc tế Lao động) [Saturday May 1st]
Monday May 3rd.

6. Vietnam National Day (Quốc khánh)
Thursday September 2nd.

Workdays

East Agile will be in full operation for 251 days in 2010.

If your screens don't look like this then (a) you have better screen hygiene than these developers, but perhaps (b) you're not doing eXtreme Programming right, and in particular, you're not doing paired programming.  Having fingerprints all over the screens is an artifact of active collaborative development.

Learn more about Paired Programming on Wikipedia, including references to research on its effectiveness.

It's fun to spy on the advertising strategies and expenditures of other companies.  Keywordspy.com lets you do just that. It was introduced to me today by Semantic Web authority, David Siegel.

For example, I noticed that unlike most Ruby on Rails development shops, which spend nothing to attract new business, the old-school development shop, Art & Logic (artlogic.com, founded 1991) is spending more than $1400 every day, mostly on keywords designed to attract new customers. That means they are spending something like $400,000 per year just on search engine marketing (SEM).  This suggests to me that they are somewhat desperate and/or passing a lot of advertising expenses on to their clients. 

On a similar note, keywordspy.com suggests that Ruby on Rails developer, Pivotal Labs, stopped their SEM to hire new staff after November 2009.  When they were doing SEM, they were using it to hire more staff, not get more business. Presumably getting more business was not a problem, or at least not a mass market proposition for them.  And possibly either their need for new staff, or any troubles they might have had getting more staff went away after November.

 Our incorporation address of record in Hong Kong is:

East Agile
Rm. 1302, 13/F
CRE Building
303 Hennessy Rd.
Wanchai, Hong Kong

We are in a festive mood this week.