Welcome to the new us. We’re still the same people in the same place, but we’ve given our brand a major overhaul.
Why Rebrand?
We’re twelve years old this year. At this point you might assume everything is nailed down and set in stone for us but the truth is, a lot has changed since 2003: The economy is different, our industry has evolved, our business model has shifted, and our team is different. In short, it’s time to update our brand to more accurately reflect who we are today and where we are headed.
A Brand that Pulls Us
You’ll find dozens of different definitions for what a brand is. This post isn’t about creating a new definition, but we do want to share a bit about what we think a brand should do for the employees of a company as partial explanation for why we’re changing our brand.
We believe a brand should be aspirational to the people working for the company. The brand should support the company’s vision and provide a framework within which to communicate that vision. For employees, their ability and their desire to “get on board” with a company’s vision are in part shaped by the brand itself. The brand helps create that ever-so-important feeling of “I’m part of something great.”
Over time we came to feel that our former name “Agency Fusion” was pulling us backward instead of drawing us toward the future we were working hard to achieve. The old name, because of our old positioning, felt like baggage we were fighting against, instead of a brand that we are aspiring to build in the direction we’ve been heading.
Evolution and Revolution
When we chose the name Agency Fusion, we wanted a name that represented our core business model. At the time the majority of our revenue came from providing education and development services to other creative agencies. As far as we know, we pioneered the phrase, “You design it. We build it.” This business model worked well for years but with the economic downturn in 2008-2009, the flaws of this model were exposed in a dire way.
Rather than continue to rely on business from other creative agencies, we opted to begin transitioning away from this business model. Over time we shifted from getting most of our revenue from other agencies, to now getting the majority of our revenue from our own clients and our own software products.
We’re fans of a Harvard Business Review article about how companies go through periods of evolution and revolution. Our big shift in our business model was a time of revolution that likely saved us from an early demise. Our name, however, has been stuck back in the pre-2009 days of our existence and this rebrand aims to fix that.
Today the types of projects we choose to accept are bigger and more complex than in our former life. We work for a lot of startups and often for big companies who want to launch a new product or act more like a startup. We’re less of an ad agency and more of a digital product design and development company. If you mashed up an ad agency, a startup, a software development firm, and a business consultancy you’d have something very much like us. People hire us when they need to create something both technical and elegant, and when they’re willing to invest what it takes to do it right.
Looking to the Future
A full rebrand is time consuming. We’re still dotting i’s and crossing t’s to roll out our new brand. We hope the change has minimal negative impact on our clients. Our proposals, invoices, and other documents will have a new look. Accounting or accounts payable departments will need to update our vendor profile (the new name is a DBA so our tax ID stays the same). Clients will need to contact us using our new email addresses (although the old ones will continue to forward for a while). But other than these few inconveniences, everything else moves forward as before but with a new brand that works with us instead of against us.
Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.
Smart Dust
The Michigan Micro Mote (M3) project at the University of Michigan has built a computer one cubic millimeter in size. One possible use is to insert them into the brain to monitor tumors or evaluate head trauma.
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Improving Rendering Performance
An in-depth and worthwhile read from Google Developers about improving rendering performance and reducing jank.
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Free Photos
Here’s another resource for free photos.
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Your Passwords
Your passwords might not be as strong as you think.
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Learning Regular Expressions
You should learn regular expressions. They’re incredibly powerful and useful, even for non-developers.
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Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.
Dropplets
In terms of simplicity, it’s hard to beat Dropplets for a stripped-down, bare-bones blogging platform. It doesn’t even require a database.
Dropplets
Vector
Netflix released some on-host performance monitoring software called “Vector.” It’s a client-side application based in d3 and angular, and presents data gathered by another piece of software called “Performance Co-Pilot (PCP).”
Vector
Continuations in Ruby
Continuations allow you to persist the state of your stack and registers to the heap. This can be used for a variety of things: program control flow, implementing tail-recursion in languages that do not offer proper tail-recursion, and so on.
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Oyster
Oyster is a subscription service for reading books on your smart devices.
Oyster
Google Pac Man
You’ve likely already played Pac Man on Google Maps. Wired Magazine presents their 15 top locations for playing the game.
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Firefox’s BroadcastChannel
The BroadcastChannel API now works in Firefox Developer Edition. It allows an app to send alerts to other browser tabs that have the same app open. So, if you have multiple tabs for some app open, and you log in in one of the tabs, it can update the other tabs (without refreshing) to show that you are logged in there as well.
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Galen Framework
Galen helps automate the testing of front-end look and feel.
Galen Framework
Codie on Indiegogo
We’re fans of anything that results in more developers in the world, even if it means starting them young. Codie is a robotic toy that helps kids learn how to program. Buy one for your kid; we’ll keep an eye out for their resume.
Codie
Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.
Native vs. Web App Ceasefire
People can be pretty passionate when it comes to native vs. web apps, but Matt Asay says it’s time to declare a ceasefire, and we agree. It’s better to focus on building a great app. Most apps are (and should be) a hybrid of both approaches.
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6 Ruby on Rails Testing Tips
If you aren’t writing tests, you should be. If you’re already writing tests, these tips might be helpful to you.
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Ephemeral VHS
Wish you could see that movie you used to have on VHS, but it never made it to DVD? Check here, someone may have uploaded it.
Ephemeral VHS
Ruby Together
Ruby Together is a community formed to help with the maintenance of shared Ruby tools, like Bundler, RubyGems, and RubyGems.org. It’s supported by Stripe and Engine Yard, among others.
Ruby Together
Debugging Ruby Memory Leaks
Read up on memory leaks in Ruby and tools to debug them, as well as a look into how these tools can be applied to track down and fix a severe memory leak.
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Amazon Dash Buttons
Buy a Dash Button for products you order frequently, and Amazon will ship a new batch whenever you press the button. It’s interesting to think of other ways a physical trigger might help a customer initiate a digital process.
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Understanding SQL’s Null
Null in SQL means something different than what it means in many other languages. This is a good explanation of some common pitfalls caused by null values in SQL.
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Vince Vaughn Stock Photos
iStock teamed up with Vince Vaughn and a few of his co-stars to recreate some pretty classic stock photography.
Vince Vaughn Stock Photos
Outsourced QA
If you can’t afford your own QA team, you can outsource to Testlio.
Testlio