Screen shot of Best Buy IdeaX which we launched in 2009

The clear ripoff by Intersective for Deloitte.

A couple years ago we released the idea crowdsourcing code as an open source project called BBYIDX, so that’s free for the taking. But Intersective clearly lifted our design work without authorization. When we contacted Intersective, they apologized for the “mistake” without argument and promised to change the design.

Over the years we have found a number of blatant copies of our design work. In case you’re wondering how we find these, it’s typically because the so-called ripoff artist copied and pasted everything, including our Google Analytics tracking code. Not so smart, in my book.

UPDATE April 14, 2012 – As a result of this blog post and a simple tweet, Deloitte Australia took action, contacted Intersective, and  the site was immediately taken down. A representative from Deloitte Australia posted this comment and this tweet with an explanation of the situation.

Each semester, I hold an SEO contest in my class. The point is simple. On the first day of class, I find a search term that returns zero results in Google. This year that term is “hydropackulicity,” an utterly meaningless term. The students have 16 weeks to launch a website and optimize it for that term. On the last day of class I do a search for that term, and the owner of the website that comes up first in Google’s natural search results wins the grand prize!

Here are some websites that have already hit the interwebs:

• hydropackulicity.info by Philip Shields
• hydropackulicity.blogspot.com by Dhila Backstrom
• hydropackulicity-challenge.com by Gina Reed
• Hydropackulicity – Geeky Gangster by Kou Yang
• hydropackulicity.sarahjohnsondesigns.com by Sarah Johnson
• hydropackulicity.tumblr.com by Kathlea Almoite
• hydropackulicity.wordpress.com by Carol Prom
• facebook.com/Hydropackulicity.AbbyRich by Abby Rich
• hydropackuli-city.com by Gary Lutgen

export PS1='$PWD> '

After you restart your shell, your command line prompt will look more like this:

/home/username> 

You can replace the > with any other character of your choice. That’s just a character added in for readability.

Thanks to Eric Scheel, CTO of our Salesforce development partner Reside, for snapping a photo of IdeaX being presented by Oren Teich of Heroku, as well as a picture of a 20-foot-tall Gary Koelling hanging in the lobby of Moscone West. And thanks to Mark Johnson of Salesforce for the “Pillar of Success” photo of Gary.

Oren Teich of Heroku presents our work on bestbuyideax.com at Dreamforce 2011

Gary Koelling has always been a big deal, but now he's larger than life!

Gary's Pillar of Success

Uh, wouldn’t that be a cool name for a video game? Brahmageddon. Uh, heh heh. That’s funny.

Next thing I knew, Jamie delivered an entire game specification document, and so was the start of Bust Out Games and our first steps into the iOS gaming industry.

Months before the start of Bust Out Games, I had a number of conversations with Robert Weber of W3i on game distribution, monetization, game play design, and the game industry in general. It was quite an eye opener for me, and a motivator for our team to get into something as fun and challenging as game development.

We knew enough about the gaming industry to understand how competitive it is, so monetary success wasn’t immediately our primary motivator. Our intent was not to build the next Angry Birds or become millionaires off of seven-year-olds making in-app purchases on their dads’ iPhones. The point of building Brahmageddon was to set a baseline for what the Bust Out team could produce in the gaming industry. We tracked our time and managed the project as if it were normal client work. We spent close to 400 hours developing the concept, designing, illustrating, composing music, engineering, and testing. Much of that time was spent learning both the technology and game design ropes since we had never done this before, so naturally we anticipate our next game to take much less time. We used Basecamp for messaging and project management, tracked tickets in Pivotal Tracker, and logged hours in Harvest just as we do for client work.

Brahmageddon

Featuring characters from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the great classical epics of India, Brahmageddon is a light-hearted and absorbing way to escape the stresses of modern life, and return to a time when heros were real heros, and the bad guys were real demons.

It’s mayhem in ancient India! Cannibal demons are popping up everywhere! Brahmageddon is nigh! Yet all hope is not lost, for your fingertips possess the awesome power of … demon smiting! Will you wield that power? Will you heed the hero’s call? Well, look at their smug little faces. Don’t you just want to bonk them on the head?

Brahmageddon is basically whack-a-mole with Hindu demons instead of moles. The concept of the game is Jamie’s brain child. By day, Jamie is our quality assurance tester. By night, Jamie is a game designer with a knack for coming up with kitschy concepts that combine humor and fun with strategy and problem solving. Originally, the game concept was to whack Hindu gods, but then we decided that would be offensive to Hindus. Then we thought, what if instead of picking on Hinduism we included all religions? Jesus would pop up – *whack* – then Buddha – *whack* – Muhammad – *whack*! But… perhaps offending all of the world’s major religions was worse than picking on one, so we landed on the concept of demons. Demons are bad! Who wouldn’t want to whack a demon?

With a game concept as simple as this, the character art is crucial to the user’s experience. The game play is clearly important as well, but without good character art the game lacks interest. During development we used placeholder images for the characters while Dan finalized the illustrations. Once Paul dropped the finalized images into the game, it was a whole new experience.

Once a celestial musician, Kabandha was cursed by Indra to be a hideous demon with no head!

With his celestial sword and a wicked glint in every one of his 20 eyes, invulnerable to deities and skilled on the veena, Ravana would intimidate even the most fearless warrior.

Game concept and testing was done by Jamie Huggett, engineering was done by Paul Cantrell, graphics were done by Andrew Bessler, character illustration by Dan Anderson, Jamie’s younger brother composed the soundtrack, and we recorded local musician Marcus Wise playing the tabla.

As a test project, it’s really a fine piece of software and a damn fun game. Kids love it. Adults love it. Go buy it!

sudo cp /private/etc/php.ini.default /private/etc/php.ini

Change permissions and edit the file

sudo chmod 777 /private/etc/php.ini

vi /private/etc/php.ini

Change mysql.default_socket = [blank] to

mysql.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock

Restart Apache and you should be good to go!

sudo apachectl restart

I will be giving a talk and leading a discussion on “The Missing Web Curriculum: What Every Web Professional Should Have Learned.” In this session I will talk about reasons why web instruction in higher education is vastly disconnected from the real world, and propose solutions for improving the way we prepare students (and mid-career professionals) for jobs in the web industry. I’ll draw from my experiences as an instructor at Hennepin Technical College in comparison to my experience as the owner of Bust Out Solutions.

WordPress places a hidden file on your web server called .maintenance. All you need to do to restore your website is delete the .maintenance file. To do this, either log in to your web server’s command line and rm the file. If you don’t know how to do this, then open an FTP client connection and you can delete the file this way too. Note that any files that begin with a dot are “hidden files,” so you will need to set your FTP client to display hidden files.

If the upgrade didn’t work the first time, you can run the automatic upgrade again after you remove the .maintenance file.

My particular advice from the perspective of building websites and mobile apps was for organizations to start with simple strategies and products that you can take to market fast and change on a dime. The attitude that the guys at Best Buy had when we were working with them on Blueshirt Nation, Giftag, and IdeaX was to fail fast and fail early. Technology and the culture that surrounds it changes at such a rapid rate that you will need to adopt a culture of change in order to keep up.

Thanks to Todd Tweedy for assembling and moderating the panel of speakers.

Lo and behold, it’s happened again! This time the rip off job is actually not bad. They made their own slide show, changed the Google Map, and generously left the Google Analytics code in tact.

For more good stories about bumbling tech thieves, see this recent story.

I joined Morten on stage to demo the work Bust Out did to create Best Buy IdeaX and Best Buy Business District, two social web applications that both run on the Heroku platform. I also talked about how Best Buy generously decided to open source the code under the project code named BBYIDX.

In the remaining five minutes of the presentation, I was able to create a new application in the cloud and deploy BBYIDX to create a fully functional idea crowdsourcing application. Yes, it’s that easy. Hit us up if you want one for yourself.

Thanks to @apexsutherland for providing the photo from the talk.

One thing that I’ve been teaching the students is to request links from other site owners. So far, here are the students who asked me to link to their sites:

• http://bustizzleouteezy.tumblr.com
• http://bustizzleouteezy.weebly.com
• http://www.designsbykunst.com
• http://www.bustizzleouteezy.com
• http://bustizzle-outeezy.blogspot.com
• http://bustizzle2outeezy.tumblr.com
• http://getbustizzleouteezy.wordpress.com
• http://bustizzleouteezy5.wordpress.com
• http://www.bustizzleouteezy.org

If you want to watch our progress, just go to Google and search for bustizzle outeezy.

UPDATE on March 8, 2011: Since this blog post was published, this site is showing up as the #1 search result. That’s clearly not fair, especially since this website has been around long enough to gain a higher Google PageRank than most of the sites in the class. This site does not count in the final competition.