On February 16 we had an appearance in the newspaper CincoDías with an interview in the supplement of Economics & Business talking about FacturaDirecta.

Download interview as PDF or read online

We hope to see you at Salón MiempreS.A.!

Thanks to Mike, we have just updated at LonelyDrops the latest changes in the list of ISO countries.

Surely many of you already know this great plugin (Masked Input Plugin from Josh Bush) to facilitate data entry forms by assigning a mask to facilitate the introduction of structured data.

The plugin works really well, but we think it was a major weak point for some types of data, in particular to enter dates. The eternal question of what value (month or day) should be first, depending on the language and the place where you are. To fix this we have slightly modified the plugin to accept a "placeholder" of more than one character and that will be displayed when editing the input until it is completed.

With this modification, the plugin accepts values of more than one character in the configuration parameter "placeholder"

    $ ("#date").mask ("99/99/9999", {placeholder: 'dd/mm/yyyy'});

Here you can see an full example of use.

Original Plugin: http://digitalbush.com/projects/masked-input-plugin/

Modified plugin (source): jquery.maskedinput-1.2.2-co.js

Modified plugin (min): jquery.maskedinput-1.2.2-co.min.js

Since last July, Conductive Online Services has been included as a developer for electronic billing format Facturae in the official lists of the Tax Office website (Agencia Tributaria).

This blog, our public places and our applications will be offline for a few minutes to perform maintenance on the servers during the next Thursday, June 3, from 7am CET .

According to our hosting provider, it is only necessary to disconnect the servers for a few minutes to make some hardware changes.

We appreciate your patience during the period of inactivity.

After analyzing LonelyID statistics results during the first month of our launch, we realized that a high percentage of users who requested an account have not yet made use of it.

This situation is worrying us and we think that is mainly due to the lack of knowledge that exists around the OpenID standard.

Most of the websites that support OpenID use different mechanisms for registration (applying different data records, not allowing direct registration with OpenID, etc.) The diversity of formats and registration processes add extra difficulty to the use of OpenID by the users.

To try to encourage a bit more the use of OpenID, we have decided to prepare and launch over the next days a serie of demonstration videos. Those videos will contain real examples of how to use LonelyID on broadly-known OpenID-enabled websites.

The first video of the serie corresponds to an example of registration with LonelyID on www.dailymotion.com website.

We have just released a free version of LonelyID Mobile for iPhone for a limited time.

LonelyID is an authentication system based on OpenID that allows you to avoid remembering any password. Your new password will be generated safely inside your mobile phone. The password generated on the mobile changes every minute and the previous password is no longer valid. This ensures you can access your websites without having to remember passwords and without having to worry about malware or keyloggers.

If you would really like to use (or already use) an OpenID service to access your favorite websites, we encourage you to try LonelyID.

Download the iphone application directly from the following URL:

http://itunes.apple.com/app/lonelyid/id337733114?mt=8

Because your iPhone may contain sensitive and confidential information (especially if you are using LonelyID), you must be sure you keep your iphone protected against any loss or forgetfulness.

A useful way to protect and secure access to your iPhone is using the 'Passcode lock' functionality.

You may follow these steps to activate the passcode lock:

1. Go to:  Settings> General> Passcode Lock
2. Enter a 4-digit PIN and that's all! Your iPhone is now protected against theft.

If you do not like having to enter the password each time your iphone is locked, I recommend you to configure your iPhone to request the passcode only one hour after last use (in the same section "Passcode Lock" there is an option called: Require Passcode  After 1 hour). So, in normal use, the passcode will only be requested once and when you stop using your iPhone the passcode will be requested again after one hour. Very practical.

If you think a 4-digit passcode is not sufficient to protect your data, you can also activate the option 'Erase Data' which will be responsible for removing the data from your iPhone after 10 failed attempts when introducing your code.

Remember synchronize your iPhone with iTunes frequently to avoid any loss of information.

According to the information published on the OpenID Foundation website there are over 9 million websites utilizing OpenID for registration and login on some portion of their websites.

Within this group of websites that supports OpenID, we may also include the vast majority of the applications that we have created this year using our development platform TubeSpark. As I mentioned in previous articles, TubeSpark natively supports OpenID authentication and user registration.

Our commitment and trust on OpenID allowed us to create a free OpenID service.  

The service is called LonelyID and uses a special authentication mechanism that goes beyond the classic user/password authentication. With LonelyID, passwords are generated randomly in the user's mobile phone (using LonelyID Mobile) with no need to exchange data with the authentication server.

To learn more about LonelyID, you can visit: http://www.lonelyid.com

Finally, we renamed our software platform (which until now had no official name) with the name of TubeSpark.

The vast majority of our applications and web projects are developed on TubeSpark (currently working on version 4.2)

TubeSpark is a software that allows the creation of all types of cutting-edge applications for the Internet in a quick and efficient manner.

TubeSpark greatly facilitates:

• The creation of self-managed websites (with administration areas where anyone with basic knowledge can change the content on their website)
• Adapting Web content for mobile devices, thus facilitating the visualization of the websites created with TubeSpark on mobile phones (our conductiva website is a good example)
• The creation of virtual communities for the Internet, providing access control and precise management of the different sections of the web according to user profiles.

TubeSpark is a modular software quickly provides a large amount of functionality into the websites of our clients:

• Virtual Communities
• Virtual stores
• Blogs
• Photo and video galleries
• Send bulk newsletters (which allows sending news to thousands of emails simultaneously)
• Native support for OpenID (for access to restricted areas of the different sites through a unified, secure and standard mechanism such as OpenID)

With TubeSpark we can also create web applications with more specific functions, such as:

• Online video recording and playback (right from your browser)
• Registration and printing of accreditation cards (right from your browser)
• Take photos directly from the web browser
• Automatic barcode generation
• Automatic generation of dynamic content in PDF and Excel

Although version 1.0 of LonelyDrops was initially intended to be used with drop-down lists on SELECT elements, here we are going to describe additional ways to manipulate the lists to get other screen presentations. In this case, we have prepared a sample with the list of countries organized by continent with links on each country.

LonelyDrops has available a set of Javascript arrays containing the data stored in each list. The format of this array will never change in LonelyDrops version 1.0 (and later versions will not affect in any way the deployments with version 1.0 of LonelyDrops)

The secret to getting other presentations beyond SELECT dropdown lists is to use arrays that can be extracted directly from data files containing the lists. See an example here of the array format,

  http://www.lonelydrops.com/drops/1.0/list/en/countries

And here is an example with a short Javascript manipulating these lists to get other screen presentations of the data stored in LonelyDrops.

  http://www.lonelydrops.com/dp/local/example8.void

As a web programmer in java, I spend my time compiling with maven, updating and commiting to subversion, stopping and starting the tomcat, viewing tails of logs, and a lot of executions of scripts.

After programming for the iPhone I wanted to program something in Objective-C so starting from the idea of Tomcat Controller I have developed an application that can run scripts and view results in a new tab if you want. For example, you launch a tail of the log of tomcat in a new tab and without having to open new tabs you can launch and stop the tomcat.

Every script that configure has its own environment, so if we need to define some environment variables we can do it without problem. For example, to launch tomcat in debug mode.

The application is able to launch any script, you can even write your own, some examples:

1 - cd /myFolder;. /myscript

This will execute myscript inside the folder /myFolder

2- open -e /etc/hosts

This would open the file /etc/hosts file with default editor.

Download here:

Application_Wrapper.zip

You only have to unzip and
move or copy to the Applications folder.

Adrià Febrer
conductiva.com

From a user's request, we have added a new drop-down list within the LonelyDrops database.
In this case, we added the list of towns in Spain, which in turn can be linked (if needed) with the list of Spanish provinces.

In the following link, you may find an example of the new list of towns combined with the list of provinces.

http://www.lonelydrops.com/dp/local/example7.void

For now, the LonelyDrops API does not allow linking and filtering more than two consecutive lists, which means that the three linked lists of autonomous communities, provinces and towns would not conduct a proper filter on the final list.

In late summer, we closed the new version 4.2 of the set of libraries (framework) that we use to develop all our projects and applications.

As big news, I would like to stress that from now on, all applications developed by Conductiva have native support for OpenID user authentication.

The OpenID is an authentication standard that allows users to access a large number of websites without having to remember multiple usernames or multiple passwords.

In parallel to OpenID support in all our applications, we have launched a service that operates on the OpenID standard to generate OpenID identifiers. The new service is called LonelyID. These new identifiers allow authentication through a random password generated directly on your mobile phone. So far, LonelyID supports iPhone and iPod touch devices, but we are preparing new versions for devices from other manufacturers.

A couple of weeks ago we were foretelling its release but now we can say that LonelyID service is a reality!

LonelyID is an innovative online authentication service that operates on the OpenID standard and gives you maximum security to access all your web apps and web services.

Its main feature compared to other OpenID services is to generate random passwords on your own mobile phone (using LonelyID Mobile app) and valid only for a short time period (OTP). No need to remember passwords anymore. All your access will remain safe and always confidential.

Go to the homepage of the service, www.lonelyid.com to know more about its operation.

Or download the app Lonely Mobile for iPhone / iPod Touch and activate your new LonelyID identifier. Very easy!

We’re really excited to (almost) announce LonelyID, a new form of online authentication. With it you will not need to remember passwords anymore.

LonelyID is an authentication system that provides you access from any Internet-enabled computer to all those web applications compatible with OpenID in a completely secure form and with no need to remember any password by simply installing an application called LonelyID Mobile on your phone.

In short LonelyID Mobile will be available for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Follow us on twitter to find out about the LonelyID world-wide release.

For more info visit: www.lonelyid.com

We have now included two new lists in LonelyDrops for Spanish autonomous communities and provinces.

Codes for these lists are: spain_autonomies and spain_provinces

Here's an example of use combining both lists:

http://www.lonelydrops.com/dp/local/example6.void

In early 2009 after analysing and comparing different options for our server hosting, we decided to migrate our dedicated servers to a new hosting.

Previously, our dedicated servers were hosted in a data center located in Germany. Strategically we had a good connection to the global network and truly affordable prices.

However, the large number of accesses on our servers came from Spain and, with the lower prices of server hosting in Spain, we decided to migrate our servers to a Spanish supplier.

In this case, we decided to change to Dinahosting, a Galician company that offers competitively priced dedicated servers (hosted in a data center in Madrid). For now, the change has been very satisfactory and we can say that the service provided by Dinahosting is excellent in terms of connection, hardware, technical support and commercial support.

Congratulations to Dinahosting for their work!

This year, in the Campus Party 2009, we participated in the development of a software application for registering and printing of accreditation cards.

Following the same line of work we had been doing in the recent years, we chose to develop a web-based application. The software run directly on a web browser and only required an Internet connection to be used (quite easy to get into an event like the Campus Party)

In this case, we would stress that we made use of Flash technology for building a small software component that allowed capturing images directly from the web browser.

The application was connecting with the hardware of the camera installed on the computer and allowed us to take a picture of the person who owned the accreditation card.

There was a small area covered by a red rectangle identifying the area to be captured.

After taking the photo, the result could be previewed and then decide taking another photo if necessary or confirm the current picture, and finally continue with the registration process.

Once the picture was correct, it was sent to the server (hosted on the Internet) along with other registration information to compose the final document that would serve for printing the accreditation card.

This summer we took part in a project to carry out recreational activities with gift awards in the stands of Telefonica in the Feria Internacional de Muestras de Asturias (FIDMA, International Trade Exhibition of Asturias).

The action was intended to mount a series of stands where visitors to the exhibition could perform multiple game activities. For each activity, the participant got a score based on skills demonstrated during the activity.

After harvesting the total score of all activities, participants were able to pick up their gifts which changed depending on the number of points obtained in the different activities.

Conductiva has been responsible for developing the control software in the various activity stands and gift stands.

Here we present some of the technical challenges we faced and the solutions we applied in each case.

CHALLENGE 1: Provide software installation and software updates at multiple spots

The software should run on multiple computers (several computers were needed to record the points the participants were getting on each activity and two computers at the awards area where gifts had to be delivered). All had to be linked with a common database. Each computer also needed to have specific functionality depending on the activity it was assigned to.

Due to the short time we had for the development (2-3 weeks), we had to foresee that the software could even suffer changes once the system was already running. In that case, we had to find a way to speed up the software updates in the computers located in Asturias. And, taking into account that our development team was distributed between Vic and Madrid, the installation and configuration of software updates could grow into a major problem if they were not done automatically.

Solution

Assemble a management tool based entirely on web so that:

1. All computers (about 10 computers) located at different points of the exhibition only needed a web browser to run. The cost of installing the software was being reduced to 0.
2. The installation of the entire application was carried out remotely and without physical presence in the data center located in Madrid.
3. Software updates could be done without stopping the activity of the event which was frantically every day.

CHALLENGE 2: Speed up data entry and minimize the possibility of human error

In each of the stands a responsible person was required for entering the scores that participants succeeded in each of the activities.

At the gifts stand, another person had to take care of marking which gifts were delivered and updating the remaining stock.

Due to the high turnout expected, the software had to be quick handling and human error free.

Solution

A mechanism based on bar code identifiers was developed for which it was only necessary to have a bar code reader in each of the stands and there was no need to use the computer keyboard. This decision accelerated enormously the management of activities and significantly reduced the possibility of human error.

Thus:

1. Bar code IDs were created for each of the participants who wanted to take part in the game
2. each activity had a bar code associated with each of the scores to be assigned to the participant depending on his skills (5, 10, 15, 20 points, etc.) plus an additional cancellation code in case any registered score were incorrectly allocated.

At all times, the software was checking that the participants would only receive a single score for each activity.

The fact of having the software hosted on the Internet also provided an easy remote configuration for gifts and activities. From anywhere, the manager (duly authenticated, under a secure connection) could control the list of gifts, remaining stocking units and decide whether it was necessary to replace some gifts that were running low, and so on.

The software worked perfectly during all days and activities had a great success of participation.

All software development was carried out using our software package CIS Framework.

Today I found an interesting article talking about a project called Personas created by Aaron Zinman. The project is part of an exhibition at M.I.T. Museum called Metropath(ologies).

Personas project defines itself as: "(it) scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile."

As a curiosity, it catched my attention to see that the concept of conductiva, inside Persona's project, contained a great amount of significance related to our company's definition and our online profile.

http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb

P.D.: If you think that Persona's project is not going to change the path of humanity at all, you are probably right. In the example of conductiva, our company's definition comes in the first place probably because our website is hosted under conductiva.com. However, the project is still interesting enough to step by and see how it works.

After a frantic summer, finally we found the time to prepare the launch of a new web service so everybody can make use of it. We have been using the service in conductiva for some months in our projects and now we think it's time to present it to the public.

The service is called lonelydrops and its main goal is to help people to create multi-language dropdown lists (such as lists of countries, timezones, continents, etc.). Neither databases nor special complicated configurations are needed to build these lists.

The web service has been designed to be easy to use by inserting a few lines of Javascript in any html page and with no need to have a database-enabled web server.

To have a better understanding of how the service works, we have prepared a website where you can find more information and see some practical examples.

   http://www.lonelydrops.com

We are glad to anounce a new section in our website called Labs!

In Labs section we'll publish web utilities (such as web services or applications) that have helped us on our daily work and as they are being useful to us we think they are worth sharing too. 

What you will find in Labs section

• Early web services developed by Conductiva waiting for their final "graduation" :-)
• Some applications or utilities we have developed on our daily work and might be useful to others

And soon...

Over the next months the section will grow up with new services and applications.

We have included a new feedback section in our website. The main goal of this new functionality is to provide more usability to conductiva's website so visitors can now send their comments or contact us in an easier way.

With the intention to let this section always highlighted and visible, we have inserted a small tab/button on the left side of the web. By clicking on it, a contact form will come up.

Keep in mind you can also get in touch with us by email, comments on posts in our blog and messages through the different profiles/users we keep up-to-date in twitter.

Since the begining of this year, when we started with twitter micro-blogging as a way to publish information related to Conductiva, we found a critical problem: our daily relationship with customers and collaborators is carried out in multiple languages. Some of them speak english, others spanish and others catalan.

After some weeks working on our website we can finally say that new Conductiva's website is ready!

We have organised the website to clearly display the most interesting contents, from new products or services we're going to start offering on incoming months to some analysis of some of the projects we've been involved with during the last months.

In order to maximise compatibility with mobile phone browsing, we have prepared a mobile version of the website where all web contents are accessible in a more compressed form.

A new blog has also been created. We'll be publishing technology and project related info from there as well as info about the projects we're involved with in our daily work. We have also prepared the website to be easily linkable to Twitter, RSS feeds, ...

We also want to thank Bifid for its excellent job in the graphic design of the website.

We just moved to a more convenient office. And our phone number has changed too. Please write down the new contact details:

viddler.com has an interesting sign up confirmation message that IMHO it's great. In multiple occasions sign up confirmation messages get lost in mail server spam filters.

The website for advertising agency Targeting, www.targeting.es, contains a new section: Press Office (Sala de prensa in spanish).  Conductiva's blog publisher software combined with Conductiva's newsletter software (with subscriber management and massive email delivery) have been in charge to get the work done.  Both tools (blog and newsletter) have been used in several of our projects during these last months.

Since last October, we've been involved with the development and maintenance of a set of community websites (sponsored by Telefónica)

The main goal of these websites is to promote online activities through a soccer fan community.

The project has been carried out together with the advertising agency Targeting Link Thinkers and the graphic design studio Bifid.

Using our web content management platform, we have shaped up the project and the following main functionalities and tools have been generated:

• Gift draw mechanism (registrations, winners publishing, gift delivery control, ...)
• Betting system
• Gifts exchange system
• User uploaded contents (photos, videos,…)
• Multiple flash games
• Point based system for obtaining and exchanging gifts based on points

Communities are currently accessible through the following url:

      http://www.soydelathletic.com

After some weeks of development, we launch the final version of a website called, www.foodtraceability.eu, sponsored by European Union as part of Trace european project.

The main goal of the website is to provide you with an introduction into the world of food traceability. Different people think very differently about traceability. The website tries to respect this variety of mindsets by giving a space to each of the different viewpoints about traceability. Whatever is your particular viewpoint, the people behind TraceFood (see Who we are) are trying to make your life easier by providing easy to follow Good Traceability Practices and a standard for exchanging traceability data.

You'll find a great amount of videos and interactive exercises with the aim to increase the comprehension of traceability to those people who visit the website. The company Bífid has been in charge of graphic design and video compositions. The company foodreg, experts in food traceability, has provided all video scripts as well as the most of textual content in the website.

A tiny user community has also been created where people interested in food traceability can sign up and get in touch with other people to share opinions on this subject.

 

To increase the interaction between the website and its target public, we have prepared a new blog section (We trace!) where you may find traceability related news and you may add additional comments on published articles.

 

 

The whole development has been carried out using the latest version of our content management system, Conductiva publisher.

In one of the projects we were involved during the year 2008, we implemented a system to record online video streaming without having to install any additional software on the computer.

Recording online video streaming

We set up small site (owned by Telefonica) where Valencia CF fans could record their songs of encouragement to their team to the semifinals of the Copa del Rey (Valencia CF - FC Barcelona). Fans recorded their home video via streaming and, after passing a content validation process, the video was automatically posted on the website. The best recorded videos were finally broadcast on the giant screens in the Mestalla stadium during halftime of the game.

Offline video recording

The software was also designed to be installed on laptops (Pixman) and provide offline video recording. Around the Mestalla stadium, fans could record their videos. At the end of each day of recording, all recorded videos were automatically uploaded and published to the web server.

The project was conducted in partnership with the graphic design company Bifid and the advertising company Targeting.

In the end, the Valencia C.F. eventually won the match and qualified for the final of the Copa del Rey. We provided our bit ;-)

On the development of the website for the advertising agency Targeting, www.targeting.es, we have tried to push our Flash programming a bit further using the 3D engine called papervision 3D to recreate the three-dimensional effects over the transitions in the project list. The experience was good and we hope to repeat it again in other projects.

The website has been developed entirely in Flash and its contents are fully self-managed using conductiva's content management software.