What we're thinking about

Posted by Rob Heittman

Congratulations to Aidin & fellow members of the compliance team!

Posted by Alison Heittman

We're celebrating with the winners tonight at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center!

Posted by Alison Heittman

Tonight, we'll be attending the 2022 Freddie Awards at the World War II Museum in New Orleans

Posted by Alison Heittman

Stop wasting your points with point.me, a flight search site for credit card and frequent flyer points.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Looking for the perfect gift for a friend in the Greater Boston Area? How about a Market 2day gift card?!

Posted by Alison Heittman

This month we're pushing out two big new features for the Market 2day mobile app: reordering & ledgers!

Posted by Sam Graham

Today’s update of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species shows that slightly over thirty percent of all species of lemur in Madagascar are now classified as critically endangered. The update also reveals that the North Atlantic Right Whale has also been moved to critically endangered classification.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Congratulations to this year's winners!

Posted by Sam Graham

The population of the African Black Rhino has been slightly increasing due to conservation efforts countering the persistent threat of poachers.

Posted by Sam Graham

Today I flew to Las Vegas to surprise the staff at Pan Am to talk to them about their experiences with My Flight Solutions software and the Front Desk App that we had specially built for them!

Posted by Sam Graham

Today's data release reflects improvements in the status of ten species due to conservation efforts.

Posted by Sam Graham

Overfishing is pushing two families of rays near extinction, while the hunting of bushmeat and loss of habitat have led to the decline of a significant number of primate species.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Now in its second year, Market 2day is expanding to cover all of Cambridge, Somerville, and most of Boston's neighborhoods. Order now from their app!

Posted by Rob Heittman

Rob at the booth!

Posted by Alison Heittman

The votes are counted, and tonight we celebrate the voice of the frequent flyer at the 29th annual Freddie Awards!

Posted by Alison Heittman

Are you ready, frequent travelers? It's time to make your voice heard in the 28th annual Freddie Awards!

Posted by Alison Heittman

Time to head out and play with Trashbot at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City

Posted by Alison Heittman

This year more than 4.2 ballots were cast, and we added support for voting in four more languages.

Posted by Alison Heittman

The votes are tallied and it's almost time to announce the winners of the 26th Annual Freddie Awards! And with almost 25 million page views this year, we had a lot of votes to count!

Posted by Alison Heittman

The IUCN and the European Commission data release includes the first complete assessment of European marine fishes

Posted by Alison Heittman

With over 10 million votes cast, it's time to recognize the best in travel loyalty programs!

Posted by Alison Heittman

Today marks the first 2014 data release of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The Red List now includes 73,686 assessed species, of which 22,103 are threatened with extinction. Highlights of this release include lemurs, Japanese eels, slipper orchides and the FIFA World Cup mascot, the Brazilian three-banded armadillo.

Posted by Alison Heittman

The USA Science and Engineering Festival is in DC, and Alison is womanning the DC Web Women booth!

Posted by Alison Heittman

Alison is on the move up to CustomInk to tour their fabulous new office in the Mosaic district, learn about how they've grown their brand and are extending into mobile, and give a talk on how Solertium partnered with Five Guys to bring their brand into your pocket. Register now!

Posted by Alison Heittman

Voting is now open for the 24th Annual Freddie Awards. This year's development theme: responsive.

Posted by Rob Heittman

A technical notebook post from the FIND website, in which Rob discusses its complex content model.

Posted by Alison Heittman

The Center for Conservation Biology has launched a new mapping portal as a complimentary service for the conservation community.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Thanks to the magic of Twitter, today we were able to catch a glimpse of the team on the ground in Aceh at a forest monitoring workshop.

Posted by Alison Heittman

I'm really excited about FIND, a cultural lab we recently launched with New York University's Abu Dhabi campus. The project is designed to capture intersections and dialogues between artists, writers, scholars, designers, technologists and the UAE landscape in both a historical and contemporary context.

Posted by Rob Heittman

The first in a series of technical notebook posts about implementing the FIND website. In this one, Rob discusses the challenges of implementing a site in which Arabic and English versions of the content must functionally and beautifully coexist.

Posted by Alison Heittman & Rob Heittman

Alison & Rob are both speaking this week at the ModevEast conference, taking place in McLean, VA. See you there!

Posted by Alison Heittman

Congratulations to team Codeo Sweethearts (better known as Rob, Alison, and Solertium friend and designer Jill Zimmerman) for taking 7th place in this year's Rails Rumble with their game Llama or Alpaca?! Play the game now - wool you know the difference?

Posted by Rob Heittman

Rob's Medium post about what he learned from building Llama or Alpaca? for the 2013 Rails Rumble hackathon.

Posted by Alison Heittman

On which Libby Mojica of OspreyWatch turns our team into citizen scientists to show us why she cares about exception monitoring in Rails and being responsive to her user community.

Posted by Alison Heittman

IUCN has released the latest upate to the Red List of Threatened Species. With this update, 4,807 species have been added to the Red List bringing the total of assessed species to 70,294, of which 20,934 are threatened with extinction.

Posted by Rob Heittman

Thinking about adding a feedback form to your iOS and Android apps? We recently sat down with Alison Heittman to talk about why you'd want to, and how Appygram makes it easy to both get the form working and route the messages to the people who want to read them.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Introducing Appygram, a communications service for your web and mobile apps.

Posted by Rob Heittman

Join Rob & Alison at the first RVA Titanium User Group Meetup, where we will be giving a quick intro to the platform for those who want to know more about it and of course talk about our experiences on developing our application with Titanium.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Solertium helped the Center for Conservation Biology get ready for a new season of counting nightjars with the Nightjar Survey Network site.

Posted by Alison Heittman

On February 26, join Alison and DC Web Women for the "So you want to take your business mobile" at iStrategyLabs. After this event you will better understand how to ask and find answers to the questions that are most applicable to you. Sign up now!

Posted by Alison Heittman

The voting period for the 2013 Freddie Awards launched on February 15, 2013. This was our third year working with the frequent traveler industry on their voting application for their annual awards, and every year it just gets better. This year's theme: mobile.

Posted by Rob Heittman

The October 2012 issue of National Geographic focuses on elephant ivory poaching. Our Elephant Database and ETIS projects contributed statistics.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Download the latest result from our partnership with OLO: new iOS and Android mobile ordering apps for San Francisco-based La Boulange Café & Bakery.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Introducing OLO app #3: Mooyah Burgers Fries Shakes on iOS and Android.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Launched! In partnership with OLO, we're excited to announce the release of mobile ordering apps on Android for boloco and Bullritos.

Posted by Alison Heittman

When all the partners on all the elephant projects are in one place, that's where you'll find us. Rob & I are back from Kenya, where we met with experts from IUCN, TRAFFIC International, Universite of Reading, and Save the Elephants. We also got a lot of experience driving in Nairobi during the rainy season.

Posted by Rob Heittman

Slightly modify newrelic.yml to enable Rails 3.1 asset precompilation on Heroku's Cedar stack with New Relic RPM enabled.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Moving office can be a herculean undertaking. Fortunately Solertium has some great friends that made the job enjoyable.

Posted by Rob Heittman

Vanity Fair's August 2011 article, Agony and Ivory, covers the elephant poaching crisis and includes interviews with partners from our Elephant Database and ETIS projects.

Posted by Rob Heittman

Using a live network pull from PostLaunch CMS, I'm avoiding complex CMS integration and /public bloat on a Rails deployment to Heroku. I'm even saving a lot of template code duplication. And I'm psyched about it!

Posted by Alison Heittman

A couple of years ago, we were at a William & Mary career fair, and we met a student who wanted to come work for us because, in her words, "I'd like to save the animals." I love that a lot of our projects involve saving the world with software, and that we're fortunate enough to partner up with some great conservation non-profits and help them meet their goals.
And now we can say we helped to save the unicorns.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Solertium is proud to have partnered with the Frequent Traveler Awards to run the voting application for their 2011 awards. Travelers from around the world voted for their favorite loyalty programs in a variety of categories, and we congratulate the winners.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Jennifer O'Sullivan published her very first online content to a rarely visited Gopher site in the early 90s, and yet somehow managed to convince other people she knew what she was doing. Lucky to live in entrepreneurial New Orleans during the dawn of the Web, Jen was recruited to design GUIs for first-generation ecommerce solutions, working her way through college. After earning degrees in French and International relations, she tossed her first plan to go to law school for the champagne dreams and caviar wishes of the emerging digerati.

Posted by Rob Heittman

Web-scale systems should be economical to operate at any load level, and have in-built resilience against localized problems. Infrastructure as a service cloud offerings, like Amazon AWS, have made it easy and economical to provision servers and storage. But outages like the recent AWS us-east-1 failure quickly expose the systems that weren't designed in a way to survive a localized infrastructure breakdown.

Posted by Alison Heittman

We are proud to announce the launch of the Five Guys Android App. To say that it's been a fun project would be an understatement; we are having a great development experience working with the teams from Five Guys and OLO.

Posted by Rob Heittman

Lots of scripting languages run on the Java VM. JRuby has grown into something uniquely important, by embracing the strengths of both Ruby and Java culture. In lightning talk mode, we’ll survey some hybrid projects like celerity and RedCar that are only possible in JRuby, and look at the reasons why. We’ll look at warbler and some multicore metrics, to see how JRuby can help a Rubyist satisfy enterprise demands. For a brief dig into the internals, we’ll see an embedded JRuby interpreter used for web page templating inside an OSGi cloud platform. Finally we’ll take some BDD practices for a spin with Cucumber, to see how a little Ruby influence can impact any development project in any language.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Congratulations to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on the launch of Protected Planet, an interactive website that provides engaging, in depth insight into the world's protected areas.

Posted by Alison Heittman

The World Day to Combat Desertification is observed every year on June 17th. For 2010, the Day's theme is "Enhancing soils anywhere enhances life everywhere". This is fitting, as 2010 is also the International Year dedicated to Biodiversity, and desertification, land degradation and drought dramatically affect the biodiversity resident in the soil.

Posted by Alison Heittman

It's that time of year again! Rob & Alison are flying out to San Francisco for the 2010 Google I/O Developer Conference. Alison will be live tweeting the keynote & the sessions she attends - you can find her at @alisonheittman.

Posted by Alison Heittman

The extinction crisis continues apace. The latest release of the IUCN Red List confirms that 21% of all known mammals, 30% of all known amphibians, 12 per cent of all known birds and 32% of all known gymnosperms (conifers and cycads) are threatened with extinction.

Posted by Rob Heittman

The hidden agenda behind GoGoEgo as a Web Development framework: creating a friendly framework that provides one solid development model, but warmly embraces others.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Rob & Alison are heading out to Google I/O in San Francisco today. Google's largest developer gathering, it promises to be 2 days chock full of events, releases, learning, and networking.

Posted by Alison Heittman

In mid-2008, Dr. Dan Laffoley and the steering committee of the Protect Planet Ocean initiative asked for our help integrating exciting new Google technologies into a proposed new Web portal. The timetable was short. Dozens of stakeholders were contributing. And the key elements of the project relied on technologies in alpha or beta, with feature sets changing from week to week.

Posted by Alison Heittman

Four of us from Solertium have just returned from the 2008 World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, where we supported our largest strategic customer, IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. IUCN is a democratic membership union including some of the largest organizations in conservation (WWF, The Nature Conservancy, Natural England, Birdlife International, Conservation International, etc.), governments, and almost 11,000 volunteer scientists.
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