Our Geek Space

This past june 24 Moove-it won the contest “Best ideas for Ceibal 2010” organized by Rayuela and the Ceibal Plan (One laptop per child), presenting its idea “Together with Ceibal”.

Follow this link to read the official information (spanish) Rayuela Web site of Best ideas

Moove-it was selected by the Ceibal Plan as the company who will develop the first social network for more than 400.000 students of primary and high school.
The idea is to build a web-based tool which will allow students and teachers to interact inside and also outside the classroom. The platform will provide virtual classrooms where teachers can work directly with their groups using all the benefits of the Web, Internet and XOs. Students will also be able to use the tool to meet each other, share their interests or even play together.

This video shows a brief idea of what the “Ceibal Plan” is.

It feels really good to be part of something like this!

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Currently we are the developing team of blahsports. Since January 2010 we have been developing several new functionalities and administrating the whole Site.

Blahsports – www.blahsports.com

Blahsports is a social content website. As a user, you participate in determining all site’s content by providing, selecting, sharing, and discussing articles, pictures and videos that you like and feel that would be interesting to other people.

see the site …

Blah and technology

This project is based on PHP, codeigniter (www.codeigniter.com), Python and MYSQL.
It uses RSS and Web crowller application developed in Python to share all the sports content of a hundred sites.
We create a tag module which searches and identifies the language, sports and a set of tags for each content. For instance, if the content is “Forlan plays very well against Mexico” then the module will find out that the text is about Soccer, Forlan, Mexico and that the main language is English.

blah and a marketing campaign

We are making a marketing campaign to acquire and activate users.  We have a Maradona t-shirt as a prize for the winner among all the registered users … see the site … http://maradona.blahsports.com

This application was developed based on rails.

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Virtualmart – This is a package of solutions (components, plugins and modules) to create online shopping web sites with Joomla . It provides many tools to make an e-commerce solution.

Joomla – CMS (Content Management System) Open Source based in Php and mysql.

We are building a couple of sites using this combination: www.uruguaycompras.net and deportes.universia.edu.uy (coming soon).

In our opinion Virtualmart (VM) is the most complete open source solution to build this kind of sites. After installing Joomla we add the component and a lot of modules and plugins (see the instructions: http://virtuemart.net/documentation/User_Manual/Installation.html)
After that you can configure your virtualmart solution with different ways of payments (e.g. paypal, on delivery, etc.), different providers, different currencies, different vendors and so on.
VM has a complete back-end administrator to manage all the information and all the shopping process.

This picture shows the administrator panel.

From our experience, VM has two problems without solution until now. We expect to solve these issues and share this stuff to all the community.
The problems are:

• multi vendor management – this module is in alpha version to developers. You cannot manage two or more providers. For Instance: we have a site for a reseller company and they sell products of different vendors. VM solution doesn’t consider this situation.
• multi currency solution – VM allows to manage as many currencies as you want (more than 100 for default, and you can also add others if you want). But in the checkout process and in all the shop gallery you don’t have the possibility to show more than one currency.

We expect that in the next two weeks we could have another post sharing these solutions.

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We showed the first prototype of the game developed for the “Plan Ceibal” (www.ceibal.org.uy). The game is web based and specially designed for children using a XO computer.

Plan Ceibal

The One Laptop Per Child Association, Inc. (OLPC) is a U.S. non-profit organization set up to oversee the creation of an affordable educational device for use in the developing world. Its mission is “to create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.”

“Uruguay is the first country in accept the challenge”

Worldbank.org – Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal: The world’s most ambitious roll-out of educational technologies?

The Game

Moove-IT and El Abrojo (a Uruguayan Social Organization who works with poor children) are working in the development of an online game for the XO computers.

This game is financed by the IMM (Government of Montevideo) and his main objective is promote good habits between children. This tool is an online game in which the children works with themes relative to the daily environment care. Each child works in groups with their classmates and also with other schools in any location of the country.

They will be able to: build houses, create commercial areas, create rural areas, maintain clean the neighborhood, and manage parks, among others things.

The points are generated by answering simple questions and doing simple tests. The tests and the answers are validated by the collective. This means that players themselves determine whether an answer is correct or not.

Here you have an initial slide of the game with some screenshots. (The slide is in Spanish)

We will put this Game on production in April 20, 2010

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Rock and roll nene !!!

With Ariel, Gejo and Pablo (CEO of moove-it and two friends) we went to Buenos Aires to see AC&DC in the stadium of River Plate. Web of AC&DC: www.acdc.com

Here we share some pictures from inside.

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As Saul Klein wrote on his blog, the Open Coffee Show is:

“an attempt to establish recognized, open and regular meeting places where entrepreneurs can meet with investors (and anyone else who fancies coming along) in a totally informal setting.”

This initiative was “imported” to Uruguay by my friend and partner Conrado Viña.  Nowadays is an interesting place to meet interesting people with great ideas.

If you are in Uruguay you cannot miss the annual event!

Open Coffe Show Annual Event

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“Usability is making your website easy for your visitors to find the information they need when they need it.”

When you are building a web page one of the first things that come to your mind is where to put the most important features so the user find them easily.

So, doing a bit of research I found that most users have a particulary way of looking the screen that is called the  ”F-Shaped Pattern “.

This pattern says that users tend to first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.

Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.

Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

For more information about the F-Shaped Pattern visit this link

Other usability tip that I found is that users tend to focus on people’s faces and eyes, this means that if there is a face in your page users focus on it, next they are going to look what the eyes of the face are watching. So if you are going to place people in your page make sure they watch the content you want to show.

Talking a bit about scrolling, recent studies prove that users are quite comfortable with scrolling and in some situations they are willing to scroll to the bottom of the page. So it is a good idea to divide your layout into sections for easy scanning, separating them with a lot of white space.

There are many of usability advices but I think that the most important is to keep it simple.

If you want that users navegate your page easily and they don’t get lost, your page must follow conventions of web design.  For example:  use blue for hiperlinks, if you use another color the user will have to learn the new color to associate it with a link.

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faltauno.com
Interview with Martin Cabrera in .TV
In this interview, which was developed in the program. TV Channel, Martin Cabrera presents the main characteristics and objectives of the social network of sport www.faltauno.com

This social network is being developed by Moove-iT and is targeted to soccer.

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