I don’t know about y’all, but we here at Dynamo Labs *love* democracy. The smell of sweet freedom fills our lungs in the mornings before we set out to change the world. We enjoy our inalienable rights (and the occasional McDonald’s cheeseburger) as much as the next guy/girl.

So when we were told about what’s happening in the island of Saint Vincent in the Grenadines, we knew that we had to help.

Heard the story? Saint Vincent in the Grenadines is a beautiful set of islands in the South Caribbean where about 120,000 hard working people live (along with a few American celebrities.) The current Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves has aligned himself with Venezuela and Hugo Chavez. The New Democratic Party, led by Arnhim Eustace, wants to save SVG by raising the standard of living and guarantee civil liberties. (For more information on NDP’s campaign, click here.)

Here at Dynamo Labs, we got a request to do what we could to give the people in SVG back the democracy they painfully miss and we fervently cherish. So we gave the New Democratic Party of SVG the online tools to help them fundraise for their campaign with help from our good friends at Piryx.

Through this online fundraising process, anyone will be able to donate $5 or more to the NDP campaign. We encourage all of you tuning in to give. Instead of grabbing that pint of Franconia Wheat or grease-laden Whataburger dinner, take that cash and give back to this nation yearning to be free.

SVG deserves to be as free as the rest of us. Donate, or at least come see us on August 12th with a special guest from the NDP.

See you soon!

Dynamo Labs setup a Challenge demo before a Dallas Running Club group race

Challenge & the Dallas Running Club partner to up the ante for the White Rock N Roll 5 & 10 Mile

(I-Newswire) April 3, 2010 – (Dallas, TX) – Today, Dynamo Labs announced its partnership with the Dallas Running Club (DRC) to help promote this year’s White Rock N Roll 5 & 10 Mile. The DRC, the third largest running club in the U.S. with 4,000 active members, has chosen Dynamo’s Challenge application platform for all race participants; including members of the 400-strong DRC training program.

“We’re in a rebuilding year and wanted to elevate the exposure & importance of the race to what it was a few years ago,” said Jason McGhee, Race Management Director for the DRC. “We chose to partner with Challenge to help with this rebuild. With Challenge, we hope to increase engagement among those already participating in the race and to also share the event on people’s social networks.”

Challenge provides participants with a unique and collaborative experience by leveraging social behaviors to motivate members to accomplish a goal. The platform’s interface redesign is now simpler and more intuitive providing users with a continuous feed of your and your friends’ activity as well as graphic progress trackers. The customized DRC site also features integration of Nike+ data and a leader board to project participants’ progress. These new features present the total amount of progress posted, number of times posted and the size of each progress posted. In addition, Challenge integrates with Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to connect and publish updates on both sites automatically.

“We all know too well the obstacles of training for races. Having friends and teammates encourage my progress is a powerful training and accountability tool,” said Blake Burris, Founder of Dynamo Labs. “With Challenge, we can facilitate collaboration for training groups and clubs in a far more engaging way than simply using email and online groups.”

About Dallas Running Club
The Dallas Running Club is the largest running and walking organization in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We welcome runners and walkers of all ages, shapes, sizes and skill levels. We are a volunteer-run organization led by runners and walkers just like yourself.

About Dynamo Labs
Dynamo Labs builds apps for the mobile social web (Facebook, iPhone, Android, etc) and was among the first fbFund recipients. fbFund is an innovation grant fund operated by Accel Partners, The Founders Fund and Facebook. Dynamo was founded by Blake Burris in 2008 to build social applications that help people connect with friends to develop their fullest potential. The company operates at CoHabitat, the startup community and coworking space located in the historic State-Thomas neighborhood in Uptown Dallas.

One of the features we’re most excited about in the upcoming v2 release of Challenge is a leaderboard we’re hoping will really capture the essence of accountability and bring it to the web.

In designing it we wanted to satisfy a few key criteria:

1. It had to be versatile enough to work with almost any kind of challenge, like reading, not just the usual suspects like running, biking and swimming.
2. It also needed to elegantly communicate three different types of data per participant: the total amount of progress posted, the number of times progress was posted, and the size of each progress post.
3. The leaderboard had to be fun. Our good friend and beta tester Chris St. John suggested that the focus be less on the raw numbers and more on the natural drama of competition, that is, who’s beating whom. This is why we chose to visualize the three data types. Each creates an opportunity for drama to unfold as participants compare their performance throughout the challenge.

The following images are in chronological order, starting with my initial sketches and ending with a finished comp designed by the very talented Jacob Morse. The dots, hops, and rectangles you’ll see represent individual progress posts (e.g. “5 miles, 3 miles, 7.5 miles…”). Hopefully this will give you a sense of the “evolution of a leaderboard.”

We’re super excited to announce that our team will be heading down to Austin to partake in the SXSW Interactive madness next week. We all know that this is an exciting time for everyone in the tech industry, but we look forward to meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends.

It’s been quite a ride from becoming one of the first fbFund recipients to launching our Challenge app. If you’re curious about being a successful startup outside the Valley, come find us!

Interested in coordinating a formal meeting or interview with Dynamo Labs founders? Feel free to contact Jennifer Conley to sync schedules.
 
 
 

Looking forward to seeing everyone next week! Let the madness begin.
 
 
 

We made CNN Radio! Yesterday, Winston Edmondson of CNN Radio DFW 1190AM interviewed Dynamo Labs, founder Blake Burris and Tyler Fields.

Winston is the host of the Innovation@Work radio show. Hiis program features local entrepreneurs with big ideas. The interview will be published on his ProjectInnovation site and we will post the link here when it becomes available.

Dynamo Labs on air with Winston Edmonson, CNN Radio

Tyler Fields, Winston Edmondson, and Blake Burris

]]> http://dynamo-labs.com/featured/dynamo-labs-hits-cnn-radio/feed/ 0 http://dynamo-labs.com/featured/pulp-startup-part-2/ http://dynamo-labs.com/featured/pulp-startup-part-2/#comments Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:46:50 +0000 Tyler Fields http://dynamo-labs.com/?p=65

Blake‘s baby, my step-baby, baby Challenge. We have very high aspirations for her. We want her to grow up big and strong and beautiful and we want her to find something she’s good at, something that can be hers. She’s told us before that she wants to be a social platform for challenges among friends, but you know how kids are, always changing their minds. Right now we’ll be happy if she doesn’t bomb her first day of school, which is comin up real quick. She needs to do what we’ve taught her and play nice with Facebook and make one thousand friends so that Blake can make good on his promises. This is why I was hired.

I meet Blake at our usual lunch spot and we both order the special. They bring out meatloaf sandwiches, which means it must be Thursday. Blake starts talking about Ryan Frytus. Spelled Freitas. This is the Adaptive Path ex who will be judging my user experience skills for one hour starting at 1pm. He’s kind of a big deal according to Blake, but I could be confusing him with someone else. Blake spews names the way 8th graders spew locker room expletives, to the point where your motha’ Freitas brain throws up a motha’ Freitas blue screen of death and asks for a motha’ Freitas reboot.

I’m nearly immune at this point, but it’s still fun to watch the uninitiated as they lose cognitive cabin pressure. Which reminds me, to make a mental note, to google Ryan Freitas.

To be continued…
 
 

The iPhone chimes. I don’t need to check the sms to know it’s from Blake. This instinct has developed after five weeks, and it’s the price you pay for choosing to work different hours than your boss. I grab the brick from across my bedside table and do la one-handed disconnect. Says it’s 11am. Says we need to prep for 1pm call. THE call. Prep is at noon over lunch. Which means another 55 minutes of sleep for me. I close my eyes.

Things are coming along. Slowly of course, but surely. Five failed web apps with nearly as many teams of developers have taught me that getting a product to alpha with remote, part-time devs is slow. I’ve never had a full-time anybody, but I do know that things hum when everyone’s in the same room. Experiencing a full workweek at hum-speed has always been a dream of mine, but I remain unsatisfied. Some day perhaps. Some day when my startup pays the bills. Mom and Dad will get off my back, I will be vindicated and the words “my startup” will feel a bit more like they did when I first spoke them two and a half years ago. With less stretch and more truth. Or more bravado, rather. Before the cuts and bruises. Before I learned how to take a punch. Before I learned what a punch felt like.

But this isn’t about me. I mean this isn’t about Momo, begat by me. It’s about Challenge, begat by Dynamo Labs, begat by Blake, my lord and Facebook-funded savior. Challenge is like my step-child; it’s not technically mine, but I’m helping Blake raise it. Kind of like the stay-at-home mom who spends all day with the baby while dad goes out and brings home the bacon. Actually, that’s too generous. I’m more like the live-in housekeeper who works for the single dad and has developed an emotional attachment to the kid ’cause she’s just so darned cute! And I take her bad behavior personally (insert scolding finger here). And I’m doing her user experience. Please keep your mind out of the gutter.

To be continued…
 
 

It’s true – we work out of an amazing place in Uptown Dallas called CoHabitat.  It’s really not fair to everyone stuck in those traditional corporate offices but I digress.  CoHabitat is home to about a dozen startups working on social apps, linked data, and iPhone apps among other things. I like to say it’s a startup community first and coworking space second.  We just got rolling with this project in December 2008 and renovations continue today.

While I’m plenty busy with Dynamo Labs and  committed to seeing our vision come to be, the opportunity to create a hub for startup entrepreneurs and developers in Dallas couldn’t be left to chance!  Thankfully we have many smart folks coming through the door here so it’s easy to recruit leaders who want to drive a variety of tech and platform technology groups.

To date, we have communities going for Facebook, iPhone, and Google (GTUG) along with design related groups like DFW-UPA doing workshops here.  Drop by to see us if you’re in the neighborhood.

CoHabitat Uptown

It’s great to finally have the Dynamo site up! Thanks to Ben Hernández‘ smokin design and Worpress skillz. We’ll use this site to tell the on-going story of our product development, talk about the contributions by our stellar team, and to explain a bit about how we intend to make the world a better place.

This site also is the first site using our new company name, Dynamo Labs. I always spent too much time explaining what a “Corazón” was and think “Dynamo” better represents our vision for fun on the social graph.

We’re also working furiously behind the scenes to get the Challenge app beta in the wild so you, our fans, can enjoy it. I’ll be posting an update on that and some screens next.
 
 
 

Challenge was featured by Ben Ling during the keynote speech at the Facebook developer conference, f8 08, in San Francisco.

We’ve come a long way since our first attempt at build a platform application; though we’ve stayed true to our mission to connect people for self-improvement and are really excited to show off our work to you all soon and again at f8 09.

Blake Burris covering details of being a fbFund recipient for his Challenge application. Photo Credit: Stormy Shippy