Increasingly, consumers initiate local purchases on their mobile devices, and if they like what they see, go into a store and buy. Are you ready for them?

This weekend we had Intrideans at four different events we sponsored from DC to Germany, talking about user experience, design, Ruby on Rails, and tablets. Here's a quick rundown of our experience at the events.

MoDevTablet

The first event kicked off early Friday morning. We partnered with GoMoDev to support their MoDevTablet event, and Jurgen, our Managing Director of UX, Christine Nakatani, our Director of Business Development, and Maggie, one of our superbly talented Project Managers spent the day talking with tablet developers and designers.

Last April we sponsored the first MoDevUX event in Washington DC and helped facilitate some important conversations about user experience design and application development with hundreds of industry experts.

We had the opportunity to take the stage to share some of our insight gained from developing beautiful, modern mobile applications over the years. Our presentation garnered a lot of feedback and even landed us a story in InTheCapital, DC's leading online news source for tech and startups.

The main function of data visualization, is to better understand the general concept of a data set quickly. Sure, if done effectively, data visualization can look organic and beautiful, but the primary goal always stands: allow the viewer to get the gist of the data quicker than looking at the sum of its parts. Rating systems are a great example of where we could do better, as Goodfil.ms has mentioned in their post about rating systems; 5-star rating systems are broken.

New to css layouts or a Ninja warrior we both share one common headache, The Box Model. The box-model is the way we calculate the width and heigh of an object. The W3C modal calculates the width and height by adding the padding and border to the width you specify ( width + padding + border / height + padding + border ). This is a pain when we want to specify a width to be 400px wide, we need to then subtract the difference of the padding and border to make a 400px wide box. If we had a border of 10px and a padding of 20px, the width would be 340px wide (400 - 20 - 40 = 340px).

We’re excited to announce our involvement and sponsorship of Smashing Conference, taking place in beautiful Freiburg, Germany September 17-19th.

This event brings together web designers and developers for three days of intense workshops and engaging presentations from design experts around the world. We’re sponsoring the sold-out event and trekking to Germany for an epic “meeting of the minds.” (And some streusel. And beer. And sausages.)

Don't cry. We've all been there too. Regression issues in the presentation layer make the entire team go crazy. Why can't we have a methodical way of testing the UI to ensure once designs are styled as views, they stay the way that they were created?

They say you can tell a lot about a person just from their bookshelf. Here is an inside look at our design team's current reading lists!

Last week we sponsored MoDevUX, a mobile conference in Washington, D.C. led by vanguards in the mobile development and design industry. In addition to learning about emerging trends from the diverse crowd of presenters and attendees we also shared a bit of our own "secret sauce".

Anthony Nystrom, our Director of Mobile and Emerging Technologies, shared the stage with Jurgen Altziebler, our Managing Director of UX to tackle the topic of "Development and Design: When the Two Must Act As One".

Through cultivating a culture of quality in both design and development we've gained insights on the formula for success among teams of developers and designers. MoDevUX was an opportunity for us to share those insights with the greater mobile design and development communities.

Rails. No, really.

The future of web and mobile design is in Rails, Sinatra, Django, and other RESTful web frameworks that can be used to leverage design power across multiple platforms, making it easier and faster (translate: more economical) to design for web, mobile and desktop.

Our UI/UX team was stationed up in NYC for the Future of Web Design conference last week and we were able to chat with some really awesome folks who had innovative and inspiring ideas about web design.

In just a few weeks, our design team, led by Jurgen Altziebler, our Managing Director of UX, will descend upon Manhattan for three days of intelligent discourse on the future of web (and mobile) design at this year's highly anticipated Future of Web Design (FOWD) event.

This year we are sponsoring this remarkable event which brings over 500 talented designers together for intimate sessions on the most current topics in web design. Top industry experts will be flown in to lead two days of informative sessions in which attendees will learn about the future of everything from HTML5, CSS3, Compass, Sass, Mobile UX, iOS design, Haml, responsive web design, content management systems, branding, animations, and JavaScript, which will be followed by a day of in-depth workshops.

This article focuses on the correlation of UX and brand equity to quantitative measures that we see in market value.

User experience (UX) is a catch-all term that we use in the software industry to describe the overall feeling that an end-user gets when using a product. The UX is the attitude that is triggered when using (and subsequently thinking about) a company and their products and services. Since your user's attitude affects their future behavior toward your brand or product, a good user experience is vital to product adoption, engagement and loyalty.

Inspired by their recent trip to the Wolfram Data Summit, Marc Garrett and Jurgen Altziebler share their thoughts on big data and the missing component.

The Wolfram Data Summit is an invitation-only gathering in Washington, DC which brings together the leaders of the world's largest data repositories. Professors, Chief Privacy Officers, Research Scientists, Chief Technology Officers, Data Architects, and Directors from leading organizations like UCSD, the U.S. Census Bureau, Thomson Reuters, Cornell, and Orbitz (among many others) come to present on the challenges and opportunities they face in the data community and to discuss their work.