Get Rally!

Rally is probably the coolest iPhone app EVER, and a great startup that we're proud to be a part of. It's a location-based service that's all about staying in touch with your real friends, seeing where people are, and what they're up to. And by real friends, we mean people who are really your friends—the idea is to cut out the noise and focus on people you actually hang out with.

Every other location-based service falls into the same trap that Facebook and Twitter do. Namely, your basic human nature is to want as many friends as possible, so you add anyone and everyone to your friends list, even if you barely (or don't) know them. But when you throw location into the mix and these people can see exactly where you are whenever you check in, it's creepy.

Rally is currently in limited release in the iPhone App Store for the Santa Cruz area. We're focusing on responding to user feedback and bringing out some features to help you cut out the noise and focus on your real friends. Check it out, and be sure to read all about us in the Santa Cruz Good Times!

Learn more at www.rallyapp.com.

Presenting the beeets.com grand (re)opening!

So, the second version of beeets is now up and running. We’re really excited we finally got it out the door, and people can actually start using it. For the moment, we’ll probably only have events in the Santa Cruz, CA area (visit the SC homepage) since we don’t have the (wo)manpower at the moment to keep up with any other towns.

Some new features you may enjoy:

• A complete redesign. We wanted something more functional and intuitive. Let us know what you think. As always, be harsh.
• Groups. Users can now create and join groups. This is an alternative to having friends. So many other sites do friends, and there’s really no point in creating one-off connections between people on an event site. So instead, you can join a group, post events to it, meet other people who share your interests, etc. We’re encouraging new friendships over finding people on the site you already know.
• Subscriptions. From the homepage, you can select a set of tags, and subscribe to them. You will be sent emails with events that have those tags. This is great for people who want to stay connected, but don’t want to check the site five times a day. This service is new new new, so please be patient of any issues with it. Please use our wonderful feedback tab to let us know of any issues.
• General UI overhaul. Over the past months, we’ve learned many things about what makes a site easier. In fact, we’re still learning this. We’ve tried to incorporate all we know about making a site as simple as possible into beeets. Always feel free to let us know through our feedback system if something doesn’t make sense to you.

So show your support and post a few events, or try out the site and give us feedback. Hope you like the site!

Special thanks to Parachute Creative for the awesome new logo. Davy and Ruby are awesome and we love them.

Oh yeah, and happy new year.

privacychoice.org redesign and uxui.us

Check out our portfolio for the newly redesigned privacychoice.org site! With privacychoice, you can learn about what ad networks target and track your online activities on your favorite sites, and opt-out from tracking. Privacychoice offers browser add-ons you can use to see what trackers collect information on any page and keep your opt-out settings permanent.

Also check out the newly-launched uxui.us landing page. With the mad design skillz of Ruby and Davy over at Parachute Creative, and our HTML / CSS development, UXUI's page is just an example of the affordable, high-impact web presence we can create in a minimal amount of time.

Finally, we have a very exciting announcement coming up soon, so I'd like to take this opportunity to announce the announcement. Stay tuned...

Presenting the beeets.com open beta!

After just a few short months of development, and implementing new features based on user feedback in the closed beta, beeets.com is now open to the public! beeets is our tag-based events search engine, based on our incredibly versatile aFrame rapid development framework.

Our goal with beeets is to help people get in touch with local events in the communities around them. Anyone is free to sign up and post events, and anyone can find and share events that match their interests by using a simple tag-based search. It's so easy, even my dogs can do it!

We are also launching a campaign to promote community awareness of beeets.com in the greater Santa Cruz area. We hope to get in touch with local non-profit and community organizations that share our vision of getting people off their butts, out of their houses and active in the world around them! Of course, we will also continue to improve beeets.com based on the valuable user feedback we've been receiving.

We hope you have as much fun using beeets.com as we did building it!

LyonBros.com Grand Opening!

Welcome to the company web site of Lyon Bros. Enterprises! We designed this site to showcase our technical prowess and provide information about our business. Check our portfolio to see some examples of our past work, or learn more about our products and the services we offer by clicking the links at the top.

This site runs on our aFrame rapid development framework. aFrame combines the best aspects of the CakePHP and CodeIgniter frameworks and trims the fat, enabling us to quickly develop highly efficient and fast-running web sites. From the initial template design to the custom blogging system, content and deployment, this site took us less than two days of work to launch, thanks in great part to aFrame.

Again, welcome to our grand opening, and thanks for visiting! Please feel free to leave comments on our blog or email us.