PixelBit Lab

Matthew (PixelBit founder) was invited to speak to the Busy Creator audience about our work, business and technology. Have a listen and post your thoughts.

Crazy to think 2014 is more than half over, we have been busy bringing clients dreams to life and launching some amazing projects. One of those awesome projects was for Comcast Spotlight. We partnered with Piehead to re-design and re-define the Comcast Spotlight mobile app/website experience.

We will be writing a more in depth case study on the project but for now here is a teaser screenshot and link to download the app for yourself.

In addition to the mobile app we developed a custom Wordpress CMS to manage the app assets (videos, images, pages, specials) without ever having to publish a new app to the various stores. This allows the client a greater level of management and even integrates into their proprietary delivery systems.

The biggest challenge of this project was dealing with numerous automated systems, lots of pages and allowing portions of the app to work offline (with cached data). 

The end result was an easy to use, visually appealing and fast mobile app for iPhone, Android and iPad that aligns perfectly with the Comcast brand.

Soon after we acquired pixelbit.com and launched our new site we decided it was time to buy up some advertising to get more eyeballs on the site. While didn't expect to rocket into stardom over a few ads we did anticipate some positive results.

Ran a campaign on Twitter for 3 months, got a couple retweets and a handful of followers. Did the same on Facebook and promoted a few posts, less than 100 new followers (so basically it cost over $2 for each one of those likes, not good).

As a final social media experiment @mkeefe started tweeting PixelBit news and the results were shocking. The organic marketing got us dozens of new followers, thousands of visitors to the site and a new client.

We know many companies and individuals have profited from social advertising, but in our limited tests it really doesn't pay off. Maybe a service business is not the correct fit for this type of marketing. We'll stick to what works best, repeat clients, face-to-face meeting and organic status updates.

What have your results been like?

Hard to imagine we are fast approaching the end of another year. Each one has its highlights and thanks to some amazing clients and projects, 2013 was no exception for us!

We just posted an updated website packed with projects we’ve had the pleasure of working on in 2013. We welcome you to check out our work and check back often as we continue to post more.

Preview of 2014 We are already getting a jump on 2014 and are working on some awesome projects. Though we can’t unveil any details at this time, we can say one project is with a major content producer and another is building an innovative learning tool. Look out for more details in our quarterly newsletters coming in 2014.

Have a Happy Holiday Season and a successful New Year.

See you in 2014!

As we begin to work on proposals and sign contracts for 2013 we wanted to take a moment and look back at 2012. It goes without saying that 2012 was a huge year for PixelBit. We worked on many amazing projects, gathered great client relationships and got to work with some pretty awesome people.

What's in a Year? In one years time we shipped over a dozen mobile apps, numerous websites, some physical installations and an e-learning training platform. The PixelBit team got the opportunity to work on an advertising campaign for Lenovo, an iPad game for Wrangler, a web project for Disney, and an iPad app used within a trade show to engage attendees. Closing out the year our holiday card was featured on the printers blog, an added bonus.

View our Sortfolio page for some project screenshots

What will 2013 Offer? It's hard to imagine how 2012 could be topped for our small team, but it already is. We are currently working on a few fun projects, one of which is for a nationally syndicated spanish TV network.

It also is hard to imagine we don't have a full website, but only until you realize the amount of work we've shipped over the last year. However we are actively working on the website and plan to release more info about that in a follow-up blog post. The site is currently fully designed for web and mobile (after-all we build for mobile) and in the process of being developed. While we don't have an exact launch date it should be online in about a month or so.

Late last year the founder of PixelBit, Matthew Keefe was interviewed by the team at VitaminT for their Webby Connect Talent Spotlight series. The focus of the interview was on mobile. It touches on future technology, favorite apps and common mistakes app developers can make.

Excited to unveil another project just completed! The PixelBit team in partnership with dwinQ designed and developed a mobile application. This allowed attendees of the 2012 Lexus Americas Cup to predict race results, win prizes and stay connected to the event. In addition to the mobile app a kiosk web-app was developed to allow the non-mobile users to engage in all the same ways.

Exciting news today. We just got word from Apple that the Wrangler "Rope Your Rewards" iOS app is now available on the app store. PixelBit developed this app in partnership with Digital Ad Agency for Wrangler and it was quite a fun project for the team to be a part of.

It started with a simple talk about what sort of app should be developed and a few short months later we now have completed apps for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. Thats right its even available for Android on launch, no "coming soon" happening here.

We are extremely excited to announce Four Stack, an app we partnered with Go Go Games to develop is now available on the app store.

This project began as a simple Flash app for the web but quickly turned into a full featured iOS game as the clients needs grew. One of the more interesting things about this project was the client originally came up with the game concept when she was a child. Now that she partnered with PixelBit its now a reality for the world to enjoy. Go download it today!

We are excited to announce that Scooter Traffic is live (launched in late 2011) and is already a hit with moms around the world. The PixelBit team worked with Peniferella Creative to develop this project. We are extremely happy with the result and had a bunch of fun working on it.

After looking over many applications/services and reading all kinds of reviews we started to formulate a list of applications the "Bitizens" use. Here is a small list of the top tools we use at PixelBit. We use others as well, but these ones clearly shine.

Basecamp Project and client management. The Suite is a good deal.

Sortfolio Good advertising opportunity for little cost.

Quickbooks Online Perfect tools for managing the business, paying employees and contractors. Also integrates with our accountants systems.

Beanstalk Hosted SVN for secure, offsite backups. While we don't use this for all code (contract restrictions) it works quite well for our small team.

TestFlight iOS Developers "new best thing". It makes testing a breeze and makes it possible to push builds in minutes with a clear communication with our testing pools.

Dribbble While not really a web tool it really is nice to get feedback in realtime as a project is being developed.

MediaTemple We actually have a love/hate for this host, but so far they've allowed PixelBit to scale and provide hosted and cloud solutions for a few of our clients.

MailChimp Excellent newsletter and one-off mailing. Clean, Fast and Intuitive. Plus it has chimps, whats not to love?

There you have it, a little list of the tools we use. We will post some more "company information" in the future as we continue to grow. For now we are focused on our brands and clients, so much that we haven't even finished our own website. Its the "cobblers children" effect for sure.

What tools and services do you use?

Recently we have received numerous emails asking what we were working on, how the site was coming along and what our favorite coffee was (yes, really). Rather than respond to each email we decided to fast-track the blog. Also known as "PixelBit Lab". So here goes:

What are we working on?

- Finishing touches of an app for a department within the US Government. - iOS card game app - Rebate Radar beta - Our site, slowly  - Albedo 

How is the site going?

Not bad, we have about 90% of the design completed, tested in multiple browsers and developing the mobile version all at the same time. However with the influx of client work we had to make the not so difficult decision to allocate less time to our own site, for now.

Our Favorite Coffee?

Well since we are a company I don't think it likes coffee, however I (Matthew) personally prefer Dunkin Donuts over Starbucks yet rarely drink coffee anyway.