January 2012
1 post
PicCollage is the #1 Photo App in Japan
We’re excited to announce that PicCollage has reached the top of the charts in Japan and is right now the #1 Photo App! In addition, it is now the #7 top app OVERALL in Japan (for all free iPhone apps).
We are pleasantly surprised by this sudden surge in the rankings and can’t fully explain it, but we’d like to share with you some things that we have done to try to increase...
December 2011
1 post
A PicCollage from us to you... Happy Holidays!
There are a few things on our end that we’re thankful for this holiday season. Since our launch less than 5 months ago, we have grown from a single-page app with zero social features to a Top 10 Photo App in more than a dozen countries with over 2 million downloads. w00t!!
What means more to us than that, however, are the 5 star reviews that we’ve consistently been receiving from our...
November 2011
2 posts
Mixi-ing it up in Japan
We’re excited to be integrating Mixi into PicCollage, which is now LIVE in the App Store! Mixi is the largest social network in Japan, and now our Japanese users will be able to pull photos from Mixi into their PicCollage collages.
October 2011
6 posts
Now hiring... iOS/Android developers!
我們正在尋找開發iOS/Android的工程師，若你熱愛寫 code，喜歡矽谷式的外商文化，來加入我們團隊吧！
加入我們團隊將共同參與全球受歡迎的app - PicCollage - 的成長，PicCollage目前已超過一百萬人次下載，而且下載人次依然在成長中! 在未來，我們也將一起開發更多酷炫的app!
我們的公司文化重視設計、創新思維、程式開發，Heroku也曾把我們的作品選為成功的案例!
若你有興趣加入我們，歡迎參見http://cardinalblue.com/jobs 或來信 jobs@cardinalblue.com
*** 此外，也歡迎推薦優秀的工程師給我們，推薦成功就有機會獲得最新的iPad2喔!
We’re looking for iOS / Android developers to join our team in Taipei...
Position filled: Taipei operations
This position has been filled! Thanks!
我們正在尋找台北分公司的營運助理，若你喜歡矽谷式的外商文化，想要成為有趣好玩團隊的一份子，一起參與最酷的app成長，就快加入我們吧!
聰明、有責任感、可靠，而且喜歡把事情做好!
可以協助各種工作，包括記帳、管理、招募
擁有流利的中文及英文能力
喜歡拍照、喜歡玩手機app、喜歡玩社群網站
如果你符合以上所述特質，歡迎參見http://cardinalblue.com/jobs將你的個人簡歷寄至job@cardinalblue.com，我們會再與你聯絡!
We are looking to looking to hire an Associate for our Taipei office. Here’s a chance to work with a fun group of...
Accelerate your Startup
We had a very fruitful summer taking part in the 500 Startups accelerator program, which provides seed funding, shared coworking space, mentorship, design reviews and a great network. There are a number of such programs that would be valuable to an early stage startup, so I wanted to provide some links to incubator/accelerator programs in the US starting in Winter 2012:
500 Startups (next...
September 2011
6 posts
Facebook and Heroku... and Cardinal Blue →
We feel honored to be mentioned by Heroku in their blog post announcing their new partnership with Facebook to provide cloud services for Facebook apps:
Facebook apps have long been a major segment on the Heroku platform. From scrappy startups like Cardinal Blue to Hollywood giants like Warner Brothers, Heroku’s scale-out capabilities and friction-free workflow enables these innovative...
PicCollage adds photo-editing features with the... →
“Aviary also announced that 31 companies have started incorporating the tools in their apps, including popular photo-sharers like PicCollage, Pixable and TwitrPix.”
500 Memories
It’s hard to believe that the summer has gone by so quickly… From Drunk Pitch (a fun icebreaker event where we had a few beers and had to pitch someone else’s startup based on the name only) to the actual pitches at Demo Day, it was seriously great to have a group of really awesome people to go through the ups and downs of the startup process together with.
Best wishes to...
August 2011
2 posts
A great review of Pic Collage →
“My favourite part of this application is that all of the collages that you make are stored within the app. You can easily flip through all your past creations. The best part? You can still edit the layers of these collages! That is awesome!”
“Do give this app a try if you are looking for a photo collage application! I look forward to seeing future updates.”
5 Fun Ways to Make a Photo Collage
pic-collage:
Want to make picture-taking and sharing more fun? Consider making a photo collage!
Remember how much fun it was to make a collage in elementary school? Now, you can do it with the touch of a few buttons on your iPhone – no more scissors and glue!
To help get your creative juices flowing, here are 5 ideas to get you started..
1) Baby Beauties – we know you have tons of photos of...
July 2011
7 posts
PicCollage好好玩!!!
上篇跟大家介紹了PicCollage的功能，接著趕緊來分享一下最近玩PicCollage的拼貼照片囉！
...
PicCollage讓你簡單玩拼貼！
還記得幾個月前跟我們家的工程師聊到現有的照相app，一直想找可以像”家裡牆壁隨意亂貼照片”的app，聊完後我們找到了一個類似功能的app，不過由於操作上有點複雜，玩沒幾次後就很少再打開了，對於懶人使用者來說，app的操作方式要越直觀越簡單上手才能吸引喜歡躺在沙發上的馬鈴薯們呀！(不得不承認我是顆懶惰又肥美的馬鈴薯lol)
((腦海中的”家裡牆壁隨意亂貼照片”示意圖，網路照片提供))
沒想到事隔不久，我們真的開始設計這樣功能的app－PicCollage，前前後後測試了一段時間，現在終於可在app store下載了！感謝各位使用者的支持，很開心剛上架就榮升排行榜Top Free的前五名！
((20110720-Top Free No.4,20110721-Top Free No.5. 有圖有真相阿！))
...
"Overall, the control is extremely smooth,... →
Translated from this review of Pic Collage: ”整體來說的操作非常的順暢，非常的直覺，非常的好用！”
Anonymous asked: How do I save A collage I just made on my iPad?
June 2011
6 posts
Echelon Launchpad: Singapore and beyond
We recently took part in the Echelon Launchpad in Singapore, as covered in TechOrange and Inside. Here’s our story.
As a startup, we are always looking to save money. When we read that Launchpad companies receive free tickets to the Echelon conference, we decided to apply to the Launchpad as a way to save money… :)
When we were given a slot to pitch at the Echelon Satellite...
Campfire Integration Trick
We’ve been using Campfire for a few months, and here are some observations:
Integration trick. We have notification hooks for posting into Campfire from various sources, such as Pivotal, Heroku, Github and Exceptional. Here’s a neat trick - for each data source, create its own Campfire user. For example, if our company name is “CBLUE”, so we created users called...
Three Startup Weekends
For 3 weekends in a row in May, we participated in 3 intense startup events in San Francisco: Startup Weekend, Podio Hack Day and Lean Startup Machine. On top of our normal work during the week, we chose to spend these weekends meeting new people, trying out new ideas and hacking code under a tight time constraint.
Our main takeaways were:
Deadlines lead to focus and urgency.
Talk to your...
Cardinal Blue is Fast, Furious and 500
We are excited to be part of the Fast & Furious at 500 Startups: Cardinal Blue has joined the 500 Startups Accelerator, a three-month intensive program in Mountain View, CA culminating in a demo day in August.
500 Startups claims the top floor of the tallest building in Mountain View (where you actually get a panoramic “mountain view”), walled by huge lego-like windows:
...
`git rebase --interactive` to fix merging branch
Consider this scenario: you want to merge a pull request from github, but some of the commits and edits are not related at all. You are not interested merging them together, so you can’t simply click on the merge button.
I (godfat) ran into this situation. To fix this, I first checked out to a merging branch:
git co -b merging
Then I pulled the request as usual:
git pull...
May 2011
2 posts
April 2011
5 posts
2 tags
Tribute Balloon: a million balloons, a million...
Each morning I wake up and the first thing I do is to check my tributeballoon.com email to see if there have been any major user concerns and to make sure that the site is still up and running smoothly. This morning, due to the Amazon EC2 outage, Tribute Balloon was down for a few hours (which allowed me to spend some time thinking about writing this post). Instead of dozens of emails from upset...
2 tags
Ruby on Rails Outreach Workshop for Women
I attended the 15th RoR Outreach Workshop for Women sponsored and hosted by Railsbridge and ModCloth on April 8-9, 2011.
For someone with not much of a technical background in programming, I have to say that this was one of the best workshops I’ve been to. 100% volunteer-supported so not only is it free, but you can tell that everyone who is there (volunteers and participants) really...
Computing the minimum number of Heroku dynos from...
In a previous post, we described how to query the API for New Relic, a service that we use to monitor our Rails apps. In this post, we give an example of how this data can be used to adjust the number of front-end server units (“dynos”) for Heroku, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that we use to host our Rails apps.
Let’s do some math. Here are two numbers that can be read from...
Using the New Relic API with Geckoboard
We’ve been using a great service called New Relic for monitoring our Rails applications for over 3 years, and recently, we’ve started to play around with the New Relic API. In particular, we’ve recently integrated New Relic stats into our monitoring dashboard (which we set up using Geckoboard). Here are some more details about how we did this.
As discussed in a previous blog...
Introducing RestGraph
We are proud to announce RestGraph - a lightweight open-source Facebook Graph API client for Ruby. It’s modular and compact, and provides only the essential functionality.
Moreover, it’s designed to be transparent to Facebook Graph API, which has the benefit of simplicity. Unlike other client libraries that might try to “fix” Facebook’s API, RestGraph lets you...
March 2011
1 post
1 tag
Adventures with AppMakr
AppMakr is a convenient web-based tool for building iPhone (and now Android) apps out of RSS feeds and HTML/CSS files. We recently built an app using AppMakr based on our Facebook page for startup news (http://facebook.com/thinkstartup).
Here are some issues that we ran into:
RSS Mess. It turns out the default RSS feed for Facebook feeds cannot be read by AppMakr… so we needed to write...