David Crow

Connector of dots. Maker of lines. Rider of slopes.

Social Media

Trapeze – Director of Application Development

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Toronto, ON

Trapeze seeks a strong technical manager with experience leading and developing teams of programmers, making important technical choices, and defining internal processes and procedures.

Toronto-based Trapeze (www.trapeze.com) is a leading digital agency that works with a select group of exciting world-renowned clients, including Bonefish Grill, CBS Television, CBC, Cineplex, Disney, Jaguar, LandRover, Natrel, Sobeys and many others.

Responsibilities

You will lead Trapeze’s talented team of web and application developers working on creating customized projects for our clients.

Your core duties will include:

  • Defining a standardized approach to define technical solutions and technical architectures for our client projects.
  • Collaborating with client facing teams and internal developers to determine the best technical solutions to challenges.
  • Defining the internal processes and methodologies of the development team.
  • Managing the development of re-usable code libraries and tools.
  • Acting as the lead technical person on the most demanding client projects
  • Making decisions on which technologies Trapeze invests in training and developing our staff in.
  • Developing the skill sets and capabilities of all of Trapeze developers, especially growing a team of highly capable lead developers under you.

Requirements

  • Computer Science degree
  • Demonstrated experience managing multiple teams of developers
  • Demonstrated experience in developing software development project management processes.
  • Project management training and / or other management training an important asset.
  • Strong understanding of/experience with web technologies (see following list)
  • Required areas of technical expertise:
    • CMS Platforms
    • LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Python
    • Some experience in Microsoft technologies -.NET / ASP would be a big asset
    • Front end  – HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Flash

Nice to Have

Experience with:

  • Java / J2EE / JSP
  • C++
  • Facebook and Open Social application development

Key Attributes

  • A desire to continuous learn and develop new skill sets
  • Detail-oriented and accountable for deadlines and quality of work
  • Committed to extensibility and reusability
  • Can distil business requirements into technical solutions while retaining a sense of the “big picture”
  • Comfortable working in a team environment
  • Actively seeks input from other team members
  • Can motivate and energize those around them
  • Willing to work occasional additional hours when necessary

Reporting

  • Position Reports directly to CEO
  • You will be part of the senior management team responsible for charting a future direction for the company and integrating the capabilities of Trapeze’s different areas of expertise
  • You will have team of currently 10 developers reporting to you
  • Position will work closely with other VP / Director staff in following areas
    • Director of Trapeze Labs – in making technical choices for the company, determining development methodology and identifying opportunities for re-usable tools
    • Director of HR – in hiring and developing staff
    • Director of Production – in project staffing and resourcing decisions

Package/Benefits

  • Competitive compensation plan
  • Comprehensive health benefits plan (medical, dental, life insurance and disability)
  • Excellent working conditions
  • Career advancement opportunities

To Apply

Email your current resume to [email protected] with the words “Director of Application Development” in the subject line. No calls, drop-ins or faxes, please.

Groundswell: Application to Gauge Social Networks Attitudes

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Thank you Beet.TV.

There is a lot of interest in tap into the wealth of behavioural data that is unlocked by social media applications. There has not been a lot of tools that really go beyond traditional demographic or web analytic measures.

Groundswell is Forrester Research’s new tool for understanding the social media ecosystem of: Creators; Critics; Collectors; Joiners; Spectators and Inactives. Groundswell provides some initial breakdowns using basic demographic data (Age; Country; Sex) to identify the composition of the social group according to their Social Technographics® and compared to the general population.

Interesting stuff. Unfortunately there is no data about Canada.

It’s tied to the release of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff‘s book of the same name, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. I’m really curious at how much data they collected, it’s probably better than most anecdotal evidence but the quote from book site is a little nebulous:

"hard consumer data and experience with dozens of companies"

Apparently it’s based on "65 corporate examples including 25 full case studies". But it’s interesting to begin to build a profile of the audience and the general archetypes. This basic level of research is designed to get you to purchase additional research from Forrester. And it’s a very good start. I wonder how many media startups are not able to provide similar basic demographic details about their audience. What happens when we move beyond CPMs and CPCs? At Nakama, the behaviour analysis tools were very immature, probably a contributing factor to our failure, but we understood to build a "mobile social community" we needed to understand who was using our site, from where and what they were doing on the site. In our case, it turned out that it was to upload pictures of their wangs (yep, not their Wangs). It would have been very interesting to have build our strategies and tactics on the understanding of the social media ecosystem provided by Groundswell.