It’s a funny thing in Israel.  No one knows how to stand in line or wait their turn, yet there is a sense of organized chaos that even the most seasoned immigrant sometimes doesn’t understand.  After 11 years of living here, you would think I am used to it, but I’m not.  So you can understand why it still tickles me that there is reserved seating at the movie theater.  And Israelis are really serious about their reserved seats.  Thanks to all sorts of fancy movie theaters like Cinema City and Yes Planet, you can order tickets in advanced and assure the best movie experience in your seat of choice. 

Since Israel is so small, if you can’t find a good seat at one movie theater, it is still quite convenient to choose another theater at a reasonable distance from your home (at least in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area).   And when all the movie theaters offer the same viewing experience, what becomes most important is that you have the perfect seat.  Imagine it’s a Friday morning and you’re trying to decide where to see that new release you have been waiting for.  At the end of the day, you aren’t concerned with the location of the theater, because 5 km in one direction or the next doesn’t make much of a difference (although with gas prices here, perhaps it should).  Your biggest concern when choosing how and where you are going to spend your Friday night is whether or not you will sit in a row that you have the best view- not too far away that you have to squint and not too close that you end up with a stiff neck after staring at the movie screen at an awkward angle for 2 hours.

Imagine if you had an application that not only helped you find where there are seats available for that movie you are dying to see, but it told you if there were good seats available.  Well folks our ninjas (Yon Bergman, Danni Friedland, Asaf Gartner and Chief Ninja Erez Dickman) did it again.  As it always happens, one day at lunch this issue which can make or break one’s weekend came up.  And then once again one of life’s biggest challenges served as an inspiration for genius and Makom Tov was born.  Makom Tov is Hebrew for “A Good Place”.  It turns out we weren’t the only ones feeling like this was a serious matter because quite quickly after Makom Tov  was launched we found it was receiving significant unique traffic.

Not only is the concept amazing, but so is the user experience.  Since the site was launched I order all movie tickets via Makom Tov. To really understand how amazing this application is, you have to try it for yourself.  While the site is in Hebrew, thanks to Google Translate you can enjoy this site in any language. 

On the homepage there is a comprehensive list of all the movies currently out in theaters.  My favorite part is that all the movies are listed not only by name, but with their poster.  I never remember the names of movies, especially in Hebrew so being able to see the poster helps me find what movie I am looking for much quicker. 

Once you click on the movie of your choice, you are directed to a comprehensive listing of all the times and locations the movie is playing on the day you chose.  Next to each movie is a button which alerts you whether there are good seats available (complete with a ranking) or not.  Click on this button to see the seats that are available in the theater and view Makom Tov’s suggestion for the best seats available.  The best part is once you have chosen your seat and click order tickets now, you are directed to the checkout page of the movie theater and can easily purchase your tickets.

We even have a version for iPhones J

While clearly this is the coolest thing since the beginning of time (well except for Group Gifts of course), since most of you don't live in Israel you might not find this as useful as me, but regardless of whether or not you try the application, I highly recommend that you check out the homepage to see the amazing footer by our very own Yon Bergman.  Do you recognize all the stars?

Gifting is and always has been a universal act. Although we're not obligated to give a gift, in many cases the gift comes in a form of a commitment or a duty we have to fulfill. Not only that, the hassle of picking the gift and paying for it :( can become a real burden.

We thought this situation must change. Gifts should be a fun, surprising and pleasant experience. With Group Gifts, friends can buy together a gift and split the cost. This way, friends can enjoy an easy and efficient process of buying a gift and people can get a bigger better gift.

The idea behind blinking lights was to share with the world the joy of getting group gifts from friends. Every moment people give gifts using our Group Gifting Platform around the globe, and we thought it will be fun to blink the lights with each purchase of a gift.

To make it really happen, we had to create a black box with a digital signaling system called Electro Board and connect that box to our servers. Sounds very simple so far? Well, we bought all parts and spent few hours connecting the cables, the network, electricity and the blinking lights hose to one another. Danni and Gartner, our electro board specialists, have created the black box and wired it up. Since the black box had to be installed on the deck in the open air, we had to make it waterproof and resistant to potential weather changes. So they wrapped the box with a black nylon and secured it with a tape.

Now that the black box was ready, safe and secure, we could decorate the balcony and the red bars surrounding it with the blinking lights hose. Check out Danni, Gartner, Marti and Erez who worked on this project:

(download)

Click here to download:

blinky-lights-ixEthIxGIsHBvdqcquax.zip (2.89 MB)

Take a moment to stroll on Rothchilds Ave in Tel-Aviv and look up for the blinking lights coming from the balcony of The Gifts Project. Come and say hello.

Enjoy,

TGP Team

The situation is familiar.  Each day at around 11:45 AM, in anticipation for lunch, a hungry employee begins his rounds in the office (‘his’- you know who you are).  The question is simple, but the decision can make or break your day.

If you read our blog, particularly the entry “Excerpts from an Office Manager’s Diary”, you know that we have a hard time deciding where to eat.  There is a clear policy that we eat together, but we definitely can’t decide on what kind of food.  We have vegetarians and want-to-be vegetarians, carnivores, health freaks and everything in between.  Moreover we are on Rothchild Blvd., one of the culinary hubs of Tel Aviv and just have too much to choose from (as we say in Hebrew ‘a Rich person’s problem, but really too many choices can be very overwhelming). 

This is a very real problem that affects many companies in our neighborhood and very likely any company which is located in a place with a lot of choice for dinning out.  In our company challenges that affect our everyday lives serve as an inspiration for genius.  It didn’t take much time for our ninjas to create an application which helped us solve our daily ‘where to eat dilemma’ in an efficient and democratic way.  As this problem was acute and was becoming an existential threat, they quickly set out to define an MVP (minimal viable product) which would prove to be an extremely useful concept.

The application is quite simple.  We created a comprehensive list of restaurants in the area and divided them into categories by types of cuisine.  The system then generates a daily lottery, which randomly chooses 5 options from the 5 different cuisine categories.  At exactly 11:00 AM each day, an email is sent to all employees.  Employees then have until 12:00 PM to vote on their top choice (or indicate that s/he is not going to be joining everyone for lunch).  When the vote closes, the system tallies the votes and then sends an email with the restaurant which received the most number of votes.

As time went on, additional features were added, including a system which gave additional weight to an employee’s vote whose restaurant of choice was not chosen the day before.  This caused corruption and it was soon discovered that people were voting for restaurants that they didn’t particularly want to eat at in order to improve their chances of winning the following day.  What kind of mechanisms would you have added in order to make sure that such corruption doesn’t occur?

 “Lunch Time” is the end result and while it is no longer in use, this venture enjoyed success and popularity among the employees of The Gifts Project for a distinguished period in the company’s history.

But this doesn't have to be the end of it. We developed this app using open source code and you are more than welcome to grab the code and revive it. We are very happy to hand you the code for any public use. Feel free to say hi@giftsproject.com.  

The Gifts Project R&D team and other contributors.

Last weekend The Gift's Project's R&D team stayed at the office, not to fix bugs, but to have an awesome hackathon.

Introducing Retroid.

Retroid is a retro alarm clock that hooks up to your Android phone and replaces the boring alarm clock sounds with real life bells and whistles. Oh and it has LEDs - 12 of them.

We were given a prototype board named IOIO from some cool guys at Google.

The board itself is based on the powerful PIC24F chip from Microchip. It's a 16 bit MCU that exposes around 40 I/O pins. The cool thing about this board is that it comes with the software to communicate with any Android-powered device!

Working with the IOIO is as simple as:

DigitalOutput led = ioio.openDigitalOutput(Constants.LED_PIN,true); 

PwmOutput engine = ioio.openPwmOutput(engine_pin, 100); 

boolean ledStatus= false;

led.write(ledStatus); ledStatus ^= true; engine.setDutyCycle(0.8f); 

We started working on Friday morning. The first thing we did was to disassemble the alarm clock and separate the inner components. We needed to hook up the ringer's motor directly to the IOIO in order to control the sound. Meanwhile, we set up an Android application which handled the basic communication between the device and the IOIO.

After the initial communication test with the IOIO, we started installing the 12 LEDs in the alarm clock's frame. While we were drilling, we also wrote the software that controlled the LEDs and made them blink. We ran into a stupid bug because initially we only checked if it blinks and we weren't sure which values power the LEDs on and which turned them off.

We had lots of tinfoil for an experiment in capacitive touch (which didn't make it to the final version), so we decided to take the opportunity to protect the dog from alien mind-control devices and wrapped berry's office.

Next we wrote the software that was notified when the phone rang or received a message and sent LED animations and sound back to the alarm clock.

After that, we started wrapping everything inside, soldering the wires and drilling space for the USB cable. We also added some Floyd decals to the face of the clock (which was harder than it looks).

The finished product looks very neat; there are no cables showing and the lights are perfectly aligned J.

In the end we settled on 5 functions for the clock:

1. Alarm clock - when the phone's alarm clock rings, the Retroid rings with it with a spinning LEDs animation and increasing ringer volume.

To snooze, just violently shake your phone.

2. Text message - the Retroid rings quietly and blinks for about 2 seconds.

3. Phone call - when receiving a phone call, it imitates the ringing of an old school phone.

4. Awesome mode - when you click the "Start LED" button in the Retroid app,

the LEDs show a magnificent animation the likes of which had never been seen.

5. Display hour - It displays the current hour when it's not in use by lighting the matching LED.

Links to Media:

Promotional Video #1 -  

Promotional Video #2 -  

A photo album of our work - https://picasaweb.google.com/LightHawky/Retroid?authkey=Gv1sRgCJiaqfj2pNSI1gE&feat=directlink#

The Gifts Project R&D Team- Asaf, Danni, Erez and Yon