Zero 2 Hide
Developer Updates
Developer Updates
Much to my frustration last week I decided to pull the plug on further time spent engaging Koo Bhangra on the design of the User Interface of the application.
Having know him for over 15 years this was not what I wanted to happen, but it would seem he has far too much on his plate and not enough focus to give to us.
Like all things, nothing can ever go 100% to plan, but this has lost us time.
The positive outcome is that I was able to engage Steve Cluett, who I was speaking with way back in Sept 2017 and was fortunate enough to grab his time before he was snapped up on his next freelance project. He has already proven himself to be fit for the task and I am in hindsight thankful that I made the decision to cut the cord with Koo before we got too far down the line.
See the next posts for further design updates.
i am pleased to inform you that the trademark is now registered.
The contract is now signed and Jason is starting officially today.
The estimated timetable is as follows:
COMPLETED
UPCOMING
Customer resources to be made available:
I have now engaged Bee in the task of working through what are amazingly about 70 screens within the app itself. She is looking at the words and the messaging throughout the app and will in addition to making the app feel very "consumable" be building up what she refers to as our "ownable words".
These are effectively the words that we will use across all our marketing material to refer to different elements of the process... eg the washing machine, our forghettibles and so on.
We want the app to have a personality that people can feel engaged with, in the same way that you do if you walk into an apple store... everything from the door mat to the perfume of the room reflects the personality of the business... and so it will with the app, the website and any marketing that we produce.
She is also signing a supply contract to ensure that Z2H legally own everything that comes from her pen!
The agenda for the meeting held on the 5th January 2018 at BRC Accountants in Andover was as follows:
Minutes of the meeting can be downloaded here (PDF)
This week I met with Robin Weber at Wessex Translations.
A really decent guy, local and living in Timsbury. He has been working for Wessex for 23 years and it has been running for 45 years. They have 18 people in the office, basically all multi-lingual, but really there to project manage and to do a sanity check on work that is produced.
They have a network of around 2000 translators around the world of which about 200 are active. They are working for many large companies, including but not limited to the MOD, Ordnance Survey, NHS as well as companies in many different industries, Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, Politics... you name it...
We did not get into the detail of what Z2H will deliver, but what I did achieve, was to establish that this would be a great company to work with. They are able to deliver ongoing translation services and would employ the right characters in the different languages so that we were able to maintain as much as is possible our tone of voice and personality.
One bonus that he did offer was for the team in his office to act as part of the beta testing on the product (probably in March)... which is great news as the team would be fully involved in the product and also we would ensure our first users were real people.
Robin runs the company with his business partner, Jonathan Nater.
Carl has been working on the user journey for the past couple of weeks and we have now shared with the designer (Koo), the tone of voice (Bee) and the developer (Jason) the first draft of the feature set of the app...
I am not sharing all of this with you... as there is a lot still to do, but to give you a taste of it, please take a look at the very short video (click on the picture below).
Note that the final design will not be blue! and this purely represents the user flow.
This is the first of several videos which show how simple it will be to generate your password.
I have asked Jason to provide me with a couple of references as well as examples of the work he has done.
Jason has been a bit of a god send to be honest. Having worked in mobile app dev for nearly 6 years I’ve always been reluctant to use cross platform as a mobile solution as its always a hand off of quality vs. going native, but Jason has consistently proven me wrong. The work he does is great, fast and always on time – I’d recommend over and over again.
Great developer.
(Pro tip, I’ve learnt that he is very very busy so his answers are short and to the point, at first I thought it was rude but actually you can just see he’s pretty efficient!)
Sam
He has been fantastic to work with. We just submitted our app to the Apple Store and its been accepted. Great communicator and has excellent product vision. Highly recommend.
Jason has written a book on App development. You can read about it here.
Apps he has worked on are on his web site, including:
I hope you agree that this is a good course of action....
Further to my recent post about languages, I am meeting a company next week to get an idea of the scope of their business for dealing with what could be quite a significant ongoing task, namely that of translating our collateral, marketing information, user guides, FAQs, etc.
We have used them recently for translating Welsh (Jonathan Humphrey has been on the receiving end of this), and whilst Welsh is seemingly a very complicated language, they delivered quickly and efficiently for that small task.
One nice point to add is that they are a local firm - Wessex Translations. You can read more about them here:
Further to my recent post ref Jason the developer, Harry has raised some concern and so in case others are also asking questions, please see the Q&A here below.
As ever, I am available to talk to anyone at any time. Thank you.
I read the stuff about Jason. I am a little anxious as to the positive reasons for going to Indonesia have seemingly gone - scale of numbers to get the job done.
Why does Jason think he can do in 1 month what others were going to take several months of manpower to do?
That said, you have met him and you are the boss so I will of course support you in whatever plan you go with as I can see there are some advantages doing this closer to home
- with him being closer to home we have been able to talk very clearly about the system and so I feel he has a very good understanding of the task in hand.
- I have never had a timescale from the Indonesian team - they have been waiting for us to give them the full brief. It has been my estimate based on what people have told me... like everything, none of these people work 100% on one project, and Jason has said that it will take two months working on a 20-25 hour week...
- using the platform that he works with, we save a lot of time, and he has now shown us a method by which we using the one piece of html for the grid everywhere... so this again saves a tremendous amount of time.
- main benefit already highlighted by the clarity of conversation between us all is that we are able to talk face to face with a hands on developer...
The final decision is not made, but either way we have a great supporter to assist us in ensuring we take advantage of experience.
Over the past weeks as we explore what we want to build, how we want to control the user experience and the user journey around the app, on the phone, the computer, the browser, the watch etc.... it has become more and more clear to me that we were missing one key ingredient.
In our normal day to day work we are so familiar with what we need to deliver and how to best go about it, we take for granted the little snippets of knowledge that enable us to save time, money and also to deliver a great solution for the client and the user.
When planning the app, and specifically when working with the development of the mobile app (iOS and Andoird), we are very familiar as users, but as developers less so. I have been considering this challenge and the interaction required between developer and designer and I have been exploring different avenues.
So I am very pleased to be able to inform you that I have discovered experience even closer to home than I thought possible.
Let me introduce Jason Kneen
Jason works as a freelance app developer, specifically building cross-platform Native Mobile Apps for iPhone, iOS, iPad, Web and Android... Working from what has to be the most advanced garden shed I have ever been into (keypad entry, CCTV everywhere... you name it), he is a father to FIVE kids and is based in Wiltshire. He speaks at mobile development events, he has written a book on App development, he develops for large and small and he is really excited about our project... RESULT!
He has worked with amongst others, the folllowing:
Jason has been down and met Carl and Lee and we have had some very productive discussion already about the best way of tacking different challenges in the build and design of the app.
So whilst I am prepared and everything is set up to develop the apps in Indonesia, Jason would be willing to support us on that journey, but equally is interested in him personally doing the development with us in the first quarter of next year. So I might not be going on that Asia trip during the first quarter of 2018 after all.
Carl is finalising the user journey as we speak and I hope to be able to then agreed budgets and timescales with Jason this side of Christmas. From our conversations I am very confident that we will be securing his time and we will be all the more in control as a result.
Thank you for your feedback on the branding last week.
We have progressed further and now think its time for your input.
You can see below duplicate versions of a brand guide that outlines the use of the logo, the icon, fonts etc... each of them is with a different colour way.
You can download each one to get a full idea of the application of the colour...
I thought you might like to have some involvement with the lead colours. Ultimately, I am planning not to be too tied to a specific set of colours, but when it comes to icons, logos etc, you do have to choose something...
So here goes...
I have enabled it so that you can leave comments within this post... when you have reviewed each of the colours, just click here and scroll to the bottom to add your comments!
Developer Dave has been playing around a little and this weekend is going to be adjusting the encryption so that it works with the code that the app generates.
You can have a play as a bit of fun with an encryption page on this test site.
Just enter in a value and then click encrypt....
The value you receive can then be entered into the decrypt box... and "tada" you have the original text back again! That is the principal behind encryption! Consider yourselves now educated!
In line with our trademark strategy, I have been considering our strategy for developing marketing across different languages...
Not really as tricky as it might seem since I believe we want to tackle as many people in as few variations of our marketing as possible.
So, the order I believe should be:
Thereafter we can look to move to doing the Cyrillic languages... but this is more technically complicated.
To view more information on the numbers of people speaking these languages, I have gone to Babbel... you can read about it all here:
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/the-10-most-spoken-languages-in-the-world
Further to a number of comments about the Trademark risk and the Italian foody firm, I wanted to give you some further feedback and copy on the feedback that I have received from Blake Morgan.
On a flippant note, it would be lovely to own an Italian restaurant on the Amalfi coast! If it is not there now, I can see us opening one soon! Of course this is when we are hugely successful!
On a more serious note, Ben says:
There is clearly a risk because it’s a highly similar mark registered for services (i.e. software development) that would be deemed to be complementary to the goods that you'd be looking to provide. On the face of it therefore there is certainly a risk, at least in the countries it is registered i.e. Italy, the US and China. However, I think it's important to look at the commercial realities here, yes there is a legal risk but, realistically, it seems relatively unlikely that a restaurant chain is going to see that there is any real damage, or harm, being caused by your proposed system.
The tactic that we have adopted is therefore, in my view, the right one. That is to file the applications (starting with the UK for now) and see if anything comes back. If the restaurant did raise an issue then it would really be crying out for a form of co-existence arrangement between the two businesses i.e. you stick to your area of business and we'll stick to ours.
In summary: we need to be aware that it is a risk, and it can be hard to predict how other brand holders will react, even where the commerciality points to there being no genuine problem, but, in reality I think we can be relatively relaxed in that if an issue does arise I would hope that we could simply negotiate our way to a co-existence arrangement.
Best regards,
Ben Evans
Senior Associate & Chartered Trade Mark Attorney
So in summary, I think we are doing the right thing.
We have been analysing lots of different apps and user interface best practice to work out the most friendly front end...
Carl likes things to be small and neat!
As a thought, we are looking to enable people to be able to securely generate PIN codes as well as passwords... so now, each card you own need not have the same 4 digits associated to it! A revolution is a coming.
I am pleased to confirm that the application for FORGHETTI will be published in the Trade Marks Journal number 2017/046 today.
The two month opposition period will commence on this date. A potential opponent can apply to extend this two month period by one further month but if after the initial two months no opposition has been received, or a notice of extension, the mark will be registered.
Once registered the IPO will issue a Certificate of Registration.
After a lot of conversation, I am really happy with the result of our branding work.
How I would like you to think of this is as a line that is by nature, very simple, but very adaptable...
We plan to use the line as an animated object that can be whatever we want it to be... a keyhole, a brain, a padlock, a person, a heartbeat, a smile... all leading to forghetti.
The brand of "forghetti." with the full stop at the end then becomes something that creatively we can give life... movement... energy.... and to tell a story or indeed many stories...
How safe are you? How happy are you? How frustrated do you get?... and so on.
We can animate this in video, on advertising banners online, within the app, on our website... you name it... we have creative freedom... afterall, that is what forghetti. enables, freedom for you to get on with the more important things in your life.
Click on the image above to see an initial animated example.
This is an example of the basis of the icon that will site on the app store etc.
Colour will be introduced but we plan to be colour agnostic so that we have a pallet of colours, but not one specific, constrained colour that we have to live with forever.
Seeing the logo in colour does look fabulous!
I hope you like it all.
Working with Bee over the past few weeks has been very refreshing and no more so that in the tone of voice work that she has been putting together with us.
It’s not just about what we say. It’s how we say it that makes a difference.
Would you trust someone to keep your passwords safe if they sounded all pumped-up and perky? How about quirky? Or somewhat smug and smirky?
Quite.
Here’s how we get it right...
Confirmation with Ben Evans that we should just carry on with the Trademark.
The application has been filed in the UK initially and then within a 6 month window we can then apply for other regions around the world... English speaking and EU to start with. This enables us to delay spending lots of money until we need to, but also to ensure we get the key initial market tied up.
The categories that we are filing under are:
Within these classes there are 29 services which we are going to cover from software, hardware development to cloud computing and software as a service.
Our UK trade mark application number is UK00003267828.
We expect to hear back from the examiner within 20 days. If the application is accepted then it will be published, this is the period during which third parties can oppose the application if they have conflicting prior rights. The application is initially published for 2 months. If no oppositions are received then the application will proceed to registration.
All in, and assuming no oppositions/objections, we are looking at 3-4 months through to registration.
There are a lot of services listed in order to cover for all eventualities. It is not easy to add/edit after the Trademark has been granted.
Hardware is included on this as one of the thoughts that we have is to send subscribers an encryption key - to be used alongside the app to ensure 2-factor authentication is really secure...
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