Marakana Blog

We are proud to announce that Ralph Marx has joined Marakana - welcome aboard! Ralph will help us flush out our marketing strategy and set us up for accelerated growth.

Here's a bit about Ralph:

Ralph Marx is a seasoned executive with two decades of experience in marketing, business development, and engineering in the software industry. Since 1983, Marx has focused on emerging technology solutions and has been a key executive in three successful software ventures. In his role as the founder and CEO of his 4th company, Soiree Corp., Marx is delivering a new service offering to the events industry.

Prior to Soiree, Marx founded Acteva, Inc., which was a leading player in the modernization of the events and activity services industry. As CEO, Marx drove the Acteva idea from conception through planning and funding and on to a successful launch of the Acteva service. Marx garnered clients like Microsoft and Stanford University and his efforts at Acteva were covered in major publications including Forbes and Fortune and as a Case Study taught in Harvard's Graduate MBA program.

Earlier, Marx founded Advocate Systems, Inc. Advocate clientele included some of America?s largest law firms and corporate legal departments such as Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosatti and Seagate Technology. Advocate's hallmark was intelligent pioneering of new technology. As its US technology and marketing partner, Advocate developed one of three products for a $20 million joint venture with a British Software Company backed by Guinness PLC, British Petroleum, OCE, and Thompson CSF creating a nationwide distribution channel in just over 9 months.

This Monday, during his keynote presentation at the WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference), Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. CEO, announced that developers will be able to develop applications for the IPhone after all. This was really important since a lot of people, including some of us at Marakana, were turned off by the idea that IPhone OS will be closed for 3rd party applications.

However, there will be no "real" apps for now, developers will only be able to create web-based internet applications. This news has been received with the mix feelings by the developers. On one hand you have seasoned Mac developers who feel "cheated", and on the other hand you have web developers who are really looking forward to this opportunity.
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Here's an example of how easy it is to parse RSS feeds using SimpleXML. This particular code reads the RSS of the upcoming Marakana public courses. You can use it on your website.

Go ahead, try it!

Marko

We are pleased to announce a new course on Building Google Maps Applications. This course is based on Ajax and Ruby on Rails for the back-end.

First, students will make a map, add some custom pins, and geocode a set of data using freely available services. After that the course gets into more map development topics, like building a usable interface, dealing with extremely large groups of points, and finding sources of raw information.

Finally the course dives into advanced topics: building custom map overlays such as your own info window and tooltip, creating your own map tiles and projections, using the spherical equations necessary to calculate surface areas on the earth, and building your own geocoder from scratch.

The course is thought by Andre Lewis, the author of "Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax: From Novice to Professional".

The Google Maps training course is going to be a lot of fun. It's in the spirit of providing cutting-edge Web 2.0 training with expert instructors.