Our hack was an attempt to see how the camaraderie of your social sphere could influence everyday consumption habits. Using the Tendril API, we allowed users to track their real-time electrical energy consumption data in comparison to that of their Facebook friends. In addition to being able to visualize trends in energy usage between you and your peers, users were able to commit to energy saving goals. These goals could then be shared on your Facebook wall in an effort to educate the public.

Above, you can see a screenshot of the energy consumption
comparison between you and your Facebook friends.

I am proud to say that our app took home prizes for Best User Experience and runner-up in the Tendril Energy Internet and Smart Home App Contest. It was also demoed by Tendril at DistribuTECH, the utility industry’s leading Smart Grid conference in San Antonio, Texas. It’s refreshing to see a company like Tendril taking advantage of opportunities like this Hackathon and is a testament to the fact that social media can really change the world.

The Green Carrot Team celebrating their win with Eric Shiflet of Tendril.

In addition to learning about how information technology could influence consumption habits, we also learned how an extremely limited amount of time could influence the workflow of our team. Rather than following our conventional methods for producing a web project, we chose to use a more organic approach. In the interest of saving time, our team utilized Google Drawings to create an interactive wireframe that allowed all of us to collaborate in real-time. Opportunities like this hackathon give creatives the ability to test out new methods of working together and if any part of this experience seems interesting to you I would highly recommend attending one in your local area.

This article is copyright © 2012 

San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives

The Carrot Way

Always Be Working Yourself Out Of A Job

This article is copyright © 2012 

We work in a world heavy with management, red tape, legal mumbo-jumbo, and an overall disdain for fun things. This landscape is perhaps the most rugged in the lands of technology companies. Carrot has abandoned this world. They’ve taken to space as a crew of self-proclaimed pirate astronauts.

This is what I found most appealing about the prospect of working at Carrot. I dealt with my fair share of management-heavy organizations. I was tired of the mundane work days and felt it was time to move on to something better. Working at a company that genuinely trusts their employees and actively encourages them to have fun was something I wanted in on.

After visiting the Carrot Headquarters for my interview, it became obvious that they disregard traditional business dogma where employees end up being treated like untrustworthy hooligans. Carrot is full of people who are genuinely passionate about what they do. In such an environment, you don’t need managers, supervisors, team leads, or any other non-workers to whip employees into action. Instead, they’re all actually excited to do work… and to do a damn good job. A few natural side-effects become apparent in such an unconventional workplace:

1. Work can actually be fun. When co-workers trust one another to do their jobs, they’re able to have beer, video games, and other non-worky paraphernalia in the office. Everyone needs a break at some point. It’s best to be able to actually enjoy it.
2. While working with passionate individuals, employees will inherently learn from one another. Nobody makes a better teacher than someone interested in the subject they’re teaching.
3. NO TPS REPORTS.

I was absolutely thrilled when I got the job offer from Carrot. I obviously took the job and look forward to working with my new family away from home. I hope that together we’re able to continue demonstrating that happy, motivated employees do the best work. Everyone deserves to be happy with their work.

This article is copyright © 2012 

While my favorite thing about Carrot is the people and being small enough to know everyone’s favorite food (note to self: pick up peanut butter filled pretzels for Dan), it’s still exciting that we’re large enough to offer great benefits that rival any New York agency. We’re still working on that free cafeteria, but we do have medical, dental and vision insurance plans. We prefer that our team members spend their time worrying about how awesome the work they’re creating is, rather than how they’re going to pay to get their tonsils out.

In truth, there’s only one thing missing from Carrot — you. We’re growing steadily and, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re right smack-dab in the middle of taking over the world. We can’t sail this pirate ship without a full crew, so check out the positions below that we’re looking to fill. Think you’re a good fit? Drop us a line/email/pigeon/parrot/baked good.

Developers
Carrot does things a little different than the average agency. We’re looking for devs who will have an opinion and cringe at the phrase “code monkey”. Everyone is a creator at Carrot, and we mean that.
Check out the full description here (PDF).

Strategists
Did you play Risk as a kid? Are you the bomb at Connect Four? If so, we want to talk to you! Carrot is looking for a strategist who geeks out on data, has experience managing marketing/sales funnels, and relishes the idea of being measured on ROI.
Click here for the full description (PDF).

Assistant Account Executive
Do you have to-do lists for your to-do lists? Have others referred to you as their lifesaver, the one that helps keep everything together and running? Carrot needs support from a note-taking, calendar-scheduling person like you. Think you can help a brother/sister out?
Check out the full description here (PDF).

If Carrot sounds like a place you’d fit in, we want to hear from you.
Go ahead, fill out an application!

I may be one of the younger Carrots on the team, but I’ve had a lot of jobs at a lot of different companies. In my experience, Carrot Creative is the single most amazing company I have ever had the honor of being a part of. It’s not just that I feel like a part of a team when I come into the office, but I feel like I’m part of a family when I leave the office. We look forward to hearing from candidates to help our family grow!

This article is copyright © 2012 

Introducing: Platlas from Carrot Creative on Vimeo.

Here’s a quick look at the people and thinking behind Platlas, the first ever social media platform atlas. Meet the engineers, managers and research analysts that made Platlas for Facebook come to life. And see for yourself exactly what all the fuss about, and how you can use Platlas to better understand the countless interactions and connections that are possible on Facebook.

This article is copyright © 2012 

We’re here in force at F8 and jazzed about the platform changes in store at Facebook, some of which we’ve been honored to build with via our work on the The Daily Facebook app.

We will be following up to this post soon, with our additional thoughts on what this means for users, brands and what will surely be a leap in the evolution of how we share, experience and archive our daily lives.

Announced today:

Timeline: The story of your life in 3 pieces… All stories, all apps, a new way to express who you are.

Essentially, Timeline organizes your life – as you’ve shared it on Facebook over the years- for exploration. More importantly, it will allow users to better chronicle their lives moving forward (as well a brand new level of experiences), with ease. Apps will facilitate this new level of content on the Timeline, at the user’s request. Facebook will present history to the user in a “best of ” format, but will allow users to hide content as they choose, or highlight items that Facebook may have missed. Timeline will also launch with a full-fledged mobile-side experience. Privacy settings will be available for Timeline, and individual pieces of content on it.

At first glance, it’s beautiful.

A New Class of Apps: Define an action and publish it.

We’ve experienced Communication and Gaming apps to date. Now, Facebook is revolutionizing experiences for Media (Music, Movies, TV, News, Books) and Lifestyle (Exercise, Food, Travel, Fashion). Users will be able to connect to anything in any way they want, which will allow them to create an enormous amount of new connections and shared discover shared experiences. Users will experience a new permissions screen, detailing exactly what will be published to their Timeline.

Driving this, is the New Open Graph.

• “A Frictionless Experience”: Users need not be interrupted by Share prompts because activity will be fed to their Timelines. Lightweight material will be fed to their Stream, with popular or pattern-content highlighted in the News Feed to help other friends discover it.
• “Real-time Serendipity“: This is where the Ticker comes into play most. As users interact with media and content in real-time, their actions are shared live in the Ticker. The power of this is demonstrated effectively by our own client, The Daily: as users read news (through Facebook-connected or native services), their friends will have the ability to read those specific articles as well. Effectively, this offers “Serendipitous” experiences facilitated by Facebook and a user’s favorite apps.
• “Finding Patterns“: As items hit the newsfeed, Facebook will recognize patterns and showcase overlapping behaviors of friends, for effective recommendation and discovery. Users also receive Notification when their friends discover through them and interact with media through their ticker feed.

Fascilitated by the Canvas apps, Facebook can now bridge the connection between their users and the experiences of their users across software and websites. Ticker items that indicate a friend is listening to a song or watching a film will not only link to the content, but launch the experiences immediately, inline, for the user’s friends.

The “Like” stories are expanding to other verbs: “Chris Petescia watched to Star Wars” for instance. The stories generated by a user’s App interactions hit the Newsfeed, Ticker and Timeline. Wherever users interact with applications and media (for which they have opted into for publishing), it will feed back to their Timeline.

Timing: Facebook will provide access to Developers (like us!), immediately. For everyone else, it will be rolling out over the next few months and likely, the Timeline itself will be relatively sparse for users initially.

Synopsis: The new features rolling out to Facebook are all about having access to and sharing the history of your life: what users have shared in the past, and the wealth of new experiences that Apps will help facilitate for you in the future.  On the flip-side, it’s also about discovery and shared experiences as users see and interact with the ongoing history of their friends’ own experiences.  Everything Facebook users already share, and everything they will now be able to share, will be logged to the user’s personal preferences on their Timelines. Everything is personalized, and real-time feedback and interaction on content will determine it’s value.

Note: some of this post contains paraphrasing and partial quotes from various Keynote presenters. Thanks to Adam for helping out with detailed notes!

This article is copyright © 2012 

Platlas.com: A love letter to our favorite social networks.

Earlier this summer, we took on the somewhat daunting task of exhaustively mapping out the ecosystem of Facebook. Even though Carrot is a Preferred Development Consultant and we consider ourselves severely versed in the Platform, we still learned A LOT by delving into Facebook so expansively. However, our ultimate goal was to narrow down a story within this vast array of features, into something compelling and widely relevant to us: our clients and our industry. Platform education is an integral part of our relationships with our brand clients, so we decided to focus on what is most relevant to them: content creation and interactions.

We began with a flat infographic (PDF) to share with our current and prospective clients, mapping the features available to both a Facebook User and to a Facebook Page. For each feature, there are a number of response actions available to Facebook users; we are calling these “edges.” Essentially, Facebook features – anything from Profile fields to Status/Wall updates – allow users to create and share content. From that content, users have actions such as “Like” and “Comment,” a variety of tagging options, and so on. These edge actions are what make Facebook truly a powerful experience for users and a valuable tool for brands. They are what populate newsfeeds and enable the spread of content from Page to Profile, Application to inbox. Taking a step back to get a bird’s-eye perspective of the spread and availability of these edges, across all features, has helped us garner a better understanding of content-share relationships. We also realized that experiencing a flat version of this map is limiting. So, a new Carrot Labs project was launched, to bring this infographic to life as an interactive experience.

Just as the visual experience we have built has been an exciting experiment, so has been the development on the backend. Jeff, who handled the bulk of development, will be detailing this in the near future… but it’s worth noting that this experience does not use any flash. It is a mix of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), Javascript, and whole-lotta math.

As with any ecosystem, the Facebook platform is constantly evolving and growing. This is exciting for us as we’ve built this “Social Platform Atlas,” because it means we will be continually releasing new versions (while archiving previous ones for reference). The beta launched Platlas (accurate to Sept 1, 2011) is already slightly out of date with Facebook rolling out changes in the last 2 weeks as they lead up to F8. Not to fear – we are already tracking these updates on the Platlas News page, and will implement new releases of the infographic as often as we can. Additionally, we are excited to have a Pages interactive view in the works (for now, you can view the flat version). If all goes well and we see the social community enjoying our Facebook-centric Platlas, we will be taking a look at other social platforms to help tell their stories of content and sharing as well.

You can follow Platlas updates on Twitter and of course, on Facebook. Be sure to visit Platas News to keep on top of the latest in Facebook updates and our continued development of the project!

This article is copyright © 2012 

I never would have thought that I would owe getting my dream job to a guinea pig. Just a few months ago, I was a senior at Hamilton College, trying to balance a full course load with my senior thesis (evaluating interfaces using electroencephalography), an on-campus job, and the search for a real job. I stumbled across Carrot Creative while browsing Forrst, a community for designers and developers, where Kyle made a humorous post saying that Carrot was looking for developers.

A couple weeks later, I found myself totally in love with the company and ended up sending them a video of a guinea pig as my application. I knew that Carrot was an amazing company and got tons of resumes every day, and I had to really stand out and put some serious love into my application to even have the slightest chance. I went through the job requirements, and thought I was in a good position for most of them… except for “must be able to teach our french bulldog Jonas how to skateboard.” As hard as a tried, I couldn’t get my hands on a spare french bulldog, so I went with the closest thing I had – my pet guinea pig, Fluffernutter. I created a video of Fluff learning how to skateboard, and rolled this all into my customized and interactive job application. I finally sent it off, fingers crossed and hoping for the best.

I was beyond excited a couple months later when I was offered an interview, then a summer internship at Carrot, and a couple weeks later a full time job. And since my first day here I have only fallen more in love with the company and culture. Everyone is young, smart, driven, and fun, and we even have a kegerator in the office… c’mon, what more could you ask for?

It’s funny how life works out sometimes. I went to school for music, graduated with a neuroscience degree, applied to Carrot as a designer, and here I sit working full time as a developer. I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to explore so many exciting things in my life, and I am looking forward to a future jam packed with awesomeness at Carrot.

This article is copyright © 2012 

We’ve  just launched our latest Carrot Labs creation: carrot.is.

What started out as a social aggregation project turned into a multi-plaform directory of your favorite agency geeks. If you’ve run into any of us in real life, you’ll know that our brightly-colored biz cards come printed with a custom QR code. These codes activate each staff member’s carrot.is mobile site: an extended business card where you can view a quick bio, utilize touch-activated contact info, and continue onto social profiles.

carrot.is/chris on your phone

We’re consistently a pleasure to engage with across all media. The non-mobile, social stream version of carrot.is lets you check out a Carrot’s stream on Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Last.fm, Flickr, and more—we are on a lot of networks—without leaving the carrot.is profile. Aspiring to work here? Get a sense for your future peers like never before, and decide which platform you’d like to engage with them on.

carrot.is/chris on the web

Across both the mobile and web versions, you can easily switch between and browse other Carrots’ profiles to really get to know us all. As entertaining as my social spew is, I’ve lamented that people may want to enjoy the rest of the company as well. Carrot is known for a substantial staff presence on the social web, but we wanted to make it easier for you, the stalker, to enjoy us with less clicks.

This is just the first of a few projects that Carrot Labs has in the works… check it out!

This article is copyright © 2012 

Crawl Before You Can Parkour
Committing time to these simplified prototypes may appear like a waste of time, especially as ideas are constantly evolving and even being scrapped completely. Yet it’s often not the execution but the experiment that truly proves its worth. By spending time reducing problems to their most basic forms, you can achieve great insights into what is at the core of those ideas. This not only holds true to creative marketing campaigns, but to the tools used during the process. Both the tools used when prototyping as well as prototyped ideas themselves are often more simplified versions of the final product. By experimenting with both of these things at a minimalist level, you better equip yourself with the knowledge or insights needed for success at the proceeding levels. This is part of many time-tested methods across many disciplines—not only software development, but also things like philosophy and athletics.

The Tools We Use
From Moleskines to web apps: our prototyping takes on many forms, but the concept of modeling holds true throughout. Since my role pertains more to the execution of software, my prototypes translate much clearer through code. By using tools I consider swift, un-complex, and fun to use, the prototyping process is often the first, second, and third step in my creative process.

Some examples, you say? Well, my favorite stack for whipping up these models shouldn’t come to a surprise to many, but I love using MongoDB + Sinatra to work through these problems. I find Ruby is clear and declarative, as is the elegant Sinatra framework that is built atop Ruby. The reason I use MongoDB is that I find it maps to “concepts” much better than traditional Data Stores that map more closely to database “tables”. For example, I can abstract the idea of a Book object that has many Chapters into embedded Mongo objects, rather than through Book and Chapter database tables fused with a MySQL JOIN.

A Bonus
Facebook is a very fun platform to develop on because it gives the developer access to so much great context about its users like Profile Info and Friend associations—so prototyping in the Facebook environment is never rare. Here’s a code example that will give a quick way to interact with FB’s iFrame tab interface (which is a bit nontraditional due to their use of the POST method to load in pages).

If you’re a developer or designer on @forrst – I’d love to hear your thoughts on my post

This article is copyright © 2012