Engineers Blog

Engineers @ NudgeNudge – Augmented Reality and 3D

Ivan Trajkovic — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:43:27 +0000

This is a master class in 3D application development for the new glasses-free 3D mobiles on the market. The class is for anims and Android devs, and will step through the creation of an application specifically for 3D phones. Engineers have a great honor to be the headliners of the event covering the topic of 3D game development.

The very first lecture I gave just a few days ago, “Augmented Reality and 3D”, was very well accepted by the audience and the organizers. I’ve raised some quite challenging propositions that we will be working on over the next weeks and months, such as using worldwide common markers instead of the predefined static ones (car tires, traffic signs, logos, etc…).

The lecture, which is the result of couple of weeks research and development by the Engineers astrophysics-mathematician-developer Damir Burazerovic and myself, is summed up in the slides which I’ve used at the event. As there are quite a few things which I have talked about and are not here, feel free to pop up any questions and start any discussion in this thread.

Engineers @ NudgeNudge – July master lecture slides

View more presentations from swengineers

Building an online betting solution – Bet variations

Ivan Trajkovic — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 06:23:28 +0000

This is just a short introduction to what I believe are the most interesting bet variations on the market, and is written for the reason of introduction to the further posts for the “Building an online betting solution” series of posts I will write over the next couple of weeks. If enough interest is produced by this post, I’d be happy to write more about what interests you the most.

There are various ways a bet can be placed and interpreted. I will name three most interesting examples:

Sport bets

Bets before a competition/game has begun
Live betting

Auction bids

Prebids – bids before the auction has began
Live bids

Visual bets

Betting against a credible estimate

Sport bets

In sport bets or any other bets of this type, betters are betting against the final outcome. As the final result is final, the bet is final as well. A bet represents a legally binding contract between the better and the betting company. Further more, betting company must have special licence to operate such business.

Sport bets which are placed before a game begins are the most common ones. Users are betting on a final outcome of a game in terms of any of it’s parameters (final score, number of final attributes (i.e. sets in tennis, or corners in soccer… the list is infinite).

Live betting is referred to an action where users are betting during a game on various outputs/results which occur during the game and mostly within a short time span (i.e. who will score the next goal, or who will foul next… the list is, again, infinite…).

Auction bids

Auction bids are an interesting category and is probably rarely spoken about in this context. The main difference from bets is that bids do not present a final contract between a bidder and an auction host, as bid can be overbid at any time. Only the highest (winning) bid is the legally binding one. In this case, bidder is bidding against a final score, where the score represents the highest bid on which the bidder has a direct influence over. A company hosting an auction does not require special licences to operate such business.

Two of the scenarios are the most interesting ones:

Auction hasn’t yet started and bids are being placed which represent a sum one would pay for something that he/she does not know the final cost for yet. These bids are usually hidden until the auction starts. Once the auction begins, the highest prebid is the opening price instead of the opening price initially set by the auctioneer.

Auction has started, and bidders are always aware of what is the current highest (winning) bid and they bet in correlation to that one.

Visual bets

Visual bets are not amongst the most common ones, but are quite an interesting example. A prime example is company called Best of the Best, a luxury goods competition company where every one someone is guaranteed to win a Supercar.

This is how the “game” is being played:

A sporting picture that has had the ball permanently removed from it is presented to the one betting
Using best judgment, the individual is to click on the picture where they think the center of that ball should be
The bid is actually x:y coordinate of where the individual has clicked
When the competition is closed on a set date and time, the same picture is presented to a credible panel of Judges who repeat the same process
The winner is simple the person who is closes to the judges position.

This type of betting does falls under gambling as well as the sport bets, and requires a special licence for the company to operate.

CSS3 – Creating a multi-layered background

Ivan Trajkovic — Mon, 30 May 2011 09:17:06 +0000

Creating a multi-layered background with CSS3 is quite simple – all you need to do is to specify multiple background images for the wrapper class:

However, we do need a fall back mechanism for browsers which do not support CSS3 and will never do (&*#*$& !!!). Further more, we’ll implement 3 backgrounds on top of each other in order to produce a result which:

Has a background pattern
Is enriched with another pattern which appears at the top of the page and disappears downwards
Has another visual effect which for examples throw a sunlight effect behind the content

We start simple by adding background to the .body, which sets our base pattern for the page:

Now that this is set, we go ahead and prepare our page HTML structure:

The .container element is an independent element laying on the page and has no child elements. We set it’s position to fixed and give it the maximum size:

The background of this element has the texture we want to apply over the background .body pattern. At this point we are set with two background images, one over another. Note that the position of the element is fixed.

The next step is adding the effect over the body and texture. That would be our “light” element:

Again, this is an independent element with fixed position and z-index is just one above the container which allows us to create a visual light effect over the container. It’s up to you where you want to position the .light element in the page and you can control it’s position by either CSS or jQuery if you need it specially positioned at certain place while keeping it’s position dynamic in regards to the other elements.

The last but lot least is the .content element where you would place you page content:

This is the element which will finally has its own child elements (basically, your entire page). Main characteristics of this element are:

z-index is higher than the .light element’s z-index (use small numbers so that you don’t run into problems with modal pop-ups)
note that the position is absolute
you can even set it’s own background if you need to

That would be it. Feel free to ask any questions.

Developer Tip of the Day – ASP.NET MVC 3 and the @helper syntax within Razor (Html Helper extensions)

Ivan Trajkovic — Wed, 25 May 2011 14:40:17 +0000

Quick intro: “Razor”, a new view-engine for ASP.NET MVC 3 speeds up the development in terms of writing view templates, and what’s more important, puts you in a place that you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks withing your HTML. The best overview out there is, of course, at Scott Gu’s blog, so go ahead and read it if you need more insight into that.

A hidden “Razor” gem that I want to mention today is @helper syntax, which enables you to create reusable helper methods and use them on the go – again, Scott Gu’s post about it, and the solution of how to get an access to the ASP.NET MVC Html helper methods within which is not supported by default.

Building an online betting solution – Introduction

Ivan Trajkovic — Wed, 25 May 2011 12:10:14 +0000

Couple of years ago I spent 2 years working for BWIN.COM, Europe’s largest eGaming provider, as a part of the Sportsbook development team. It was until this year when I met face to face again with a similar project in terms of the back-end system – online live auctioning solution for property rentals - Zumper.com, our new client. Zumper, founded by a highly capable team of Harvard Business School students, is an online real estate market in which students and young professionals can bid on and secure properties in a more efficient and transparent manner. Further more, implementing money flow and virtual currency system (amongst all other systems) into Bloomtrigger.com, brought many things together in terms of algorithm which handles inner and outer transactions.

The series of posts I am about to write are not going to reveal any business secrets or pieces of code used in all these projects, but rather give you an insight of complexity of such systems together with some hidden tricks and tips.

Here’s the list of topics I am going to cover (not necessarily in this order, and the list may change as I go along):

Betting scenarios
Currencies and virtual currencies
Back-end logic vs. database logic
Placing bids/bets
Live visual result tracking
Logging and history
Handling user errors
Handling system errors
Security
Money flow

I will blog about our first topic, “Types of bets/bids”, in the next couple of days. Watch this space…

Engineers at Internet Week Europe 2011

Ivan Trajkovic — Wed, 25 May 2011 10:51:52 +0000

Internet Week Europe 2011 – the follow-up to last year’s highly successful inaugural event – will take place across London from 7-11 November, organisers announced today.

Engineers were Internet Week Europe Official Event Partner last year with two events:

Both events were a success with over 40 participants. We are already planning to repeat the last years success in 2011 and we are open to any suggestions for our events this year. If you’d like to hear us talk on a certain topic, please let us know.

jQuery & IE – Naming functions and elements

Ivan Trajkovic — Tue, 24 May 2011 16:17:29 +0000

After so many lines of code in the past decade, we ran onto an issue which should never happen if you follow naming standards… still, a moment of tardiness at 3am after 18 hours long work day you ran onto these as well, and I wanted to share.

Simple, ridiculous, but possible, and guess what – IE doesn’t like it:

- here’s my element:

- here’s my action link:
Click here

- here’s my function:
function DoSomething() {//whatever}

Clicking the link won’t work in IE and Safari. Firefox and Chrome are just fine with it.

Note to myself: Follow naming conventions at all times, functions and elements should never have the same name!

Reaching goals within 1st quarter of 2011

Ivan Trajkovic — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:47:58 +0000

It’s been a while since I last blogged, and that means one thing – I’ve been busy; The busy time came after Internet Week Europe as a result of the events I’ve hosted in front of the Engineers. This also resulted in more frequent visits to London, where the last one was just a week ago.

We have four new clients from London, three of those are startups all in different industries while a third one is a well established business with some sound names behind it. I won’t be telling much about who they are and what they do before we go live with any of these apps. We are looking to wrap the first stage for the startup projects by the end of April, while the fourth one is going live tomorrow as a basic static version while the full blown stage one is to be ready within a month. Involved technologies are mostly Microsoft ones, in particular ASP.NET MVC 3.

We are also working with one state University in the USA. It’s an interesting project in terms of technology which has Ruby in the back end as a over-mapper for MySql database, while the front-end is in SproutCore.

Watch this space once a week, as I will increase the frequency of blogging. I’ll be talking about interesting solutions in terms of technology and challenges of each.

Engineers at Internet Week Europe

Ivan Trajkovic — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 09:27:46 +0000

Internet Week Europe is a five-day festival set up “to celebrate the very best of Europe’s digital industry”, with events hosted by Yahoo!, Google, Poke, Tech Hub, Moo, Aol, Tweetdeck, The Guardian, BBC, Creative Review, Music 4.5, Hyper Island, many more and yours truly – Engineers!

“Internet Week Europe will be a celebration of the energy, diversity, and creativity representative of Europe and the Internet,” commented David-Michel Davies, co-chairman of Internet Week Europe and New York. “The weeklong festival provides a unique opportunity for business opportunities, making new connections and for internet and digital media professionals all across Europe to meet and share. We are excited to see the schedule filling up so quickly with some great events, and more being added on a weekly basis.”

We, the Engineers, will be hosting two events:

November 8th at 2:00PM
Startup Development: How Service Oriented Architecture will save you time and money
Sign up here.
Hub Culture London Pavilion, 49 Carnaby Street, 1st Floor @ Kingly Court, London, UK W1F 9PY

November 9th at 11:00AM
Some things you can buy on-line, for everything else there’s ShoppingAnalyzer
Sign up here.
Location to be confirmed (we will update this post).

A full calendar of related events can be found on Internet Week Europe’s website.

Search Engine & Social Media Optimization

Ivan Trajkovic — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:41:11 +0000

By driving vast number of targeted visitors to your website you are improving your online reputation and exposure.
SEO can certainly work for this purpose – if performed the right way.We offer the most accurate on page and off page optimization methods making the best effect on your web presence. Also you can be sure that your brand will be well presented on the most popular social networks.

What we do:

Keyword research and competition analysis

We analyze the most searched and targeted keywords and phrases that relate directly to your business. With such information we are creating strategies which put your website in front of your niche internet audience.

On page optimization

By carefully measuring and implementing appropriate keyword density within your site, optimizing the code of your site, linking your internal pages and reconstructing all other vital areas important for search engines we perform cutting edge optimization of your website structure.

Off page optimization

With our copywriters and link building specialists you can be sure that positive buzz is created about your site.
With our great content and quality links from high PR web 2.0 websites, implemented with the latest white-hat link building methods, the presence of your website within related web communities, directories and sites will produce higher rankings on search engines and greater traffic for your website.

Reporting and measuring

As we are tracking our own records, in the same way you are getting all relevant data – rankings, traffic of your website- about campaign and how effective it was.
For every campaign we send reports that contain all important analytics for your site.

Local Search Optimzation

We make sure your web presence is geo targeted. We take care your site is presented either, globally and locally.

Social media optimization

If you want to be recognized on the World Wide Web not only with your website, but on social networks as well or to promote your latest Facebook application, our social media coordinators will build the picture of your brand in the most positive way.