Adam Flater » Career

Roundarch Opens New Denver Office

adamflater — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:05:35 +0000

Marks Digital Agency’s Fourth Office; Denver Location Led by Adam Flater

DENVER–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Roundarch, a leader in digital design and implementation for Fortune 500 companies, has opened an office in Denver, the company’s fourth office. Roundarch currently has locations in Chicago, New York, Boston and key market penetration in the Washington DC area. The office is led by Adam Flater, a technical architect and evangelist for Roundarch.

“It is an honor to have the opportunity to bring Roundarch to my home city”

“The new location in Denver will provide a Western base for which to provide our digital design and implementation expertise coast to coast,” said Jim Butler, senior vice president of services at Roundarch. “From a strategic standpoint, this office will bolster client service while simultaneously enabling Roundarch to acquire new business in the Mountain and Western markets.”

“It is an honor to have the opportunity to bring Roundarch to my home city,” said Flater, a resident of Denver. “I am thrilled with the chance to grow Roundarch’s presence in the West and bring new, forward thinking clients on board who share our vision of creating outstanding digital experiences to solve business problems.”

As leader of the Roundarch Denver location, Flater is tasked with managing the newest office, along with finding and growing new business while creating superior digital experiences for existing clients as a technical architect.

Roundarch will host an office opening party at 1955 West 32nd Avenue, Unit 1, Denver, CO on Thursday, May 13 between 6 and 10 p.m. for the entire Denver business community. Please join us to celebrate this exciting event and learn more about Roundarch and the transformative work we are doing for our clients. Please RSVP to Paul Buranosky at pburanosky@roundarch.com.

About Roundarch

Roundarch designs and implements digital experiences for the world’s largest organizations. Roundarch delivers web sites, rich web applications, mobile apps, social media applications, digital marketing campaigns and more for clients such as Avis, A&E, Hershey’s and the US Air Force. Roundarch’s unique blend of breakthrough user experience design and enterprise-class technology implementation is perfectly suited for the most complex problems in the digital space. Roundarch has offices in Boston, Chicago, Denver and New York. For more information visit www.roundarch.com and the company’s blog at http://blog.roundarch.com.

From: Business Wire

Roundarch, Inc Opens New Office in Denver

adamflater — Tue, 11 May 2010 14:50:52 +0000

Roundarch, Inc. has opened an office in Denver, the company’s fourth office. The office is led by Adam Flater, a technical architect and evangelist for Roundarch. Roundarch will host an office opening party at 1955 West 32nd Avenue, Unit 1, Denver, CO on May 13 between 6 and 10 p.m. for the entire Denver business community.

From: Bloomberg Businessweek

Joining Roundarch / Merapi Positioning

adamflater — Mon, 04 May 2009 03:58:00 +0000

On March 9th I began a new position in the role of Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch. As I stated in my previous post, this was a difficult decision to make.

Now that I’ve had a couple months of settling in, I’m happy to say I’m enjoying my new role and the team at Roundarch very much.

Roundarch is not just an RIA or technology shop. We are specialized in Information Architecture, Graphic Design, User Experience, Technology and SEO. Our work is in serving clients, and our process provides unique advantages to the fortune 100/500 enterprises we engage with.

Now that I’ve had some time to get to know many of the 175 people that make up Roundarch, I’ve learned to appreciate Roundarch‘s holistic approach towards solving problems. Although we do have experts that work within a discipline, we do not develop solutions in a vacuum. There is a belief at Roundarch that all disciplines (IA, UX, Design, Business, and Technology) should inform each other. This adds up to a group professionals who’s combined background includes graduate and post graduate level training in; HCI, Computer Science, Design/Art, Business Administration, etc… all working together as a team to create solutions for our clients. That process is exciting to be a part of.

There were many incentives that influenced my decision to join Roundarch. A few highlighted reasons are:

Leadership that believes in the success and direction of the company.
Working with my friend Dave Meeker on Merapi
Working with my new friend and mentor Gary Schwartzbard in the Roundarch RIA practice.

1. The Leadership

Roundarch‘s history comes from years of working under the Deloitte and WPP flags. Our owners saw a distinct value in the people that became the founding members of Roundarch and purchased the practice from Deloitte. It is a testimony to the leadership that many of the founding employees are currently managers, directors, and VPs even today. This is a leadership the has a clear vision of serving it’s clients and valuing it’s employes.

2. Dave and Merapi

Another part of my on-boarding to Roundarch was working with my friend Dave Meeker to develop Roundarch‘s capability’s to offer unique services leveraging Merapi. Most recently we’ve done this by assisting Tesla Motors in the release of their new Model S electric car. You can read more about our involvement with Tesla on the Roundarch blog and in this press release.

Shortly after the release hit the web, there was a bit of a surprise in the Merapi community about our positioning around Merapi. Pieces of the text were (validly) interpreted by some to read that Roundarch now owned / had purchased Merapi. This is not the message that Dave or I intended to publish. Roundarch has and will invest time and money in promoting and developing the Merapi technology, however, we view the open source effort as a key part in the success of Merapi.

Last week my friend Andrew Powell raised some concerns over the future of Merapi, and the position of the open source project. For those of you in the RIA community, you’ve probably seen Andrew give talks about Merapi over the last year. He’s been instrumental in helping develop the concepts of Merapi and has helped promote the technology in a great way. Moving forward, Andrew will sit with me as co-chair of the open source project and help to ensure that a community focused version of Merapi’s Flex/Java connectivity thrives.

This week Andy , Dave and I spoke about what might be the clearest, mutually beneficial way to position Merapi for the community and companies like Roundarch that want to invest in developing commercial solutions with it. Here’s what we came up with…

The open source / community effort will be known as:

Merapi or The Merapi Project

The Roundarch commercial effort will be known as:

The Roundarch Merapi Platform

The open source effort will target developing a solid core for Flex/AIR and Java. Andy and I will be handling how to approve members of the community who would like to contribute on the project. We’ll likely be asking for individuals or corporate entities to contribute first by submitting patches and then elevate their status to full commitor rights. This effort will begin this summer.

3. Gary and the RIA practice

At Roundarch we don’t follow the typical manager / employee hierarchy. Instead, each employee has their own career counselor. I consider it a privilege to have Gary as a counselor and mentor. It’s been my pleasure to get to know and work with him on a few projects already. Even in the current economy, we’re in need of additional resources for this team and others. Contact me at adamflater [at] gmail [dot] com if you’re interested in finding out more about Roundarch.

So.. that’s a rather lengthy source-code-less post for me.

thanks for reading the update.. more to come on RIA development soon
-adam

Farewell to Universal Mind

adamflater — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:52:00 +0000

After much deliberation, earlier this week I chose to step down from my position at Universal Mind. This was a difficult decision for me as UM has a unique collection of highly talented individuals that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with. I will truly miss counting all the great people at UM as colleagues. I leave my best wishes to the success of Universal Mind and all of it’s employees as individuals. I am certain that we will continue to see amazing work from the UM team in the RIA space in both development and design.

It was great to work with all of you and I hope to cross paths with each of you again soon.

-adam

An open call for Designers

adamflater — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:10:00 +0000

Universal Mind has growing need to offer design services to customers in conjunction with our industry leading Rich Internet Application development. If you are a designer that loves RIAs, user experience, bleeding-edge internet technology, information architecture, and Adobe’s creative suite, we’d like to talk to you.

Universal Mind is an Inc. 500 company whose founders have a strong background in technology and professional services. We are a distributed company that has employees and contractors on staff across the country. Our distributed nature makes us very nimble. Each of our consultants is equally skilled at working from their home office as they are going on-site to work closely with a customer’s development, design, product, or project management teams. We’re also not new to the Flex/RIA game. The companies founders have ties all the way back to the days of Allaire Cold Fusion consulting. Our relationship with Adobe is strong and our customers love the experience of working with UM teams.

If you think have you what it takes to join our stellar team, please send over a resume and most importantly a portfolio. Feel free to contact me at [adamflater at gmail dot com] if you have any questions or submit your stuff directly to [jobs at universalmind dot com].

There are a few of us in the Denver metro area now and would be really excited to meet some great people locally or people who would like to relocate to Denver, but if you’re settled in somewhere that suits you geographically that’s not a problem.

By the way, we’re pretty fun too, check out what Doug McCune has to say about being a Universal Mind employe: Doug’s Blog.

Joining Universal Mind

adamflater — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 06:06:00 +0000

After making the decision to leave my former position I had another tough decision to make; what to do next. My first plan was to contract for a while to see how I enjoyed that lifestyle as well as try out a few companies, but as I took the advice of many of my friends in the industry I knew that I would be much happier in the long term if I found a more permanent home.

I ended up talking with several organizations and had to make a tough decision between a few very competitive offers. In the end, helping to build a team of talented rich internet application technologists at Universal Mind was the best match for my goals. I’m really excited about the crew that is taking shape and the work that will be a result in the coming months and years.

I think my buddy Doug best summed it up in his latest blog post : http://tinyurl.com/33rdyu

“So what does this mean? It means Universal Mind is badass.”

My first couple weeks as a contractor have been outstanding. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to continue working with all of the great people at Universal Mind.

Leaving EffectiveUI

adamflater — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:17:00 +0000

About three weeks ago I officially left EffectiveUI. This was an extremely difficult decision, one that I made in order to pursue career objectives outside of EffectiveUI. I have been contracting since, but will soon be on in a new full time position that I’m really excited about… more to come on that.

I wish all of my friends at EffectiveUI much success in the future.