The Social Planning and Research Council of BC (SPARC BC) is a non-partisan, charitable organization operating in BC since 1966. SPARC BC focuses on social justice issues and works together with communities on Accessibility, Community Development, Income Security, and Social planning.

The old SPARC BC website was first developed by rmd Studio 2 years ago and it was about time to do some major updates. The new SPARC BC Website is powered using the Joomla! CMS and Gantry Framework. It is also using a custom document management system developed by rmd Studio called the RubberDoc to manage a large collection of downloadable resources and publications.

Eventric ™ is a provider of software and online services for the professional live entertainment industry. Their customers include artists such as Sarah McLachlan, Beastie Boys, and Lady GaGa. Eventric.com website is powered using Joomla! CMS and the website template is developed using the Gantry Framework technology.

RVT.com is the online source, with over 40,000 listings, for RV traders who buy and sell new or used recreational vehicles. The RVT iPhone application enables the buyers and sellers to browse, manage, and maintain their online listings on the RVT database.

iCookDiet is a lifestyle diet and cooking instructions iphone app for medical or cosmetic weight loss that doesn't require starving yourself. The approach is very simple: follow this diet program for 6 days and you'll have 1 cheating day to indulge yourself with whatever food that you like!

Porthog is an enterprise web-based network administration tool for managing large numbers of network devices. This tool is used in organizations such as the movie production companies and large corporate intranets.

Network devices generally come with dull user interfaces ( if you have been setting up your wireless router through your browser you know we are talking about ). In this project we have developed a user friendly AJAX powered web-base editor and Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the system administrators who will be configuring a large number of devices on an enterprise network.

Propredictor is an iphone app that delivers weekly NFL stats during the NFL football season to the iPhone users. This project had 2 components:

1. an iphone apps which is being sold on the iphone app store
2. a web service developed using the Joomla! and Nooku Framework where all the data is entered and then the results are received by the iphone app via xml feeds.

Using the Propredictor iphone App You can compare teams by their PowerRating and pinpoint teams on the way up and those on the way down. These are the teams likely to make the playoffs and teams likely to miss the playoffs. The PowerRating is based on real data, not opinion. The stats are generated based on a proprietary and distinct algorithm that includes a defensive bias based upon the stats of the 1985 Super Bowl Champion Chicago Bears since they are still recognized as the best defensive team in the National Football League.

eBlast is a custom event and campaign management system developed for the St. John Group which is a company located in Toronto, Ontario specialized in organizing and managing trade show booths for some of the Fortune 500 communication companies.

eBlast has been used in the following trade-shows:

• CTIA Wireless 2009 in Las Vegas
• Mexico ExpoComm 2009
• CES 2008 in Las Vegas
• CTIA Wireless 2008 at San Francisco

Some of the unique characteristics of the eBlast system could be summarized as following:

Anahita Social Engine ™ project started in May 2007 and ever since it has become the main focus of our business operation, research, and development.

With the advent of modern Social Networking websites such as facebook, twitter, or flickr, there was a need for a truly open and versatile platform which would enable businesses and organization to exploit the utility aspects of social and collaborative tools for their everyday operation.

Unlike other stiff and quick-oatmeal social networking solutions available today, our open source platform, Anahita Social Engine, provides a solid development framework and a flexible design philosophy for developing Social Web ANYTHING such as Social Networks, Intranets, eLearning, Community Markets, Project Management Systems, Support and Distribution Centres, Content Subscription websites, and such.

Look for Heart Risk on the iPhone app store. Imagine getting the results of a blood test, entering some data such as gender, blood pressure, cholesterol, and age in an iPhone app, and then it will tell you the patient's chance of having a heart stroke within the next 10 years. This iPhone application does just that based on the NHLBI's Framingham Heart Study. In fact the application is so simple to use that both Doctors and patients could download it and benefit from it.

Live animated graphs are drawn simultaneously as the parameters are changed using the sliding knobs on the screen. This application is a suitable tool for Doctors to educate their patients on maintaining a healthier heart and preventing future cases of coronary heart disease as much as possible.

At the first glance, this application may seem like a generic RSS feed reader for iPhone, however what makes this application special is the fact that it can be branded for one or multiple news-feed sources specific to a market niche. For example a collection of news feeds about politics, entertainment, or sports.

This project was commissioned by Many Cooks Software Ltd. and this application was deployed in the following projects:

   1. Bollywood HoGya - a Bollywood news-feed aggregator
   2. Coronary Heart Decease News and articles feed aggregator, used for a Medical Calculator application.

The Social Planning and Research Council of British Columbia (SPARC BC) is a none-for-profit organization which has been operating since 1966. They work together with communities on issues such as Accessibility, Community Development Education, Income Security, and Community Social Planning. To many, SPARC BC is known as the organization that issues special permits to those who can park their vehicles at the designated parking areas for the disabled drivers.

SPARC BC's website is powered by Joomla! content Management System (CMS) and it follows the W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) which means it is also accessible to the visually impaired users. Joomla! is one of the finest Open Source CMS solutions in the world as well as being a great Web Application Development framework.

PageBadge is a facebook application, developed in PHP, that easily create html badges for your facebook Pages, Events and Groups so you can promote them on your websites

We have initially developed this project to promote our events and facebook pages. If you have a facebook account, you can view the PageBadge here live in action . PageBadge is certainly a great way to give that extra push to your social media marketing campaigns.

PageBadge is a new application and currently being used by more than 1800 users despite some existing bugs with the Internet Explorer 7.

RubberDoc is a Document Management extensions developed for the Joomla! CMS version 1.5.

Using this extension it is very easy to upload a large number of documents ( PDF, Excell, Word, ... ) and assign them to different articles within the Joomla or present them as categories of documents or even generate RSS feeds of files.

These documents can either be made available publicly or be restricted to registere users and administrators only.

This project has been inspired by our client, Social Planning & Research Council of British Columbia (SPARC BC) , who will be using this extension on their soon to be launched website which is also developed by rmd Studio and it's associates.

RubberDoc was developed because other similar extensions were neither available for the native Joomla! 1.5 nor provided a simple and user friendly administration interface for the SPARC BC's staff. In it's first month of release, RubberDoc has been downloaded more than 1500 times.

This is a collaborative project done by rmd Studio and JenTekk Web Solutions.

Tazzu.com is an online business, technology, and knowledge networking community which started in Sept. 2006 by Jeanette Duguay from JenTekk Web Solutions and the participation of a community of Technology enthusiasts and professionals. Six months later Tazzu was incorporated as a company by Rastin Mehr and Jeannete Duguay.

The current website ( version 1.5 ) is an online community where Tazzu members share technology tips, develop business ideas, exchange referrals, and make new professional friends.

This is a collaborative project between JenTekk Web Solutions , and rmd Studio Inc. 

North49 is a Vancouver based company specialized in developing, installing, and maintaining Sage Accpac ERP since 1989. They are authorized partners and developers of Sage Software . The principle owners Etiene Grobler and Rob Eichhorn deliver more than 20 years of valuable experience to their clients offering CRM and Accounting applications. Their client list includes companies such as BC Hydro and Vancity Credit Union .

Their corporate website used to run using a set of php scripts on a Windows server.  In order to update the site, their staff actually had to make changes to the website source code. In order to boost their marketing impact, their website needed to become more informative and visually more appealing.

Premier Agendas Ltd. is a student success and education services company located in Langley BC. It is specialized in developing customized school agendas and character development programs to help K12 and College students plan, organize and set goals for academic success. Premier serves thousands of schools throughout US and Canada.

Premier Learning Unit is a Learning Content Management System developed for online delivery of educational content to all the schools who are Premier’s clients. Premier Go and Premier Get Set are two student character development programs that are currently using PLU 2.0. This is the second customized LCMS web application developed for Premier Ltd.

Using this web application, Teachers and School Administrators are able to enroll their students in virtual classrooms where they are engaged in a set of online learning activities. In these lessons students watch videos, then they are quizzed. The result of their grades can be viewed instantly by their teacher using an online Grade-Book.

rmd Studio participated as a Project Mentor in Google Summer of code 2006 collaborating with computer science student Blagovest Dachev from USA and Joomla! Core Development Member Mateusz Krzeszowiec from Poland.

The entire project collaboration happened through IRC chat , Google Groups , Skype , and Joomla Forge .

Project goals were to develop proof of concepts, prototypes, and working examples of an AJAX framework for the next major release of Joomla! Content Management System (version 2.0). This framework was later on re-named to Project JAJAX by the team. 

The most basic purpose of an Intranet is so we can publish documents or newsletters on a private network and make them only available to a selected group of people. Premier Agendas , an Education Services company in Langley, BC needed just that.

Problem with the bloated software

Most Intranet Applications are bloated with all kinds of fancy features that companies don't  even use. It takes more time to learn how to use a bloated application; it also requires more maintenance. All of those would cost a company extra time and money.

Every year Software vendors add more features to their products so they can justify Software Upgrades to their customers. Offering more features than a competition does is a strong selling point.

Companies who grow with multiple branches in different geographical locations, could benefit from using a web based secure intranet in order to stay connected and exchange valuable business information.

The Loan Processing Terminal and Intranet, was an in-house research & development project inspired by a request once submitted to rmd Studio. In the beginning, the intention was to develop just a prototype, surprisingly the end product turned out to be as good as a production quality web application.

Premier School Agendas Ltd. Is a student success and education services company with
offices located in Langley, BC, Canada, and Bellingham, WA, USA.

Premier is specialized in manufacturing and distributing large selections of customized Student  Success Agendas and Character development resources. Their goal is to meet the unique needs of every school and their students in USA and Canada.