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Have you heard about the Lean Startup movement yet? It’s is a profound concept that’s having a major impact on how companies are being built, funded and scaled. Pathfinder is a major proponent of this approach: It’s the best way we know how to create successful software products. That’s why we’re sponsoring and helping organize the Chicago Lean Startup Machine Nov. 5-7.

Lean Startup principles, conceptualized in 2008 by Eric Ries, are based on less waste, speed to market and a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas. The movement has gained momentum and interest, and a series of Lean Startup Machine events puts the principles in action in New York, San Francisco and now Chicago.

Lean Startup Machine Chicago is a weekend-long competition Nov. 5-7. It kicks off with six-minute pitches and presentations. Participants then select ideas and form teams to work on their project for the next 52 hours. On Sunday, teams pitch their business and Minimum Viable Product to a panel of judges for cash awards, mentoring, and $10,000 in legal and company formation services. The event is limited to 60 participants.

Keynote speakers and judges include Brant Cooper, a leading advocate of the Lean Startup movement; Patrick Vlaskovits, VP Business Development at ELC Technologies and co-author of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development; and virtual speaker Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup methodology and author of the blog Startup Lessons Learned.

Registration is $50 and is open to the first 60 registrants. The event is not-for-profit and registration fees are used to cover expenses and the winning cash prize.

Want to get involved in the Lean Startup Movement? Lean Startup Machine Chicago website is here; There’s a Chicago Lean Startup Circle, and the Lean Startup Wiki is here.

The midVentures LAUNCH event kicks off today with a day of innovation and product development workshops, followed by a full day of talks and over 50 product launches.

Pathfinder will be involved in two of those launches: Construction Punchlist, the development company’s brand new iPad app, and MORExchange, a direct to consumer mortgage aggregator built by Pathfinder for Omtelligence, LLC. The two are among the more than 50 new products to be introduced at the inaugural iteration of midVentures LAUNCH in Chicago.

Construction Punchlist brings the construction punchlist process into the digital realm by allowing architects and construction managers to carry hundreds of pages of building plans to a job site in the compact, rich media Apple iPad. Taking full advantage of the iPad’s multitouch graphic interface and its capacity to process and transmit information, this app enables users to scroll through, zoom in on and make detailed annotations directly on the digitized plans. Construction Punchlist can then send the marked up files to building owners and managers directly from the job site, saving time, energy and money.

MORExchange, was a revolutionary web-based application whose mission is to provide the lowest cost, completely transparent mortgages for consumers. The application will allow consumers to see all available mortgage products at lender wholesale “par” interest rates (no margin or commission), and then apply for the mortgage with no application fee. The only cost to the consumer is a $750 transaction fee, which is not charged until the mortgage closes. This fee is the same for every loan no matter the size.

These two new products embody what midVentures LAUNCH is all about—innovative product development that’s happening in the Great Lakes right now. Although national luminaries from Google, Groupon, and IBM will be on hand to discuss their own success stories and today’s newest possibilities, the slant of the conference will be decidedly Midwestern.

Participation in midVentures LAUNCH reflects Pathfinder’s ongoing commitment to the region’s startup community, a community where Pathfinder has mentored and facilitated the launch of over 70 new products and companies in the last decade. As conference sponsor, exhibitor and launch participant, Pathfinder offers a view from the trenches, but it also has the unique perspective of having adapted strategies to help startups find success in both boom and lean times.

Workshops and panels at MidVentures LAUNCH reflect the same lean product strategies Pathfinder has been espousing for years, such as customer development before product development and agile software development. These are today’s pathways to success. They are also the longstanding hallmarks of Pathfinder’s approach to product development.

Stay tuned for more new products – we’ve got six apps launching in the next month, including web and mobile apps for real estate, healthcare, and live music events.

Brianna Sylver, Founder and President of innovation research and strategy firm Sylver Consulting, engages a lego sprint with her team. Photo by Nate Burgos

The lego blocks returned with gusto, in greater numbers and colors. This time, the participants were members of ChiPMA, the Chicago Product Managers Association. The group of thirty-three were divided into five groups. Each acted as a dedicated team responsible for developing and delivering the product, in this case, an animal with enclosure. Before going through three quick rounds of energetic lego shuffling and assembling, the group estimated and prioritized user stories and consulted with their product owners, played by members of the Pathfinder Development team.

Pathfinder’s Sr. Agile Project Manager/Coach Glenn Bernsohn led the practical session demonstrating the rhythm of an agile project. ChiPMA participants learned firsthand a number of its key concepts like Iterations, Testing, Velocity and Retrospectives.

As ChiPMA member Tim Perry put it, “Was a really fun game. Great way to meet new people and learn more about agile in a ‘non classroom’ setting.”

See the rest of the lego fun-charged pictures (slide show).

For more lego exploits, see our previous post about the game played by members of the Chicago Agile Project Management Meetup Group.

Pathfinder is changing how we blog.

Since we started blogging about three years ago, we’ve had 1452 posts and about 1.3 million absolute unique visitors. We initially started blogging about Ajax, and then added topics from Ruby on Rails, .Net, to flex and flash. Our user experience designers and our agile project managers started blogging, and we started to blog about content from iPad and iPhone development to product strategy. In short, we now blog on everything related to creating successful software, from strategy and marketing to design and development.

The New Calendar

Going forward, we will continue to blog on all of these things, but we’re going to to provide more structure and predictability to our blogging calendar.

On Mondays, we’ll be blogging on Product Strategy. At Pathfinder, that means a heavy emphasis on customer development and lean startup thinking, because we believe that in most markets, this is the best way to create products that win.

On Tuesdays, we’ll blog on Product Design, including all aspects of designing software products, from user research to usability, from information architecture to interaction design. We’ll start with Nate’s post tomorrow on Designing for Mobile Apps.

We’ll roll out further themed days over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

The midVentures25 event is happening this Thursday, and Pathfinder is proud to be sponsoring the event.

midVentures25 is the first Chicago-based startup demo day & conference: 25 of the best investor-ready early-stage startups will demo their products in an open-floor expo.

The top 5 startups will have a chance to pitch to an audience of entrepreneurs, VCs, angels, bloggers, media and Chicago’s tech community. A panel of expert advisors will ask the tough questions — ultimately choosing one company to win over $10,000 in services.

The focus of midVentures25 is to show the national technology and investment community that the Midwest has an abundance of early-stage innovators within the technology, consumer, and sustainability space. You can expect to engage thought leaders in education, art, media, business, science, and technology during the conference.

There are a lot of great innovations that continue to come from the Chicago community, as we know from the early stage clients we’ve helped towards success. We’re looking forward to an event like this that brings the people that make this happen together. It should be a great evening.

Day of Mobile is happening this Saturday, and Pathfinder is proud to be sponsoring the event.

This should be a very cool event , and we’re excited about interacting with other mobile developers in the Chicago area. We look forward to seeing you there!

Day of Mobile is an all day event for mobile developers and enthusiasts that will take place at IIT on March 6, 2010. The overall goal of the event is to better prepare both Chicago’s application development community and companies with mobile initiatives for the upcoming mobile revolution. We will cover a myriad of different topics relative to mobile development and strategy such as platform SDKs, cross platform development, multimedia, CMS/SMS, mobile business models and many more. The event will begin with a breakfast at 8AM and conclude after a keynote speech and hackathon awards ceremony at 4PM. Throughout the day, there will be talks running concurrently with one another in two adjoining ballrooms.

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We’ve been building a lot of mapping/GIS data visualization applications over the last few months, mostly using flex with various back end services (ArcGIS, google and yahoo maps, open source mapping frameworks.) One of the more fun little projects was putting together this flex widget for displaying maps and graphical data together on a timeline. It’s meant to be distributable so that anyone with a blog can display it. We put it together using presidential election data and national debt, not because we thought the correlation was particularly significant, but because the data was available going back a long time. The widget is pretty flexible; it can go against a local data source or a web service, and we can easily modify it to show different kinds of data. We’ll be coming out with a few more of these over the next few months, hopefully with some more 3D maps, drill down on geographic level, as well as more charting and other visualizations. If you’d like to use this one, or have ideas for other data sets and visualizations you’d like to see, let us know.

Vu360, the latest Pathfinder product, was launched by our client the Blue Book of Construction earlier last month.

It’s an Internet-tethered desktop application that enables easy viewing, markup and takeoff of PDF and TIFF documents for the architecture, engineering and construction industry. Some of the features include:

Rails Test Prescriptions, the eBook put out by Noel Rappin, Director of Rails Development at Pathfinder, has been picked up by Pragmatic.

Congratulations to Noel – he’s done a great job of furthering testing best practices in rails, and this is a great reward. As he said “I’m very excited by this. I’ve wanted to work with Pragmatic for as long as they’ve been publishing books, and I’m thrilled that this particular project will be able to get wider distribution and access to Pragmatic’s editorial expertise and skill.”

* The current free “Getting Started with Rails Testing” ebook will continue to be available. If, at some time in the future, there’s a better Getting Started tutorial in the Pragmatic book, it may be offered as a replacement.

* The update site for current Rails Test Prescription owners will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.

* There will be one more official update to the current Rails Test Prescriptions, probably around the end of August. This will wrap up the chapter or two I’m working on, and tie up some other loose ends.

* After that, errata and information about changes to test tools will most likely be handled via this blog and an errata page on the rails test prescriptions site.

This is Noel’s 4th book with a major publisher, following Professional Ruby on Rails, wxPython in Action and Jython Essentials. We’re happy for Noel and happy to have him at Pathfinder.

Related Services: Ruby on Rails Development, Custom Software Development

Daring Fireball had another insightful article on the contrasting product strategies of Microsoft and Apple last week. Well worth a read in it’s entirety if you’re thinking about your own product strategy.

A few observations were particularly trenchant and relevant to me in light of my own recent experience:

Microsoft is no longer ignoring Apple’s market share gains and successful “Get a Mac” ad campaign. But the crux of these ads from Apple is that Macs are better; Microsoft’s response is a message that everyone already knows — that Windows PCs are cheaper. Their marketing and retail executives publicly espouse the opinion that, now that everyone sees Apple computers as cool, Microsoft has Apple right where they want them.

They’re a software company whose primary platform no longer appeals to people who like computers the most. Their executives are either in denial of, or do not perceive, that there has emerged a consensus — not just among nerds but among a growing number of regular just-plain users — that Windows PCs are second-rate. They still dominate in terms of unit-sale market share, yes, but not because people don’t recognize Windows as second-rate, but because they don’t care, in the same way millions of people buy metric tons of second-rate products from Wal-Mart every hour of every day.

That’s the business Wal-Mart wants to be in — selling a zillion cheap low-margin items and turning a profit on volume. That’s not the business Microsoft is in.

The truth of this was particularly relevant to me because just a few hours before reading this, I had spilled a full glass of water all over the keyboard of my laptop. An occupational hazard of talking a lot with your hands, but one I’d successfully resisted for the last two years, since my last such incident. It’s a still rather painful memory.