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Now that I had a fully functioning, and maybe the first of its kind, weather balloon tracking/photo-taking app, I was ready to send it off. I figured I better clear it with my boss to make sure it was all right to send my phone off into space. I am not sure if he quite believed what I was going to do but he was on board saying something along the lines of “You break it, you bought it.” With that green light, I ordered a 300-gram weather balloon off eBay and a 24” nylon parachute from Amazon.com. I used a piece of left over 1-1/2” Styrofoam insulation, some Plexiglas and zip-ties to build a box to house the phone. I sandwiched the phone in between two pieces of the insulation and cut out a hole for the camera to be able to take pictures.

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Having already built a number of Android applications, the process was familiar to me. But I did need to research using the GPS, camera, sending SMS messages, and creating a background service to run everything. The biggest obstacles were determining the best way to create and handle the loops that had to occur and getting the camera to work inside a service.

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As technology continues to expand, we are rewarded with affordable and sophisticated pieces of hardware that would have made any tech geek beyond excited just a few short years ago. This series of blog posts will chronicle my experience with some standard pieces of technology (by today’s standards) and how I used my imagination to push the limits of these devices to achieve a goal I dreamed about as a kid.

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As a business analyst it is my goal to detail the business processes that are impacted when implementing new technologies.  Through the use of persona development, we often identify the key users of the new processes and how they will act and react when engaging in a new website or CRM solution. It is these personas that our creative and development teams use when they are creating the wire-frames and technology recommendations to ensure the goals of the project are consistent with the traits of each user. These personas look at the end customer.  There is a tone of accomplishment when developing these personas in that any solution we recommend should create a positive experience for each identified persona.

I read an article over the weekend about the aspect of employee happiness as a key contributor to productivity. It details how a happy employee is more productive, creative and generally more motivated. In the research from the article, I find it compelling that by adding the lens of happiness as it relates to employees that are impacted by our technology recommendations, we can drive success not only in the specific project we are working on, but throughout the organization.

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When the North Dakota Young Professionals (NDYP) chose Sundog as the “Best Place to Work in North Dakota” earlier this year, we were thrilled. And we continue to be proud of the honor.

Now our distinctive company culture is being noticed throughout our industry. Sundog has been named to Advertising Age magazine’s list of Best Places to Work. We’re among 30 companies featured in the August 22 print edition and you can find the full list on their website.

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