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  • Chicago Jazz Festival ::

    Killswitch is pleased to announce our work with the Chicago Jazz Institute on the 32nd Annual Chicago Jazz Festival website. Killswitch was hired to design and build the flash site.

    One of our goals was to capture the essence of the Jazz aesthetic while setting the tone with the music that plays in the background while viewing the site. The site includes all the necessary information for the festival along with a built-in music player that highlights some of the festivals most popular talent.

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  • Summer is Hot! ::

    Killswitch is pleased to announce our continued relationship with Agora Technology and the release of Premium Services on UseQwitter.com. This release includes a premium account where users can track who is Qwitting them on Twitter along with other notable features. You can also tweet directly from your Qwitter account. Pretty cool stuff and who doesn't want to know who is leaving them on Twitter?

    Also, be sure to check out our newest work for The University of California at San Diego Art Power! and Where I've Been, another Lightbank funded start up that worked with Killswitch on new website designs.

6

  • New Work for Spring ::

    Killswitch has been busy the past couple of months, and we're happy to announce a few projects we've been working on. The BET Awards 2010 site is one of our biggest achievements for spring. BET Networks approached Killswitch for the development of this year's site, and we were happy to jump on board as both a development company and a strategy/design partner. There are many features on this site, including custom video playlists and photo galleries, as well as a viewers choice voting page and nominee voting. Check back for updates as we have several exciting new features rolling out all the way up to the show date on June 27th.

    Also, we are working with several new and exciting start ups here in Chicago, and will have more news on that soon.

    Please check back for updates and for up to the minute news, check us out on Twitter and Facebook.

  • Get Poggled ::

    Poggled.com is a new way to enjoy both the bar scene and getting great deals to socialize with your friends. The site offers Party Package deals to various bars and the deals are only found on Poggled.com. Want to buy a package and tickets for your friends? Not a problem, because the site allows you to buy tickets for everyone, and then assign names to them, print out vouchers, and you can even change who is going up to 30 minutes before the event.

    The system that Killswitch designed and built includes an easy to navigate front end with e-commerce functionality for the Poggled deals and a plethora of other features. Right now it's exclusively available in Chicago, but look out for other cities as the site continues to grow and expand.

    Look for more from this start up soon as it follows a growing trend in this space behind the likes of Groupon and others.

5

  • UseQwitter.com ::

    Fear not... notification emails have returned, giving us all something to look forward to during the day! UseQwitter.com is back in action, thanks to the handy team of developers here at Killswitch.

    After Agora Technology acquired Qwitter earlier this year, they came to Killswitch for strategy and development, to rethink some of the features of this application and to build a new premium layer of features, due to be rolled out in later this spring.

    Getting away from our typical Ruby on Rails implementation, this app is built in Ruby on the Sinatra project. Sinatra, unlike Rails is not a MVC structured framework. It is however, a very powerful Domain Specific Language (DSL) for defining RESTful HTTP actions, and then defining how the application is going to respond to them.

    Sinatra has worked great in this implementation of the UseQwitter.com and we will definitely be exploring it for future projects where it complements the goals of our client's applications.

    So go sign up now to track all your Twitter Qwitters and look for new exciting features in the months to come.

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  • New Work & Relationships ::

    We are happy to announce some new work and relationships. We just finished up the new site design for Blue Box Group's corporate site as well as their Box Panel customer management system. Blue Box is our preferred hosting vendor and we love working with them! We also continue to work with Hoffman York and University of California at San Diego on a variety of projects and campaigns which span the spectrum of print and digital.

    We're also happy to welcome UseQwitter.com to the Killswitch client family. Agora Technology the new owners of UseQwitter.com approached Killswitch to launch the website after their acquisition, as well as to make some significant changes to the application over the next several months. So far we've rebuilt the application using Ruby and Sinatra, and have a lot of exciting things in store in the future.

    We will also be launching a new site for a popular PR company in Chicago, and have some other exciting projects in the works, so stay tuned for all of that as well.

3

  • AIGA Small Talk Recap ::

    In March, we had the honor of hosting an AIGA Chicago Small Talk event, which we are happy to report went well. The review should be up soon. Thanks to all who attended and we look forward to continued dialogue with the design community here in Chicago.

    Check us out on Twitter to stay up to date on daily news in between these monthly updates!

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  • AIGA Chicago Small Talk ::

    We are thrilled to announce that we will be speaking at the next AIGA Chicago Small Talk on March 16 here at our office. We'll be talking about how we got started, showing some of our work, and then answering any questions. It should be a good time, so if you're in the area, come on by for some drinks and some design discussion! Details are here.

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  • BET Sunday Best ::

    In continuing our relationship with BET Networks, Killswitch just launched SundayBestCasting.com to support the casting call for the new Sunday Best 3 TV show. In this casting site for a hit reality series, gospel singers are put to the test. In what some would call the gospel version of American Idol, Sunday Best gives gospel singers the opportunity to show off their vocal abilities amongst the world's finest, in a genre of music that both anoints and inspires. Working with BET, Killswitch developed a casting site for a new season of the show in which users can create profiles and submit audition videos in order to become a contestant on the upcoming season. This site makes use of our custom casting platform, built in Ruby on Rails, that seamlessly blends form and function and easily fields a flood of users. Check it out now and vote for your favorite contestant! Visit Website +

    See our other 2009 news.