Luis is an immense addition to our team; a technically minded, creative thinker, he always offers something new and refreshing.

Here he is explaining his approach to web-devvy design:

“I create useful experiences that answer to real problems and I love what I do. From business to UX design, going through back and front end coding, I believe the best way to create those experiences is to be aware of all the steps in the process and find the right balance between horizontal awareness and vertical skill.”

This ninja whistler is clearly a serious thinker. He’s also a tweeter, a speaker and a blog-posting solution seeker. Oh yes, and he takes a mean instagram. Follow, follow!

While we extend our warmest welcome to Luis, we urge all hopeful ribots-to-be to contact us if you think you’ve got the skills and attitude to join our awesome team (don’t worry, whistle not essential!).

Meanwhile, it’s time for an encore. Luis? Lips at the ready!

As the world’s simplest smartphone, we hope to make Threedom’s three-button interface simple enough for anyone to use. So to help us evaluate how near we are to achieving this, we need you to test drive the experience. Please make sure you’re signed up here to take part in the Big Beta.

And for those really keen to get involved, we’re running one-to-one usability sessions in our studio. For these sessions we’re looking for individuals with a real need for Threedom, i.e those who fear or lack experience using a mobile phone. If someone you know fits this bill, please email us now and we’ll gratefully reimburse them for their time.

In the meantime, we really want to thank everyone who has provided us with feedback so far. Your help has undoubtedly improved the experience for all future Threedom users. So without further ado, we’re sending a great big ribot thank you to: Simon.D, John-Henry.B, Andrew.K, Benjamin.P, Lalit, Eon, Sam.S, Anders.J, Arnau.V, Ragnar.B, Richard.L, FJ, Vidhya, Dain, Rajan, Chris.C, Mohit, Cliff.W, Dominic.T, Ischa.G, Eric, Will, Pitakthai, žiga, Andrew.K, Arnau, Louise.C, Mike.L, and Ben.W.

To the rest of the world, please sign up, Threedom still needs you!

Our Brighton studio offers us more than just a roof over our hard-working heads, it’s also a place for us to chill and let our creative minds run wild. Right now, as well as working on exciting client projects, we’re creating our own ambitious product. This means we’ve room for a few extra ribots to join our gnarly team.

So if geeking out with design-types and wondrous-web and heavy-duty devs sounds like a dream to you, take a look at the job description below. The closing date is February 17th, but remember: the early gull snatches the ice-cream (and avoids becoming kebab!). Good luck, dudes.

On offer at the ribot studio is a truly friendly team environment, monthly hackathons and, naturally, a slice of the birthday cake! There’s lots more too – just take a peek at the presentation we put together below; it sums us up in a colourful nutshell, as well as the dream droid we’re looking for!

So without further ado, we wish you all a delightful new year and to that special droid out there somewhere, we look forward to hearing from you.

Team ribot

Greetings from Dorset!

Fireside relaxation, country exploration and, what we love best, creative ideation! It can only mean one thing: the ribots are on holiday.

Yes friends, we’ve packed a van full of wellington boots and a hoola hoop (fold-away, travel size naturally), and swapped our seaside studio for a 16th-century stately home. Time to chillax to the kingly max!

Cheese with every meal, indoor hacky sack (ooh er, had to be careful of the chandeliers) and long mapless walks have made our stay an absolute joy. And the guns! Oh yes, we ribots like nothing more than to get our GTA-faces on and explode some clay.

All this rustic recreation has allowed us to kick back, relax and enjoy many a creative brainstorm. It’s been wonderful.

But we miss you all and will be travelling back soon. Think we’ve got time for one more hacky sack before then….

From all at ribot, with love.

Apple kindly featured us as new and noteworthy – the first for a web app in the Store. Nice.

Google showed off our app at Google I/O 2011 – their annual tech conference. Nice nice. Video here.

We’ve had some great feedback on the apps, which are now responsible for 1 in 5 shops on Tesco.com!

We’ve also been nominated for Carphone Warehouse’s Appy Awards. Woop! Judge comments:

A perfect time-saver – offers the complete service from creating the shopping list to purchasing the weekly shop. Judge, Carrie Longton

Though our hands are reddened and blistered with applause, we’re already reviewing your applications with feverish excitement. We’ve got a lot going on here at ribot, but we promise to be in touch as soon as possible.

And fear not, for though the curtain may be drawn, the search must go on! ribot is growing and is always on the look out for leading coders and creatives to fill new roles. If you think you’ve got what it takes to join us, there’s no need to heroically break a leg; just drop us an email with a nice letter and portfolio demonstrating your talents.

To give you an idea of what we’re after we’ve put together a little piece of theatre magic (although designer focused, developers should certainly take a look). So current applicants, take your bow; standing ovators, be seated; and cue slideshare….

By the way, we often post specific job ads with the friendly folk at Wired Sussex; always worth a little peek.

Image courtesy of Jonathan Mak Long.

“The digital age has lost its leading light, but Steve’s innovation and creativity will inspire dreamers and thinkers for generations.” – Howard Stringer, CEO, Sony.

Your story and products have inspired us and lets hope collectively as an industry we can continue this innovation.

Steve Jobs – Technology and design visionary – 1955 – 2011

Helen knows that disabled and senior persons don’t want to be treated as “special”; they want to be treated like normal people and they want the same things that normal people want.

Any designer or developer who wants to improve the lives of people with their products should listen to this podcast. Helen’s insights are truly enlightening and we are very honoured to have our 3-button phone, Threedom, star in her discussion.

Sit back, tune in and be inspired…

Tesco Food is a simple, clean, focused tool that allows users to get straight to the task of completing their weekly shop. But beautifully-designed minimalism doesn’t come at the cost of functionality. Features like the recipe finder and meal planner not only help users shop, but also inspire and change the way they do so, says Brucey in his Chrome Store review:

“Absolutely love this!! Changes the way I do my shopping!”

Thanks Brucey. And a huge thanks to all in the ribot / Tesco team that worked their Finest socks off to create this exemplary app: Rob, Pete, Mark, Becky, Lucia and Ian. Well done guys, Tesco Food is an example of how beautiful design and focused functionality combine to produce something our busy lives our crying out for, a little thing called simplicity.

Threedom realises that simple keypad configurations with large and widely-spaced buttons that don’t do much, don’t excite much either. The challenge, according to SMM, has been to build a well-featured, stylish device that includes a simple human interface. Threedom does just this, allowing anyone to easily use a touchscreen mobile, without sacrificing all the functionality.

Were SMM’s audience of handset manufacturers and senior market mobile players impressed? Oh yes. Threedom has undeniably solved the senior market’s touchscreen debate.

The question now is not one of how, but one of when; when will Threedom take the senior market by storm? The answer, folks, is soon.

Essentially, you’ll need a number of skills, but your attitude is most important. We look forward to hearing from you.

We’ll be talking on the subject of “Designing for Different Screen Sizes”, which is a subject very close to our hearts here at ribot. For all our readers/followers we’ve also got a promo code which gives 10% off the official ticket price – please quote FOM-10.

Enjoy!

Congratulations also go out to our favourite Android keyboard friends at Touch-Type, UsTwo (of Mouth Off fame) and fellow Brightonians Future Platforms and ParcelGenie.

People’s day is a local celebration designed to bring different local communities together. The event will take place this Saturday 18th June between 10am and 6pm in and around Pavilion Gardens. Visitors can enjoy more than fifty different activities with everything from face painting and sports to world food and theater. But, most importantly, Threedom will have a special stand in the Discovery zone.

Tara, Antony, Ben, and Jason will all be running around in shiny new yellow Threedom t-shirts, giving away Threedom pins and showing off our lovely Threedom phones. There will also be a very special competition where you can draw your ideal phone with the grand prize being your very own Threedom phone!

Pop yourself along and have a great time, we’ll also have some delicious Threedom cakes for your enjoyment and an exciting unveiling of something brand new…

Our nice friends at Google have been demoing Just One More at Google I/O, their annual tech summit in San Francisco.

They’re specifically interested in how we were able to create a convincing multi-device (mobile and tablet) experience using purely web technologies.

Check out the clip below for more.

More info on the talk given by messrs Meier and Mahemoff here.

It’s been long-anticipated by the android community, but this morning we can finally announce that the new ribot-designed Tesco app for Android has gone live!

Along with the infamous ability to quickly scan products around you, you can now talk products into your shopping basket using the new voice search functionality.

We’re confident that this is the best Tesco Groceries app yet, setting the benchmark for grocery shopping on mobile for some time to come!

Congrats to the great and growing ribot / Tesco team that worked so hard on the project: Ben, Alex, Becky, Owen, Hilda, Chitra, Kishan, Kamal, Rashmi, Sreelatha, Smita and Jerome.

Download it here!

We’ve had fantastic responses to our Threedom project and yesterday we sent a registration link for all those who were interested in the Threedom beta.

If you’ve not yet taken a look at Threedom phone for Android you can register your interest in the Threedom beta here.

Join the 33

We’re not yet ready to release the beta-version into the wild but so many of you were interested in having a play with Threedom we’ve decided to invite a small group of enthusiastic alpha testers to help us prepare for launch.

We’re looking for a wide-range of testers (not just mobile-industry experts) so if you or anyone you know has an Android device and would like to use it with a brand new interface, designed to help people with dexterity problems, then please register today at ThreedomPhone.com — we’ll send you a link to the alpha registration form and ask a few questions to find out a bit more about you and your device.