Roundarch Rocks RIAPALOOZA

Roundarch, the leader in large-scale Website design and development, today announced that two of its senior leaders were featured as primary speakers at the RIAPalooza event in Chicago. The two day event, aimed at exploring and promoting the development of Rich Internet Applications, was well attended by software designers and developers focused on cutting-edge Web technology. The event speakers can be seen at http://www.riapalooza.com/speakers.htm.

Dave Meeker, a user experience strategy lead at Roundarch, kicked off the event with an opening night keynote where he addressed the past, present and future of experiential software design and development tools and technologies. He also provided a glance into the future of rich, web and desktop software applications. Meeker focused much of his talk around the importance of user experience and visual design and about how design thinking translates to better software products.

“The RIAPalooza event was the first of its kind here in the Chicago market and it is really great to see such a healthy community of professionals attending an event like this. It makes you realize how exciting the next several years are going to be as technology rises to the challenge…. That challenge being the enablement of companies like Adobe and Microsoft to allow companies like Roundarch to really apply smart design and design thinking to projects, having it materialize in experiences that look, feel, act and perform the way that ‘people’ want and need them to. This transcends the Web also, we are talking about mobile devices, multi-touch and voice input and even as far out as virtual computing and virtual desktops.”

Geoff Cubitt, President and CTO at Roundarch, utilized a series of live client sites and demos to illustrate how rich internet applications are changing the way applications are conceived, designed and built.

“Rich Interfaces are transforming the web,” commented Geoff Cubitt, Roundarch President and CTO. “With the advent of RIAs it is now possible to support the rich drag and drop functionality of desktop application through a browser. This significantly lowers the TCO for deploying applications and it also means that the vast majority of applications built in the future will be rich web applications. But, to produce great, innovative user experiences that are scalable and extensible, rich internet application frameworks such as Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flex are key.”

“Roundarch’s presence at RIAPalooza raised the level of the conversation,” commented Josh Holmes RIA Architect Evangelist from Microsoft. “Dave Meeker’s ‘Drinking and Thinking’ keynote kicked off the conference on Friday night. His technology agnostic approach to Rich Internet Applications (RIA), embracing AJAX, Silverlight and Flex/Flash, set the tone for the entire weekend. This was emphasized by Geoff Cubit’s presentation on Saturday morning as he looked at how RIAs, regardless of the technologies used, broke the mold of the traditional web application and pushed the boundaries of design. It was great to see a company that “gets” RIA from their senior leadership down and is pushing the rest of the industry.”

About Roundarch

Roundarch is a leading provider of user-centric Web design and technology services specializing in the synergy between user experience and application development to solve complex issues for large organizations. Clients include Fortune 500 companies and government agencies such as Motorola, The Hershey Company, Avis, A&E Networks and the United States Air Force. Founded in 2000, Roundarch has offices in New York and Chicago. For more information please visit www.roundarch.com.

Contacts

Roundarch
Scott Judy, 312-529-2430
sjudy {at} roundarch(.)com