Design

Canary – App Design & Mockup Service

Pitch your Startup, , ,

Ed: If you aren’t in the business of making wireframes or app Mockups it can take a lot of time and effort to get a mockup right (or if you don’t have design or coding skills not get it right at all).

For a fixed and pretty reasonable fee Canary will build you a wireframe or App mockup.

This is continuing a pleasing trend we are seeing from Service Providers that are “Productising” their services so that they are easy to order and deliver a known result with a set process.

These guys probably have some low-cost labour to do all the grunt work but their team takes the brief and then delegates the build to the low-cost team.

The costs are very reasonable, I think it would be hard to do this yourself at that price and you would struggle to find a better service provider via Freelance.com that can give you a known service.

Certainly I will be considering it for my next App project.

Startup Name

Canary
What problem are you solving? Even with the tools available, entrepreneurs are still developing apps when a mockup or prototype would suffice. Our mockups and prototypes let entrepreneurs pitch for capital and get early feedback before they invest their time and money.
What is your solution? Canary helps entrepreneurs move their ideas closer to reality by putting beautiful mockups, prototypes and wireframes within their reach.
Target Market We make beautiful app mockups, interactive prototypes and wireframes.
How will you make money? Fee for Service
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? Chris – Chris comes from the world of product development, new business and marketing. He is all about products that add real value. A self-confessed wine and cheese lover, Chris says, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”Alex – Former CTO for a mobile payments startup, Alex brings his hardcore software engineering and product management skills to the table, with a side of intuition and imagination.
Founders Names Chris Gardner, Alex
Website usecanary.com
What type of funding has the company received? Bootstrap
Twitter Handle @Canary_Team
Invision prototyping mockup source control

Invision – Web & Mobile Prototyping and UI Mockup Platform

Pitch your Startup, , , , , , , , , ,

 

I regularly listen to This Week in Startups which is produced by Jason Calacanis, he does a great weekly video which runs for an hour and has in depth interview with VCs and startup founders, who he manages to get to reveal some pretty interesting stories, often gets them to admin to things they may not have before, its one of the better webcasts for startups and a great laugh at the same time.

Jason does the Web equivalent of a live read for his sponsors (those of you who have ever advertised on radio will be familiar with the concept) and one of the companies he mentioned the other day was Invision a new prototyping, collaboration and workflow platform.

Having tried about 10 prototyping/wireframing/mockup apps in the last year for one of the projects I am working on, I can tell you they pretty well all suck big time on the collaboration aspect.

Also commenting and keeping track of problems is also a major headache, invariably you need to switch out to another platform to track the requests/bugs etc and don’t even talk about keeping version control over design suggestions and mockups, its not trivial or commonly done.

So Invision seems to solve the problem for design collaboration and prototyping in a similar way to how Github solves the problem collaboration problem for code and version control.

There is a 30 day free trial and the plans seem reasonable including a free plan for only one project. Check it out here Invision App.

Invision prototyping-mockup real time commenting

Invision prototyping-mockup real time commenting

prototyping and mockup and manage


Invision editor screenshot

www.invisionapp.com

Autodesk awarded Gold Circuit Board Award for 123D Circuits – Web based circuit design software for would be hardware hackers

Maker/Grower, , , , , , , ,
123D-Circuits

123D-Circuits

Adding to the highly capable 123D range of free software for makers and enthusiasts, Autodesk has released 123D Circuits.

Aiming to bridge the gap between homemade hand drawn circuits or free open source packages and high-end circuit design, simulation and layout software such as Eagle and Altium, 123D Circuits allows you to design, simulate, layout and then order prototypes of the board you just created. It has files for the major components that you might need in a general circuit design.

It allows you to experiment with building circuits and simulate them without having to pick up a soldering iron.

  • Virtual breadboard based design, allowing to build and experiment with circuits just as you would in real life.
  • You can add an Arduino to your design, and edit the code right in your browser.
  • Real-time and interactive simulation of both your Arduino code and the circuit attached to it.
  • Full collaborative editing (think of Google Docs for electronics).
  • Powerful yet easy component editor, making it super easy to add new components to the shared library.
  • Easily create beautiful circuit boards with: free text, b-splice silkscreen art, arbitrary board shapes, …
  • Ability to embed your design, including simulation on your blog or in an Instructable.

Once you have completed the design and tested it, you can order a board with your design pre integrated which is fantastic and saves a lot of time.

http://www.123dapp.com/

I think the 123D range is a fantastic initiative by Autodesk, they are driving a massive group of enthusiasts to get familiar with their products, make stuff and then realise that they want to go further and buy into their paid products and at the same time they are kickstarting a whole generation of makers and potentially entrepreneurs and we love that.

Accordingly Autodesk 123D Circuits and their other apps is hereby awarded the first and soon to be coveted Gold Circuit Board Award for contribution to the Startup Community.

Gold Circuit Board Award (3)

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta