Rocket Farm built SDK’s

UI Design

The challenge in designing an SDK is to create a series of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are easy to use and intuitive for the developer who is going to be incorporating the SDK into their app.

Rocket Farm worked directly with Admeld’s server team to do the design and implementation of both SDKs in two short months, allowing Admeld to hit the mobile market in force.

The app not only live streams from coaches on the water but also allows users to connect with friends globally, row as a team, track personal metrics, and view leaderboards. The design also had to account for usability during intense workouts, ensuring that the UI was intuitive and easy to navigate.

Let’s break each company down and how we approached things.

Admeld was a digital advertising company started in 2007. Their clients include NBCUniversal.com, Answers.com, and The Weather Channel. Admeld was one of the pioneers of real-time bidding, a technique by which their ad server allows other ad networks to bid on mobile ad placements in real time.

Admeld first approached Rocket Farm in early 2011 with the challenge of creating both Android and iOS SDKs to access their real-time bidding network from 3rd party apps. Rocket Farm ran a project with parallel Android and iOS paths, utilizing a common design for interacting with Admeld’s ad serving engine to create SDKs for each platform.

Rocket Farm worked directly with Admeld’s server team to do the design and implementation of both SDKs in two short months, allowing Admeld to hit the mobile market in force.

Founded in 2007, TargetSpot is a digital audio advertising company that helps its clients to reach the largest target audience with their advertisements. Their investors include Bain Capital and CBS Radio, which runs AOL Radio and Yahoo’s streaming radio services.

For TargetSpot, Rocket Farm developed an SDK for both iOS and Android systems, but this time with the additional challenge of serving interactive radio ads. Radio ads are more complex because they involve playing back an audio ad via the platform’s underlying audio subsystem. In addition, TargetSpot coupled a rich set of visual interactions that went along with the radio ads.

Motally, founded in 2008, was a mobile analytics firm that collects data for mobile publishing companies. Motally was a pioneer in a field that has seen entrants such as Flurry and Localytics take off.

Rocket Farm developed Motally’s original iOS analytics SDK. Using the SDK, 3rd party app publishers could track analytics about app use and user behavior. The SDK was designed so those analytics were stored on disk if the device was not online. Intelligent queuing would send the analytics data back to Motally’s server infrastructure once the device is reattached to the network.

Rocket Farm Studios created one of the first analytics SDKs on the burgeoning iOS market.

After the work was completed by Rocket Farm Studios Motally was soon acquired by Nokia after the release of the SDK. TargetSpot received C-round funding and announced deals with Bain Capital, CBS mobile radio, AOL Radio, and Yahoo Music. In addition, the following companies continue to use TargetSpot’s advertising: McDonalds, Verizon, Walmart, Microsoft, & Pepsi. After the release of their SDK in May of 2011, Google acquired Admeld shortly after in July of 2011.