September 10th, 2009
Einstein Award for Innovation
We like creating stuff. We especially like people who create stuff off their own back.
Today we were honoured to present the Rackspace Cloud 'Einstein Award for Innovation' to a member of Slicehost Support for the work he put into creating and maintaining our public chatroom (http://chat.slicehost.com).
As we grew, the chatroom we were using wasn't really working and we needed a new solution. Josh Kearney, who runs our third support shift, volunteered to look into how we can better communicate. He may not have realised the size of the job when he volunteered but he tackled this project head on and much of the development was done in his spare time.
We can't give Josh enough praise for his effort and determination to see the project through the end and he still continues to improve it.
We also like facts and figures so I reckon we can share this with you:
It took Josh something like 80+ hours dedicated to designing and creating the room.
It allows customers to chat with us, live, from any web browser at any time of the day or night.
it allows us to ban those silly people who seem to want to cause havoc and link to nasty websites.
Customers can paste text and images into the room which can assist when explaining an issue.
We hope you like the chatroom. It's been live for a while now and the feedback has been very positive.
Here's to Josh and innovation!
PickledOnion
September 10th, 2009 at 06:59 PM Jesse Crouch
Awesome work, Josh! Congrats on the award.
As always, good to see slicehost delivering great customer service.
September 10th, 2009 at 08:22 PM Ben Smith
Congrats Josh! Any chance there will be a fix to the chat system to make it work behind corporate firewalls (right now it pulls from a port in the 8000 range that is almost never open behind a corporate firewall).
September 10th, 2009 at 08:50 PM Ben Reubenstein
Very cool, and it now works perfectly in Safari 4. Any chance of open sourcing it?
September 11th, 2009 at 07:46 PM Josh
Thanks guys!
Ben S.: I am looking into a solution for that. Hoping to have it in production ASAP.
Ben R.: Sorry – not at this time.
September 26th, 2009 at 06:02 AM Alan C
Josh,
Great work on the chat system, I had a taste of how much you were workin on it months back :) Glad to see it was a huge success though! Congrats on the award as well, you deserve it!
September 26th, 2009 at 06:37 PM directory
ha ha the pic is hilarious
September 29th, 2009 at 04:26 PM Gene T
could you comment on platform, please, XMPP / jabber,...?
September 30th, 2009 at 01:23 PM koloa
hi, where can i view link to install plugin for my site?
October 12th, 2009 at 02:28 PM Eibsee
Oh wow!! The award looks like one of our comrades lol
But congratulations to your team member. He seems to deserve the award for his hard work.
December 16th, 2009 at 07:20 PM Rackspace Rocks
Haha – this blog is precisely why I think you guys rock. Hilarious stuff. The picture had me cracking up from the moment I opened it.
February 13th, 2010 at 05:05 PM BODHost VPS Hosting
Congrats!!!!!!, Awards plays an important role in boosting your activities and performance towards success.