We’re excited to introduce Miles Holen who joined us at Q this week as our new QC/strategy intern. Miles graduated from George Mason University with a B.S. in Marketing last August after transferring from Florida State where he studied Underwater Crime Scene Investigation (Yes, we thought this was interesting, too!). His favorite sports include football, beach volleyball, ultimate frisbee and racquetball — so please let him know if you know of any local leagues or pickup games. He also enjoys reading and learning about anything business and marketing-related. And finally, he enjoys being social and meeting new people, even though he’s actually pretty shy, so please say hi!

Welcome to the Q Team!

Q’s Creative Director, JoJo Spiker will be leveraging his 14+ years of design management experience in teaching a course within the Pratt Institute’s Arts and Cultural Management Department entitled Advertising and Promotion. This course examines approaches to developing, evaluating, and managing advertising and promotion strategies. Students will be introduced to advertising concepts and the challenges to advertising products and services in the 21st century.

Congratulations @jojospiker on receiving such a prestigious opportunity!

In case you missed it, the technology that Q developed for a local customer was featured on two public radio shows last month. Q’s development team custom built a ticker board to display the changing beer “stock” values at the “beer-and-burger” concept restaurant The Big Board where beer prices fluctuate in real time based on demand. The ticker board is a custom application built for Samsung Smart TV and is displayed on 40-inch flat-screen TVs in the restaurant.

“The algorithm changes dependent on how many people are here, what day of the week it is, what type of beers are getting ordered, but the simple essence of it is, the more type of beer that somebody orders, the lower the price goes.” — Eric Flannery on The Splendid Table

Q also designed and built the restaurant’s website and designed their business cards.

Listen to the story on The Splendid Table titled “Beer Stock Exchange.”

The Big Board’s story was also featured on the public radio show Marketplace. Listen to that story here.

The Big Board opened on H Street in northeast DC in October.

You know what I missed most about MySpace other than filling out surveys in the bulletin boards or Tom’s smiling, thumbs-up photo in my Top 10?

I missed being able to brand myself on my profile page. Yeah, I was that kid who customized my MySpace page. So when Facebook’s new Timeline rolled out, the first thing I noticed was the beautiful, large space at the top of my profile page for what Facebook calls a cover photo. I’ve seen so many incredibly creative approaches to the cover photos that incorporate the overlapping profile pictures and started coming up with something of my own. However, that meant figuring out the dimensions of the cover photo area, the exact size and placement of the profile picture and its relation to the rest of the profile.

Lucky for you, I did all of this work for you in an easy, free, downloadable Photoshop document. Get creative, have fun and show us your cover photos!

DOWNLOAD IT!

This week, Q is excited to introduce our new developer Matthew Mols.  Matthew grew up near Annapolis, MD, but he now calls Silver Spring home. He is a recent graduate of Penn State, where he helped develop an online system for the Urban Gaming Club (urbangaming.org), which hosts large scale games such as Humans vs. Zombies (humansvszombies.org) on campus at PSU. Since graduating, Matt has worked in consulting, concentrating on software development for the web in ASP.NET. Outside of work, he enjoys adding to his collection of guitars, playing video games, and exploring all that DC has to offer.