Thumbtribe

Thumbtribe

Phillip Krüger work experience

Summary

Thumbtribe is a small company that brought mobile solutions to feature phones, smart phones and the web. We built a platform that can deliver content on feature phones, smart phones, websites and apps via USSD, WAP, HTML and REST services.
I was running everything IT related, from the teams, the infrastructure to the software. Thumbtribe developed an platform that allows publishers and agencies to build campaign sites that will render perfect of websites, but more importantly on all 5000+ mobile devices still active in Africa. Africa has unique challenges because of slow, expensive and unreliable internet, and old handsets that is in many cases the only connection that the consumer has to the internet.

Responsibilities

IT Director

Represented all IT related functions on the board.

Enterprise Architect, Team Lead

  • Responsible for conducting, leading and coordinating software development activities throughout the project, including key design decisions for the technology, structure and configuration of the system.
  • Involved with the product definition of the cloud platform.
  • Monitor Team performance and activity.
  • Serve clients, identify their needs and provide a solution.
  • Performance Review and management of development of the Team members.
  • Enforce best practice and environment standards.

Technical Lead, Software developer

  • Product definition, design and development of Thumbprint, a custom platform that allows building of mobile sites
  • Cloud platform that allows anyone with an internet capable device to build sites (mobile or web) without actually having to “code”.
  • Hosting of the above mentioned site is also taken care of with the cloud service.
  • The platform has numerous widgets you can use to build your site.
  • The platform ensures that the mobi site you built will work on 6500+ devices (everything from a Motorolla V3 to an iPhone)

Technologies used

  • Ant & Ivy
  • Eclipse
  • Linux
  • Java (JEE, JSE)
  • Glassfish
  • MySQL
  • openRDF
  • Lucene Search
  • Ehcache
  • Apache Pluto
  • Spring Web
  • Apache Velocity
  • Netbiscuits (BiscuitML)
  • Jquery
  • Foundation

Other

Blog posts

I wrote a blog post about responsive design in Africa, that got published on memeburn.com

Durban JUG

I ran the Durban JUG and hosted several community meetings.

Conferences attended

  • Mobile World Congress 2011, Barcelona, Spain
  • JavaOne 2011, San Francisco, USA