Platform Associates Privacy Policy
Your privacy is critically important to us. At Platform Associates we have a few fundamental principles:
- We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it. (We can’t stand services that ask you for things like your gender or income level for no apparent reason.)
- We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
- We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of one of our services.
- In our products, we aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what’s visible to the public, seen by search engines, kept private, and permanently deleted.
Below is our privacy policy which incorporates these goals. If you have questions about accessing or correcting your personal data please contact us.
Platform Associates LLC ("Platform Associates") operates several websites including platformassociates.com, approver.com, and codelesson.com. It is Platform Associates' policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites.
Website Visitors
Like most website operators, Platform Associates collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. Platform Associates’ purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how Platform Associates’s visitors use its website. From time to time, Platform Associates may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.
Platform Associates also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leaving comments on WordPress.com blogs. Platform Associates only discloses logged in user and commenter IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described below, except that blog commenter IP addresses are visible and disclosed to the administrators of the blog where the comment was left.
Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information
Certain visitors to Platform Associates' websites choose to interact with Platform Associates in ways that require Platform Associates to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that Platform Associates gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who register at CodeLesson to provide their names and email address. Those who engage in transactions with Platform Associates – by purchasing courses on CodeLesson, for example – are asked to provide additional information, including as necessary the personal and financial information required to process those transactions. In each case, Platform Associates collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor's interaction with Platform Associates. Platform Associates does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.
Aggregated Statistics
Platform Associates may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. Platform Associates may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, Platform Associates does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.
Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information
Platform Associates discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Platform Associates' behalf or to provide services available at Platform Associates' websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using Platform Associates' websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. Platform Associates will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, Platform Associates discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only when required to do so by law, or when Platform Associates believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Platform Associates, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of an Platform Associates website and have supplied your email address, Platform Associates may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what's going on with Platform Associates and our products. We primarily use our various product blogs to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. Platform Associates takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.
Cookies
A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor's computer, and that the visitor's browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Platform Associates uses cookies to help Platform Associates identify and track visitors, their usage of Platform Associates website, and their website access preferences. Platform Associates visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Platform Associates' websites, with the drawback that certain features of Platform Associates' websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
Ads
Ads appearing on any of our websites may be delivered to users by advertising partners, who may set cookies. These cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement to compile information about you or others who use your computer. This information allows ad networks to, among other things, deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by Platform Associates and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.
Privacy Policy Changes
Although most changes are likely to be minor, Platform Associates may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Platform Associates' sole discretion. Platform Associates encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If you have a WordPress.com account, you should also check your blog's dashboard for alerts to these changes. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.
Thanks to Automattic for making these terms available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. 
TokBox Launches Innovative In-Browser Video Conferencing Platform
Today TokBox launched OpenTok, a new platform that enables developers to easily integrate video conferencing and audio/video chat features into their Web sites.
Platform Associates advised TokBox on their platform product and developer outreach strategies.
Development Process
Our team uses a streamlined Web development process and methodology for all the sites we create. The intention is not to add overhead to the project; on the contrary, we're looking to provide just enough structure to provide a predictable outcome on a predictable timeline.
The process has three phases: Discovery, Implementation, and Maintenance.
Discovery Phase
Discovery is the process whereby we determine, in detail, what a customer is asking us to build. In some organizations, this is known as "requirements-gathering". It always starts with a conversation with the customer to determine their business requirements, and it and concludes with a set of deliverables that specify what's going to be built.
Discovery phase deliverables typically include:
- A product requirements document (PRD), stating in detail the various features of the site that are to be built;
- One or more wireframes that provide a quick, rough guide to how the site's user interface elements will be arranged on a page;
- One or more mockups that provide a more fleshed-out user experience design, showing in graphical format what the finished site can look like;
- If necessary, one or more prototype pages to demonstrate new or unusual user-interface paradigms;
- A domain model, a diagram that specifies the various high-level concepts in the application and how they operate with each other;
- A data design, to determine how information will be stored and retrieved;
- A system architecture, which specifies how the various aspects of the system will work together.
The duration of the discovery phase depends upon the complexity of the customer's requirements and how much work the customer has already done to enumerate their requirements.
Another deliverable that is typically provided at the conclusion of the Discovery phase is a time estimate for implementation. Estimates are necessarily the last deliverable of the Discovery phase, because nobody can have sufficient knowledge to do an estimate until the discovery phase is complete.
Some Discovery phase tasks aren't always necessary. For example, if we're building a site on an established platform such as Wordpress, we still need to gather requirements and do user-interface mockups, but we might not need to do a data design or system architecture (since those elements are provided by the platform).
Implementation Phase
In the Implementation phase, we create the site based on the specifications we developed during the Discovery phase. Implementation mostly involves writing code (including HTML, CSS, Javascript, server-side code in a language such as PHP, and data queries written in SQL), but it can also involve other activities such as testing, setting up software and servers, and rendering images.
During implementation, we provide an online issue tracker, source code repository, and a staging server.
The issue tracker is where we maintain the project's master "to-do" list, as well as bugs and other activities that need to be completed. Because we find that task information in email or documents tends to get misplaced or miscommunicated, we try to ensure that tasks and bugs find their way into the issue tracker. This has the positive side-effect of providing an easily accessible written record of the decisions we've made as the project progresses. Giving customers and other stakeholders access to our issue tracker is important because it gives everyone insight into what we're working on, what our priorities are and how much progress has been made.
Tasks in the issue tracker are commonly grouped into milestones (often associated with a specific deadline). As we begin implementation, we typically implement a feature freeze, which gives us the ability to meet a deadline and provides the customer some measure of cost control over the project.
The source code repository is where the code for the project lives. The most important function of a source code repository is to manage conflicts between different developers' changes, enabling us to manage conflicting changes to code intelligently and making it easy to go back to a working version of the code if something we did doesn't work for some reason.
The staging sever is where everyone working on the project can review and test the site prior to launch. The idea here is to prevent disruption to the production Web server as we add features and change things around. We try our best to keep the site under development in a usable state on the staging server so customers and team members can review our progress at any time. From time to time we'll do a staging push, in which we move code from our development machines to the staging server so everybody can review recent changes to the software.
Maintenance Phase
In the Maintenance phase, we deploy the Web site to the production server and plan for the next iteration. This can mean getting started on the next implementation milestone if one has been planned, or to kick off a new Discovery phase to plan significant new features. It is often possible to do Discovery-phase product planning prior to the conclusion of the current implementation milestone.
We provide hosting for our customers' Web sites based on a server infrastructure that enables us to easily grow or shrink the size of the site according to customers' needs. For a single-server configuration, upsizing a server can typically be done with about ten minutes of down time; we can plan the down time for a period when traffic to the site is low. For a multi-server configuration, we can typically resize each server individually with little or no down time. We also provide regular offsite backups and uptime monitoring as part of our hosting services.
Redmond Channel Partner on HP's Acquisition of Palm
Platform Associates CEO Jeffrey McManus is quoted in a piece in Redmond Channel Partner magazine on HP's impending acquisition of Palm.
There's A New Mayor In Town
Governing magazine did an interview with the BART web team on their integration with mobile social game Foursquare. In the interview the team describes the rationale for using Foursquare and how BART's embrace of open data platforms and social communications has worked for the transit district.
