Emberex
your web development solutions provider.
Your problems and solutions are unique to you, so we pay attention to the little things that other companies overlook.
Bring us your biggest software problems – we love them. What we do best is find the right solution: from eLearning to eCommerce, user experience to application architecture, integration to innovation –
we get it.
About
Emberex is a web development team that specializes in building outstanding software solutions specifically designed to meet your needs and the needs of your customers. We employ highly skilled engineers who have experience with the most widely used development tools and frameworks. We leverage these technologies and combine them with custom components to provide elegant and dependable software.
History
Emberex was founded on the basis of one simple idea: We can do things better.
It was with not much more than this inspirational idea that Nate Bernstein and Tom Emmons opened the company's doors in January, 2007.
So what was it that they believed they could do better? Everything. But most importantly, they knew they could do a better job of taking care of the customer. In their previous experience, they often found themselves frustrated by the lack of communication on projects. Customers weren't being heard. They saw how this communication breakdown led to a disconnect between the client's needs and the solutions provided.
Nate and Tom both firmly believed that if they coupled raw technical skill with an unrelenting desire to listen and collaborate, they'd provide real value. It's on this platform of skill and communication that they've built, and continue to grow, their business today.
Our Team
When you work with Emberex, you can be assured that every individual working on your project is an experienced and highly qualified software developer. We hire only skilled professionals who have a proven track record within the Web development industry. We regularly encourage input from everyone on our team, and we welcome innovation. The result is elegant and innovative software solutions.
Our team makes things easy for you.
Careers
Want to join the Emberex team?
We're always interested in hearing from qualified individuals. See below for current openings.
We're growing. We offer a relaxed atmosphere, flexible schedule, and an opportunity to learn and be creative as you tackle a variety of problems.
Our team designs and develops Enterprise-level Web applications that support several thousand users each day. Our clients expect heavy thinking and creative problem solving, and our team excels at providing innovative ideas and solutions. Our development team is recognized for excellence because we question and critique each other, raise issues and concerns early, and share ideas and insights on a daily basis. You'll be expected to easily transition between working individually, with minimal supervision, and being a part of a group that relies heavily on teamwork, collaboration, and effective communication.
Our developers have years of leading industry experience and they possess a level of knowledge and creativity that consistently exceeds our clients' expectations. We are looking for someone who can get up to speed quickly and help us to maintain our high standard of excellence as we grow. You'll be rewarded with a highly supportive and creative culture that will enhance your development career.
Senior Web Developer
The ideal candidate will possess:
- 4+ years of professional Web Development experience
- A strong understanding of object-orientated programming (Java, C++, C#, etc)
- CS degree or equivalent experience
- The ability to quickly analyze problems and provide insightful approaches to solving them
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
As a growing company we're looking to expand our internal skill set. Preference will be given to candidates who have experience with some of the following technologies:
- Java, C#, PHP, Python and supporting web frameworks including: Struts, Yii, Symphony, Django
- Javascript and AJAX development, jQuery, GWT, HTML5
- Various databases and database frameworks including: MySql or other relational databases, Hibernate or other ORM
- Flash/Flex
- Cross site integrations using 3rd party APIs such as Facebook or Google Apps
- Mobile application development on Android or iPhone platforms
In addition to a very competitive pay plan, we also provide our employees lots of great benefits including: exceptional health, vision, and dental insurance plans, a retirement plan with a generous company match, long-term disability insurance, accident insurance, paid time off, paid holidays, a game room, bicycle commuter benefits, a break room stocked with a variety of snacks, flexible working hours, subsidized gym memberships, occasional tickets to sporting events like Duck football games, company sponsored events (ski/snowboard trips, etc) and a yearly bonus.
If you feel that you can not only contribute, but also excel as a member of our team, please respond with a RESUME, COVER LETTER and a minimum of 3 PROFESSIONAL REFERENCES to: info@emberex.com.
Projects
In addition to serving many clients with their web needs, Emberex has also created some innovative projects of its own:
Project: studyblox
Studyblox was created to help educators overcome roadblocks in student engagement with minimal effort. Our platform was designed as a friendly environment for virtual learning that draws out even the most introverted student. We focus on developing critical thinking that will not only help students achieve the highest grades, but more importantly, create the building blocks for future success.
While most learning management systems help teachers monitor student progress, there's not enough focus on helping students learn. The few tools available are bulky and complicated, often requiring technical expertise. Our goal: Simplicity. Provide educators & students with a web-based, user friendly tool they can access any time.
studyblox.
Find. Create. Share.
Project: HashRouter
You're using HashRouter right now. It's a jQuery plugin that helps developers easily create dynamic webpages that don't require constant contact with the server.
You can see it working in the URL bar. HashRouter binds events within the page to changes to variables in the hash tag. (The hash tag is anything that comes after the # symbol in the browser's address bar.)
With HashRouter, the browser's back and forward buttons function normally and navigate sites quickly while the page adjusts content on the fly. You can read more about it and see a tutorial on how it works here: http://emberex.com/hashrouter/
What We Do
Web Application Development
Performance, stability, security, maintainability, usability, accessibility, interoperability, high availability....
Is your head spinning yet? With countless options available, it can be nearly impossible to decide how best to approach a project.
We can help!
We use language you understand to help you determine what solutions fit your needs. We approach each project with an open mind, always looking for the simplest, most elegant solution. On our own, or in collaboration with your in-house teams or outside vendors, we'll design, build, test, and deploy the exact application you need.
eLearning and Assessment Tools
Technology is changing the way we teach, the way we learn, and the way we share information.
Online educational tools provide instructors and students with the access and opportunities they need to be successful. We have implemented assessment delivery, electronic grading, reports, collaboration tools, integration with popular learning management systems, and more. From specific tools to large platforms managing the whole eLearning experience, we've done it all. With decades of collective experience and a focus on innovation, we'll help you design and build a product or platform that will redefine the way your users experience education.
Web Services and Application Integration
If you have existing content and applications – or just an idea – chances are it won't be long before you want to integrate with other platforms on the Web.
That's where we come in! Our team has broad expertise with popular frameworks and integration technologies. We create innovative solutions, allowing our clients to serve content through several widely used Web platforms. From Web services to Web 2.0 Mashups, we know exactly how to make all of the pieces fit.
Innovative eCommerce
eCommerce is more than just a shopping cart—
it is a potentially complex interaction between buyers, sellers, products, and payment gateways. We can take you through the entire process of conceptualizing and building a solution that makes it easy for everyone. Your customers want to do business; let us help them through the checkout line, as painlessly as possible.
Customized Solutions
Wouldn't it be nice if your software did exactly what you need, without extraneous features you don't need?
We certainly think so. Our team creates innovative solutions based entirely on your unique needs, freeing you from the constraints of packaged products. Our engineers work directly with you to tailor each application to fit your firm's exact business requirements. The result? Greater efficiency and a shorter learning curve bundled together in a highly customized Web application.
From enhancing your existing applications to developing your next generation platform—
we get it.
Approach
We believe that no particular software development process will, on its own, guarantee results. From waterfall to Scrum to Kanban, each approach provides distinct advantages and challenges. A team's ability to recognize and overcome the challenges is key to achieving project goals. A strong team with clear communication and effective leadership will always provide the greatest chance of success.
For many projects, we prefer an agile, iterative model based on Scrum. This process is intended to easily accommodate inevitable shifts in project scope and priority with minimal disruption. In addition, stakeholders are provided with a great deal of visibility into the team's progress throughout the entire development cycle, and the development team is empowered with a feeling of ownership over its tasks.
In general terms, an agile, iterative project proceeds through the following phases:
- High-level planning: At the beginning of a project, the team works with stakeholders to define high-level requirements and record them as user stories. A user story is a brief description, from a user's perspective, of a piece of application functionality. At the end of this phase, the team produces a "backlog," which is a prioritized set of user stories that describe the initial view of the application's functionality.
- Several sprints (iterations): The majority of the project lifecycle is broken up into short sprints, generally one to three weeks in duration. At the beginning of each sprint, the highest priority stories in the backlog are selected for development during the sprint. During the sprint, the engineering team implements the selected stories, and the quality assurance team performs tests to ensure that the stories have been implemented as planned. In addition, further planning may occur, and the project backlog is adjusted as necessary. At the end of each sprint, completed functionality is shown to interested stakeholders, thus providing a regular view into the progress of the project.
- Final delivery: After a series of sprints, stakeholders determine that the project (or a releasable portion of the project) is complete, and a final delivery is made. Additional stories may remain in the backlog for future releases.
Our Work
We can sing our own praises all day long, but as they say, "the proof is in the pudding." Learn more about the variety of projects and unique clients we've worked with:
- EPIC
- Eugene Water and Electric Board
- Cengage Learning
- Instant Action
- City of Eugene
- University of Oregon
- Avant Assessment
- SOI Systems
Client: EPIC
The Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) is a nationally recognized organization that provides a suite of tools for teachers and school administrators. Emberex partnered with EPIC to redesign SyllabusMaker, a web application that enables teachers to design coursework and syllabi based on state standards.
Emberex created a simple, intuitive user interface, and improved database interactions in EPIC's application. The finished design includes a drag-and-drop functionality that allows users to associate syllabi with state standards using minimal effort. This simplifies syllabus creation and editing by allowing for easy rearrangement of activities and better access to student assessment information.
Client: Eugene Water and Electric Board
Development of specifications for an initial phase of EWEB's McKenzie Agricultural Water Management System (MAWMS) project.
Throughout the specification development process, we worked closely with stakeholders to determine project goals and priorities, as well as provide creative ideas about web application features. Working from requirements gathered in those conversations and the client's high-level goals, we proposed our vision of a web community of food producers and buyers in the McKenzie watershed.
In order to effectively communicate with stakeholders and document project expectations, we developed three levels of specification.
- First, we created a Vision and Scope document, which provided a high-level overview of the software application and its main features.
- Next, we provided a detailed Requirements Specification, which describes use cases as well as functional and non-functional requirements of the project.
- Lastly, we created a Design Specification, which described the architecture and technical details of the web application.
Over the past two years, we have been involved as a consultant for EWEB, helping to evaluate potential options in its ongoing pursuit of the project.
Client: Cengage Learning
CengageNOW is a large-scale online learning management system, with over 1.1 million registered users and peak usage of nearly 100,000 unique logins per day.
It's backed by the Covalent content delivery system, which provides an elegant integration between CengageNOW and other LMSs, allowing the use of Cengage content in any Covalent-enabled client LMS.
Emberex is a premier technical vendor for Cengage Learning, providing technical management, software development, and both white and black-box quality assurance services.
In addition, we provide valuable technical advice and consulting with respect to all facets of the CengageNOW project. We have been responsible for designing, architecting, and developing both new features and ongoing maintenance of the software platform.
The platform itself is large and complex, consisting of several thousand Java classes as well as a variety of open source frameworks and supporting technologies.
We've responded to a variety of challenges and successfully collaborated with third party development and quality assurance vendors.
Throughout our involvement in the project, Cengage Learning has repeatedly expressed their appreciation of our ability to consistently deliver high-quality results in a professional manner.
Client: InstantAction
InstantAction is an online gaming community providing an immersive 3D video game experience within a web browser.
Emberex is solely responsible for the architecture, development and maintenance of the ecommerce component of the application.
In addition to standard ecommerce functionality, the InstantAction Store involves the use of a virtual currency model, in which real currency is exchanged for ActionTokens, with which members are able purchase games and other premium content in the InstantAction community. This introduces a level of complexity above and beyond that which is normally found in online commerce applications.
During the development of the InstantAction store, Emberex has worked closely with the InstantAction platform development team as well as third party payment processors and payment gateways.
In addition to the ecommerce component, we have been involved in the development and maintenance of several other areas within the InstantAction platform.
Garage Games has indicated that Emberex is unique in our ability to maintain a positive and professional relationship as a technology vendor and to consistently exceed expectations with respect to functionality and timelines.
Client: City of Eugene
The City of Eugene offers more than twenty five different services to the city's almost 157 thousand residents. A current focus on safety and sustainability for the residents spurred the development of the "City Council-visible" project.
The project's web application visually depicts essential city data such as population density and concentration of pedestrian activity, all served on an easy to use web dashboard.
Emberex added several new features and rewrote key pieces of the application to streamline it. We also helped migrate the app to a new website and restructured the content. As always, our goal was to create an innovative application offering a great user experience.
Client: University of Oregon
Emberex designed and developed an online survey data collection application, which is used in a variety of research projects.
The application replaces pen and paper with an online tool that manages all facets of user management, survey data collection, and reporting. The application is designed to allow dynamic generation of survey pages based upon definitions created in a markup language; thus, rather than creating an entirely new application for each research project, the tool may instead be reused in its entirety, but with a different set of survey definitions.
Additional features include reporting of statistical data, data export, and dependency-based interactions between different surveys within a single research project. Also included are a complete set of user registration, authentication, and role management features. The project has been developed in PHP using exclusively open-source technologies.
Client: Avant Assessment
Emberex performed a variety of services for Avant Assessment, including:
- Improving their online assessment delivery platform
- Creating a web application to collect client computer data and capabilities
- Evaluating client compatibility with the assessment delivery platform
- Performance testing, analysis, and optimization services
Performance evaluation was done using open-source tools. As a result of our efforts, Avant significantly increased their ability to handle peak load on their system.
Client: SOI Systems
SOI Systems produces a variety of high quality learning solutions, including Certified Learning, which provides K-2 curriculum mapped onto the Common Core Standards Initiative. Their integrated system allows each school district to customize curriculum to fit the standards of that region, all the way down to individual exercises.
Emberex worked closely with SOI to build a powerful cross-compatible web application to replace their legacy desktop application. Additional features include management of student progress, specialized student lesson content, and alerts to teachers when students are falling behind.
The entire student experience can now be organized and tracked from the district level all the way down to the individual student through an intuitive interface accessed via the Web.
Teachers can track progress on each lesson separately, and record status changes to current progress.
Lesson progress for each student is tracked individually. Teachers can easily identify which students require special attention.
"We are very happy with the work that Emberex did in developing a new web-based application for our education program, Certified Learning. We gave them an existing Windows-platform management application and asked them to reproduce its functions on the web. They took pains to understand our needs and created an application that goes beyond what we had hoped for. They've followed up with us and been a great source of support with ongoing questions. Our new application launched with the 2011-12 school year and has worked extremely well."
Beth Palmer
SOI Systems
"I wasn't sure what this was going to look like to a Web developer, but you guys really nailed it! This is exactly what we want. Thanks!"
Karl Morgenstern
Eugene Water and Electric Board
"We have been very pleased with the work that Tom and his team at Emberex have done for us at Avant. They have been prompt and very easy to work with. We know we can count on them. Tom has built a solid team. He focuses on quality and demonstrates integrity in his leadership."
Dave Bong, CEO
Avant Assessment
"I've had the pleasure of working with Tom and his company, Emberex since it was founded. I also had the opportunity to work with Tom in his position previous to Emberex. The team that he's assembled at Emberex is top notch and have become one of our primary software development vendors. They're excellent problem solvers, extremely knowledgeable, and willing to take on any task, often going above and beyond the call of duty. My experience with Tom has been top of the line, every step of the way. I highly recommend Tom and his team at Emberex."
Kallie Swanson Thomas, Senior Program Manager
Thomas Higher Education
"Thomas Emmons is professional and fully committed to client success. I experienced only the best results in my dealings with him at Emberex (at the time working as a service provider for our web-based start-up product). I highly recommend Thomas as a great businessman and all-around good guy."
Karen Clark
GarageGames.com
"It's been our company's good fortune to have Tom establish Emberex recently. The Emberex team has been a valuable resource for us in Quality Assurance for online language assessments for the Oregon Dept of Education. Emberex has also turned around work very quickly for Avant that enabled us to get website prototypes in front of US Government clients, and also for our Sales Partner for the MITI assessment (Medical Interpreting Test on the Internet). Although we have our own IT development team, we have currently entrusted Emberex with critical work on the administrative upgrades for our software platform. In sum, I can unequivocally recommend Tom and Emberex as a professional and cost effective resource."
John Haakanson, President
Language Learning Solutions/Avant Assessment, LLC
"Of all the developer teams I deal with Emberex is my 'A team.' When another vendor fails I give it to Emberex and forget about it, it's as good as done. When they attack a problem, not only do they fix it but improve everything around it. They possess a clear understand of what good code is and execute efficiently and effectively. If I could replace my other vendors with them I would."
Harold Hersey, Engineering Director
Cengage Learning
"After all the thousands of dollars we spent on other teams for software that doesn't work, Emberex made it look easy. We have to keep them forever!"
Miriam Waintrup, Research Assistant
University of Oregon
"Emberex has taken an active role in the development of CengageNOW learning management system and its content http://www.cengage.com/now/. Emberex has always been a responsive, reliable, and preferred vendor."
Tom Grega, Director of Technology and Product Management
Cengage Learning
Contact Us
Looking to supplement your Web products or services with a professional and experienced Web development team? Feel free to call or email us directly. We look forward to hearing from you.
Emberex, Inc.
220 East 11th Ave, Suite 6
Eugene, OR 97401
541.687.5778
541.342.8556 fax
Thomas Emmons, CEO - tom@emberex.com
Nate Bernstein, CTO - nate@emberex.com
