Caktus Blog

Caktus’ successful growth in mobile messaging applications overseas has been a wonderful point of pride for us. The work we’re doing internationally has real impact on burgeoning democracies, HIV/AIDs patients, and others where technology makes all the difference.

We’re pleased to announce that Caktus will be presenting Epic Allies, an mHealth Gamification App to improve ART drug adherence for HIV patients, at this year’s YTH Live in San Francisco.

After sustained growth that has us packed in six suites, we have spent the past year and a half seeking new space. We’ve found it! I’m pleased to announce that Caktus has bought a historic 1910 building with nearly 11,000 square feet of space in Downtown Durham. We’ll be right near five points at 108 Morris St. The new building will be completely renovated from top to bottom to create an open workspace that’ll make it even easier for us to collaborate and share ideas.

The Herald Sun covered Caktus’ planned move to a historic building in Downtown Durham.

Triangle Business Journal covered Caktus’ purchase of downtown Durham building.

Caleb Smith, Caktus developer, awarding the third place prize to TheRightFit creators Bipasa Chattopadhyay, Ping Fu, and Sarah Andrabi.

Many congratulations to the PearlHacks third place winners who won Sphero Balls! The team from UNC’s Computer Science department created TheRightFit, an Android app that helps shoppers know what sizes will fit them and their families among various brands. Their prize of Sphero Balls, programmable balls that can interact and play games via smart phones, was presented by Caktus developer and Pearl Hacks mentor Caleb Smith as part of our sponsorship. PearlHacks, held at UNC-Chapel Hill, is a conference designed to encourage female high school and college programmers from the NC and VA area.

Caktus is excited to further encourage young female programmers through our support of PearlHacks, a two-day hackathon and conference hosted by the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. This weekend, March 22-23rd, over 200 young women from local high schools and universities in Virginia and North Carolina will arrive for the conference.

FastCompany named Caktus client, UNICEF, as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Local. UNICEF received this honor for their launch of RapidSMS, an open source platform for quickly building SMS applications.

Colin Copeland, Managing Member at Caktus, has wrapped up work, supported by UNICEF, as the Community Coordinator for the open source RapidSMS project. RapidSMS is a text messaging application development library built on top of the Django web framework. It creates a SMS provider agnostic way of sending and receiving text messages. RapidSMS has been used widely in the mobile health field, in particular in areas where internet access cannot be taken for granted and cell phones are the best communication tool available. This has included projects initiated by UNICEF country offices in Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Managing Events with Explicit Time Zones

Recently we wanted a way to let users create real-life events which could occur in any time zone that the user desired. By default, Django interprets any date/time that the user enters as being in the user’s time zone, but it never displays that time zone, and it converts the time zone to UTC before storing it, so there is no record of what time zone the user initially chose. This is fine for most purposes, but if you want to specifically give the user the ability to choose different time zones for different events, this won’t work.