Posted by Jesse Proudman on Wed Mar 31 15:28:00 UTC 2010
Posted by Nathan Kaiser about over 2 years ago...
Rails Bug Mash starts today! We will have our Seattle offices open from 11am to 11pm today, and 10am to 5pm tomorrow for the Seattle Ruby crowd to come join us in squashing bugs. Our offices are in Pioneer Square at: 206 1st Ave S., Suite 300, Seattle WA 98104. The door you’ll be entering in is in a bright orange facade on 1st Ave, to the left of a store called Synapse.
The building is secured on the weekends, so we’ll have a number posted on the door for you to call and one of us will come down and let you in.
We look forward to seeing every one there!
Posted by Nathan Kaiser about over 2 years ago...
Blue Box Group is proud to announce sponsorship of the upcoming Wordcamp Seattle 2009 event on September 26 in the Fremont Neighborhood of North Seattle!
We are really excited to be bringing a great new product for bloggers with us to the event! Keep an eye on us through twitter (@blueboxgrp) or here on our site for the big release on Saturday! If you are attending this event, come by our booth to get some great free BBG stuff, as well as a special offer for our services!
What is Wordcamp? WordCamp is an informal conference where you can learn about the world’s most popular blogging platform, Wordpress. This is THE event to learn about Wordpress which is used by millions of consumers and businesses. Wordpress powers some of the worlds biggest sites and blog networks. Check out www.wordcampseattle.com for more information and ticket give-a-ways!
A little bit about Blue Box Group:
Founded in 2003, Blue Box Group provides managed web hosting solutions. They approach web hosting, virtual and dedicated servers as a partnership with their customers. Blue Box Group knows technology and scalable ruby on rails deployments. Blue Box Group offers quality service and dedication to each customer, ensuring your rails hosting experience is smooth and uncomplicated!
Posted by Nathan Kaiser about over 2 years ago...
Update! Locations are helpful! We’re hosting this at our new Seattle offices: 206 1st. Ave South, Suite 300, Seattle, WA 98104. During the weekends, the building is secured, so you’ll need to use your cell phone to call up to the offices when you arrive. We’ll have the number available on the sign and on this site this afternoon.
At Blue Box Group, we are all Ruby Hackers, and most of us got our start with Rails. So it is with great excitement that we announce sponsorship of the second Rails Bug Mash! If you are not aware, it’s September 26-27, 2009, and a great way to get involved in the Rails community.
We will have our offices open 11 AM – 11 PM Saturday and 10 AM – 5 PM Sunday. We will have wifi, desks, pizza and caffeine. So feel free to drop on by, and say ‘Hi’, or lend a hand!
If you plan on hanging out with us, please do RSVP. Just use our contact form to drop us a line to let us know.
We are also going to have a 1TB Apple Time Capsule drop shipped to 1 lucky prize winner! (Prizes determined by RailsBridge). So, start up your mad bug mashing skills, and come on down!
About BugMash:
The idea is simple: RailsBridge has a lot of energy. The Rails Lighthouse has a lot of open tickets. With the help of some Rails Core team members, we’re going to see what we can do to cut down the number of open tickets, encourage more people to get involved with the Rails source, and have some fun.
More at the BugMash Wiki.
About RailsBridge:
RailsBridge was formed with the goal “To create an inclusive and friendly Ruby on Rails community”. They have succeeded with projects like RailsBridge Mentors and the Builders network.
More at the RailsBridge site.
About Blue Box Group:
Founded in 2003, Blue Box Group provides managed web hosting solutions. They approach web hosting, virtual and dedicated servers as a partnership with their customers. Blue Box Group knows technology and scalable ruby on rails deployments. Blue Box Group offers quality service and dedication to each customer, ensuring your rails hosting experience is smooth and uncomplicated!
Posted by Nathan Kaiser about over 2 years ago...
With our announced departure from Tacoma, I wanted to write to clarify our feelings for the city. We love Tacoma and continue to believe that it is a great city to live and work in! I was raised in Tacoma through Jr. High School and came back to the city for college. It provided a fantastic incubator for Blue Box Group with its aggressively priced rent and ample services. For the last 6 years, Tacoma provided a solid foundation that allowed Blue Box Group to grow into the success story that we’ve become. Between our offices on 6th Ave, to our various locations in downtown, we’ve enjoyed everything that Tacoma has to offer.
So why are we moving?
We’ve experienced incredible growth rates over the last 4 years, which have in turn prompted rapid job growth within our organization. We’ve had the patience to go through very long interview cycles to be able to find the right candidates to staff these positions. In spite of these unusually long cycles, we have been fortunate to find what I believe are the most amazing staff I could ask for. However, as our growth has continued, our patience and ability to wait through these long interview time lines has impacted our ability to grow at the accelerated rate we see as our business opportunity.
In addition to this, we found that the recent economic environment has put enough pressure on price of commercial space in Seattle to be very competitive to what we were finding in Tacoma. As we looked at our business goals, challenges and expectations over the next several years, we felt like taking advantage of these discounted real estate pricing would be an opportunity we couldn’t pass up.
For a technology company experiencing extreme growth, Tacoma is a city that today presents some challenges. Regardless of the city wide fiber of Click Network or the access to the University of Washington branch office, or any of the other number of amenities offered, the limited number of high-level technology candidates is a big problem. With the regional mass transit system in a bit of disarray, it is terribly difficult to convince potential employees from outside Tacoma to brave the commute into town. Waiting for the right person to become unemployed isn’t a good strategy either. At the end of the day, our need to be able to quickly recruit talented staff is our primary motivation for this move, and is something I believe will continue to be a challenge for Tacoma unless action is taken.
This is an opportunity for Tacoma.
The departure of Russell, while unfortunate, does create a unique opportunity for the city to re-invent itself. Tacoma now has a chance to make a new name for itself in the financial and technological fields, and work to attract new businesses and new industries. Just as much of the downtown core has undergone a physical transformation, city leaders should be determining what they can do to attract and nurture the next generation of technology companies. This in turn will allow UW Tacoma to place its graduates in local technology jobs, and will then provide the candidate pool that future technology companies can pull from.
I’ve been amazed at the online conversation this move has created, and I think there’s an opportunity to engage in a conversation about our experiences, and what decisions we faced as a business. I am happy to share with any entrepreneur, or members of the community as to what some of the elements we felt were important for running and growing our business.
We’re sad to go and there’s much we will miss from such a great town. But we’re also very excited at the possibility that Seattle now holds for us.
CEO
Blue Box Group
Posted by Nathan Kaiser about over 2 years ago...
Blue Box Group Relocates Corporate Headquarters to Seattle
Company cites strong business growth, hiring plans, and new business opportunities as key reasons for moving
Seattle, Wa –September 16, 2009– Blue Box Group, a leader in managed web hosting and specializing in ruby on rails applications, today announced that they have relocated their corporate headquarters to Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle. The company, who had been based in Tacoma, WA and has customers around the world, pointed to their recently announced acquisition of Portland based Rails Boxcar, growing customer base, and need for access to top talent as examples of their growing business, and reasons for the move.
“We’ve been extremely fortunate in that our business has continued to see strong demand regardless of the tough economic climate” said Jesse Proudman, CEO of Blue Box Group. “We are now at a point in our evolution that Seattle gives us better access to the resources and talent we need to keep growing at this exhilierating rate”.
The company, which was started in 2003 and has been based in Tacoma for the last six years, will continue to maintain support offices in Tacoma for an unknown period of time.
“I believe Blue Box Group is an example where focusing on your core-competencies, and offering great service, is actually rewarded in this economic environment,” said Nathan Kaiser, CEO of nPost. “Clearly customers looking for added value or strong ROI are searching out and finding companies like Blue Box Group.”
The new offices are located at 206 1st Avenue South, in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square district.
About Blue Box Group:
Founded in 2003, Blue Box Group provides managed web hosting solutions. They approach web hosting, virtual and dedicated servers as a partnership with their customers. Blue Box Group knows technology and scalable ruby on rails deployments. Blue Box Group offers quality service and dedication to each customer, ensuring your rails hosting experience is smooth and uncomplicated!m!
