lokalite / Case Study
"What's going on tonight?"
That's the question a group of CU students set out to answer on behalf of people living in college towns nationwide. In late 2010, they asked dojo4 to help articulate their dream, design and build the product, and brand the service. Their ambitious goal: Make everyone feel like a local.
"dojo4 built in a lot of functionality that allowed for future development. It’s been awesome what dojo4 has done."
– Graham Christy, Founder, lokalite
We jumped right in. In lively brainstorming sessions that filled dojo4's open front room, we evaluated the punch and possibility of dozens of names for the service. Picture software engineers, business students, copywriters and designers, laughing and drawing on the whiteboard. Finally we settled on a winner: lokalite.
Next, in parallel, we began the process of building a visual identity and design for lokalite, while simultaneously building the technology behind it all. The logo and stylesheet we developed communicate a "sleek, clean design," in the words of founder Graham Christy. The application is pure wizardry: location-aware, context-aware, categorized, full-text searchable, micro-formatted, written in Rails with a PostgreSQL backend and deployed to Amazon Web Services infrastructure.
dojo4 supported lokalite's launch -- and represented the dojo4 at lokalite's fabulous launch party, held on The Hill in Boulder on March 31, 2011. lokalite recently released version two, built in-house with a second round of funding. Dream, build, launch: That's how we do it.