Creating software and superheroes: Google waving with Lyn And Line

When we heard that Caroline Dahllöf and Carolyn Uy, Lyn And Line founders and creators of The Rescue of Ginger, use Google Wave almost exclusively for their business, we asked them to write a post about it. Here's how they use waves to create educational story apps (about superheroes, no less!) for kids between the ages of 2 and 5 for the Android and iPhone platforms.



We're a small software company -- just two people. But we live in two different countries, on two different continents, more than 8500 kilometers apart with a time difference of nine hours. Communication for us is a little more complicated than just yelling across the room whenever we need to discuss something. Since a good part of our working day takes place while the other is sleeping, we have to put in a little extra effort to keep each other informed.

We started using Google Wave to organize our conversations. We set up waves for all the things that we need to discuss. For example, to keep each other informed of source code changes, we created a wave where we add blips for what we changed in our code. We have another wave for tracking our bugs. And we even added our testers to that wave, so they could add bugs they found. This made it easy for everyone to see what needed to be fixed. We have a wave for the next story we are writing, where we can add, edit, or comment on each other’s ideas. We have a wave for people we need to contact. This list goes on and on. For anything that is on-going that we need to keep each other up to date on, we set up a wave.

Because we can have mini conversations inside of our waves, we can keep all of the information pertaining to a particular subject contained inside a single wave. And unlike the clutter of emails that gets saved in some folder, blips of information can be added to a particular wave wherever we need them to keep the conversation flowing and organized.



The beauty of this organization is that every morning, we can look at our inboxes and get a quick overview of what the other person has been doing. Because Google Wave notifies us when there is a change, there is no need for an extra email summarizing what has happened. And there is no need tell the other person, “Make sure you look at XYZ.” Having all of our conversations in different waves has made it easy for us to stay informed despite the distance and time difference.


Contact us at lynandline@googlewave.com .

Posted by Caroline Dahllöf and Carolyn Uy, Lyn And Line