Mobify Software Engineer Stewart Yu, better known through this blog for his baking skills, also happens to be our resident musical talent. This year in his spare time Stewart has been working on a brand-new, never-before-seen, musical which is going to be presented at Vancouver's Fringe Festival.

Called "Riverview High", the show follows the confused love life of a certain redheaded teenager. His difficult choice - blond or brunette?? - comes down to a dramatic graduation-day moment amongst the trappings of 1996 pop culture.

Mobify has been providing rehearsal space to the Riverview High Cast and in return they were lovely enough to come in and give us a preview of a few songs. Take a look at the videos below to see how amazingly talented everyone is, and then pop over to riverviewhighthemusical.com or the Fringe Festival website vancouverfringe.com/ to buy tickets.

Thanks again to the whole cast, and especially Stewart, for an awesome show!

On Friday Ryan Daw was awarded the first Mobify Innovation Award for the development of Meowbify.com. Meowbify was initially developed as something fun for the team, but we released it to the world and the cat-based excitement spread quickly.

Aside from the amazing technical skill Ryan possesses, his sense of fun, energy, and creativity are an integral part of what makes Mobify a great place to work. This award celebrates his contributions to both our culture and our technology.

Congratulations Ryan, and thanks for everything you do!

Ryan accepting his award:

Just kidding - cats on the brain!

Here he really is, accepting the MIA award from CTO John Boxall:

As you dedicated readers may remember, Mobify took its first major retreat in November of last year. At the time I called it "The First Annual Mobify Retreat", in the thought that we might be so lucky to do this once per year. But apparently it was so awesome we couldn't wait that long.

This time our adventure took the team to Hope and back (that's Hope, B.C. of course) - rafting down the Coquihalla river of Rambo fame. Unlike most people in the Rambo series, we emerged alive and well - ready for a long soak at Harrison Hotsprings and some amazing team time. Here are some rafting glory shots:

No one seemed particularly excited during the safety talk...

But then we got out on the water...

...and then we got into the water

Unlikely as it seems, this boat (and all its passengers) survived. Here's a group shot taken the next day at Bridal Falls that proves it:

A big thank you to the good folks at Fraser River Rafting for an amazing day, and to Harrison Hotsprings Resort for the hot baths needed to recover. Until next time: they drew first blood... part II.

Here at Mobify we like to invite people from around town to come in and give us lunchtime lectures on a variety of subjects. In the past we've covered things as wide-ranging as filmmaking, text editors, the web stack, and Russian rocket science. We always have an amazing lunch and an even more amazing discussion.

This past week we were lucky enough to have Mark Busse of Vancouver-based brand strategy firm Industrial Brand. His talk "Beauty and Bull&*#t: Dispelling some myths about what brand designers actually do" was designed to teach us the difference between a logo, a brand, and an identity. There was an intense round of questions afterward, and although Mark was kind enough to hang around far later than usual and answer many of them, he eventually had to edge out of the room and leave us asking ourselves how we were addressing this within our own company. Since then we've been doing some hard thinking about who we are and how we're sending this to the world - a difficult challenge.

An excellent lunch and learn tends to raise more questions than it answers, and by that measure this was a total and utter success. Thank you to Mark for an excellent talk!

Mark and Igor pose for an Instagram-esque photo by the Mobify sign.

While many of us chose to celebrate the onset of spring by opening our chakras to the glorious sun above (see yoga post below), others here at Mobify retreated to the games room to relive their winter hockey fantasies with a competitive game of NHL '94.

Team Ted + Mike won this particular game. I hear Team Ted + $var wins every game.