Tuesday, 12 October 2010

Meet the developers behind our Windows Phone 7 app

I'd like you to meet a couple of people - Sangeetha Rao and Rajiv Agarwal.

Not heard their names before? Well that's about to change - indeed not only will you know them - you're about to trust them. After all, if you have a Windows Phone 7 mobile and you download our Tesco Groceries app onto it, it's their code you'll be running!

So I better introduce them to you:

photo of Rangeetha Rao and Rajiv Agarwal sat next to their development environment PC showing Windows 7 Phone Tesco groceries implementation.
Image of Sangeetha and Rajiv next to their development machine
(photo taken by Vishwa Kiran)

Sangeetha and Rajiv are part of the Tesco.com Strategy and Innovation team based both at Tesco.com HQ in Welwyn Garden City, UK and in our development centre in Bangalore, India. It has been their considerable task to take Ribot's design and make it real on Windows Phone 7. They did everything: XAML, C# code, multi-threaded architecture, the lot. What's more they did it in record time to match Microsoft's unmovable launch deadline and they delivered code of such a high standard that it passed Microsoft's rigid phone testing procedures with flying colours.

Sangeetha and Rajiv are graduates from India's exceptionally high quality university talent pool. Their thoughtfulness, intelligence, and passion to push the boundaries of innovation have really blown me away. I'm deeply proud that they have delivered such an exceptionally good app that Microsoft are saying that their phone can be aimed at Tesco shoppers.

Their boss (and mine), Vishwa Kiran, Head of IT Strategy and Innovation, has been deeply impressed too. In an email to the team Vishwa said, "A successful mission for the Innovation team. Great effort all around. Thanks and congratulations !!".

Posted by Nick Lansley at 17:25
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6 comments:

  1. Unknown12 October 2010 at 20:31

    Hello,
    So I can see that you've made an app for Windows Phone 7, that's great, but where's android app? How long Android has been on the market for? Surely long enough for you guys to notice it's presence and to release app for it, WP7 was just released yesterday, it will hit shelves in november and there's already Tesco app for it. Also that laptop in the background of this picture? Is it a MacBook being used to develop WP7 app? Bill Gates wouldn't like it probably. So, I am awaiting arrival of my android app, so I can do my shopping online or do a product search for customers because I work at Tesco, it's flagship in Oxford. It's not that I don't know about third party apps, I've got them on my Galaxy S, but it would be nice to have something "homemade"

    Many thanks
    Mario

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nick Lansley13 October 2010 at 07:13

    Hi Mario

    First of all please see my recent blog post about Android.

    Bill Gates would be very happy to see that Mac - it's running Windows and the Visual Studio development environment!

    Cheers
    Nick

    ReplyDelete
  3. Venkatesh Subramanian13 October 2010 at 11:04

    Awesome stuff. I'm impressed!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Fuzzycat21 October 2010 at 17:07

    Over a month ago you talked about an Android app and still nothing. Look at all the figures and you can clearly see that android is grabbing a bigger and bigger market share jumping other phone OS's. You continue to ignore it.

    Then what, oh yes, you release an app for an OS that has only been out for days, not years or months; days. Nice.

    I can only presume you want me to shop elsewhere, so perhaps you'd like to stop sending me all those 'Please do some shopping with us we'll pay for delivery, honest" emails because I'm not going to do any shopping with Tesco until you get your finger out.



    FuzzyCat

    ReplyDelete
  5. sas24 December 2010 at 22:34

    Hello again Nick!
    We've got end of december now and still no Tesco app for my droid.Can't you see that Android is gaining market share much quicker than iOS? So iPhone app is available for ages now, winmo7 is out as well, but where's something for my droid? There's enough developers on the market to do this. Surely it ca't be difficult to port app from iOS to Android and tweak it or even write a new on from scratch. Can you shed some light on this? I can beta test it if needed.
    Many thanks
    Mario
    Oxford Magdalen 6292

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous29 June 2011 at 09:10

    Hi to the innovation team
    I have spent about 7 year from
    2000 - 2007 using and studying very carefully the UK supermarket chains from a purely private entrepreneurial point.
    Tesco appeared as 'the winner' in this very private rating though I really wish I could help a better and less chaotic service as well as some true new ideas for quicker service and higher hygiene implemented.

    ReplyDelete

As this blog grows in readership - and because it carries the Tesco brand - I have had to become more careful about the sort of comments that are acceptable. The good news is that I'm a champion of free speech so please be as praising or as critical as you wish! The only comments I DON'T allow through are:

1. Comments which criticise an individual other than myself, or are critical of an organisation other than Tesco. This is simply because they cannot defend themselves so is unfair and possibly libellous. Comments about some aspect of Tesco being better/worse than another equivalent organisation are allowed as long as you start by saying "in my personal opinion.." or "I think that...". ... followed by a "...because.." and some reasoned argument.

2. Comments which are totally unrelated to the context of the original article. If I have written about a mobile app and you start complaining about the price of potatoes then your comment isn't going stay for long!

3. Advertising / web links / spam.

4. Insulting / obscene messages.


Ok, rules done - now it's your go:

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