Over on our blog at Curious Office I was writing about developing our “web 2.0″ app using the .net 2.0 framework. To be honest, we didn’t decide in advance to develop ImageKind with Microsoft technologies. Initially, I discussed developing the whole project using a combination of Rails and PHP with Ben Curtis. But, I had several meetings with a friend and very experienced developer over at Microsoft who encouraged me to consider the .net framework given the details we shared about the project. I outlined the project requirements and then went looking for the best developers I could find. Once I found our lead developer (Dongxia Liu) I knew that our chosen technologies would revolve around her preferences and experience. Given the size and scope of our particular project, I have no doubt that the .net 2.0 framework was the right choice.

While Microsoft may not be as web2.0 trendy as Rails, that didn’t stop us from playing with the very trendy Lightbox script. This javascript allows you to overlay any content over your existing page…basically giving you an avenue to place content ON TOP of the page without worry about layout or column widths (and avoiding a less elegant ‘pop-up’ in the process). We modified the script and stylesheet to actually merge both lightbox and the super cool DHTML cropping app from Speedingrhino.com. Our users can crop images they are working on right on the page without leaving their workspace. Pretty cool stuff.

Just discovered http://www.flickr.com/photos/anetabadziag/ over on Flickr. Not a lot of content here but pretty interesting imagery nonetheless.

This company claims a patent win that enables them to charge anyone who has created rich media applications to include those deployed using “Flex, Java, Ajax, Flash etc”.

Fortunately, this article goes on to explain that “it’s possible that Balthaser may struggle to enforce its patent, because of prior art–the process where a patent is invalid if it can be proven that the innovation in question already existed before the patent was filed.”

I couldn’t say that if I were Balthaser that I’d actually attempt to enforce this patent for any amount of money. It just wouldn’t be worth the embarrasment and ridicule you’d have to endure.

I just finished a website for a friend that needed something up quickly. How about two hours worth? Could have been worse…

Cars and design.

Josh Davis of www.praystation.com has long been an online hero. But check out this latest project site he did with BMW.

Click on the link called “The making of the movie”.

So cool it makes me sick.

I just finished a meeting with a new friend who runs a fairly large business which provides promotional products to businesses of all kinds. This could include tee-shirt silk screening, custom hats, mugs, plagues, trinkets for tradeshow give-a-ways etc. Say you’re a general manager at a Mercedes dealer and you want to give away 500 fleece vests to your best VIP customers. You’d call my buddy. Or, you’re putting on a local golfing invitational for corporate or charity purposes and you want to give all the entrants a custom golf head cover with the event logo on it. You’d call my new friend. You get the idea.

Here’ s the amazing part. Getting a logo that is suitable for embroidery or printing typically requires a vector (EPS etc) version of the image. You think the typical Mercedes manager has the high-res vector of the original Mercedes logo? 99% of the time the answer “no” and “I have no idea what you’re talking about”. Yet, this promotional products business is a HUGE business. Most small businesses want their tee-shirts or windbreakers printed but all they have is a business card. Maybe they hired a graphics designer 5 years ago to make the card but never got (or asked for) the original vector artwork. Since the vast majority of customers who order products like this do not have imagery suitable for commercial printing, my friend realized there was a business opportunity. Now, he just asks for his customers business cards or letterhead and he tells his customers they don’t need to worry about the complexity of the printing process. He charges them a small fee to “prepare” the artwork and he does all the dirty work involved to find suitable vendors of golf head cover makers.

Today, he was telling me that he now has 100 employees in China working in a new 16,000 square foot facility doing NOTHING but tracing artwork via Adobe Illustrator for purposes of printing. One hundred people tracing logos! That’s all they do!

That logo tracing side of his business brought in approximately $5,000,000 last year!!!

I expressed my amazement and he simply said, “what it really boils down to is that I’m in the business of doing things other people really don’t want to care about or do”. How true! If you’re running a car dealership, do you really want to get a tutorial on the printing business? No. Do you really have time to source golf club head cover manufacturers in China? No! Being really, really good at something that absolutely nobody wants to do isn’t a bad way to make money. Hmm, guess that is why I keep paying my housecleaner…

I’ve been doing the interface for an internal software project called ImageKind that we’ve been focused on over at Curious Office. The last few days, we’ve been developing a shopping cart from scratch because we want it to look and function exactly according to our specifications. One thing we debated was whether or not we would let people buy products without creating an account of any kind. For example, on www.art.com you can add a product to your cart and get all the way through the checkout process without actually providing a username and password. On other sites like Cafe Press you must eventually enter a password as a new customer although you do it at the very end of a bunch of other form filling (e.g. address, email etc) so you aren’t really realizing that you are creating an account by the time you enter (and confirm) your password. I debated how we would approach this for several hours. First, I thought that the goal should be to let people give you money via the lowest possible set of hurdles and that appeared to suggest that a username and password should be optional but not required. Then I realized that most of the work to purchase products is in fact entering mandatory information in the first place such as shipping address, billing address and credit card info. The extra few seconds to enter your email address once (as your username) and your new password twice (once and then again to confirm) is the easiest part! That bit takes about 8 seconds. Yet, once you do it, you get to skip having to enter all that other information next time you come back to the site. To me, that sounds like a reasonable trade off. But, users need to understand all these benefits of having an account. It isn’t immediately obvious. How about order tracking? Stored data. Address books. All that in exchange for an extra 8 seconds to provide a password. In our case, we’re requiring an email as username and password for those who want to make a purchase. I think it’s the right choice.

…so there’s this site that I follow pretty regularly called PaidContent.org. If you work (or have worked as in my case) in the digital media industry then this is a URL that is no stranger to your daily web surfing ritual. Last night Rafat and crew made a pass through Seattle and had a great little party which was largely sponsored by thePlatform - a company I merged with some time ago now and with whom my wife still works. I have to say this was a great time and it felt a bit “1999″ in terms of the energy, exuberance and optimism that hung in the air. In some ways it felt like a RealNetworks reunion party too because there were so many old faces I hadn’t seen in a very long time. In any case, I have to say that every single person I talked to said they were working so hard that there weren’t enough hours in the day to deal with all the opportunity. Indeed, I do believe we are witnessing a new wave in internet growth and innovation. Nobody complained and told me how tough times were. Not one person said that corporate checkbooks were held tightly or that buying processes were unordinarily slow. Whether the attendees were from the mobile sector (a lot were), media, software, consulting or even hardware…all agreed that life was good. Some even said we’re in a bubble!

I say, relish it and have fun. One thing that I really enjoy is hearing how well old friends are doing. George Kliavkoff over at Major League Baseball.com is now EVP pretty much in charge of all things deal related. VERY old Real alum Phil Yerkes announced he left the company yesterday to work on a wireless play and Jeff Schrock continues to carry the torch at Real and is liked by all. All my old friends are busy and we don’t get a chance to catch up near enough but I get a kick out of watching all my friends do well, move up, get promoted and succeed. The best part is, I can see they are enjoying it too. How great is that?

Michael Copeland at Business 2.0 wrote a great story this month about “How to find your angel”. It’s the March issue so if you are a subscriber it probably comes to your house this week. It should hit newstands soon. The article talks about our venture over at Curious Office and our interest in Peter Cooper’s fabulous FeedDigest product. Michael discusses everything from how to best attract early stage funding to how VC’s can work with or against angels to take companies to the next level. One thing the article didn’t talk about is what angels should expect from certain types of deals and how they may need to have a different behavior than an investor (like a VC) who may play a higher stakes game. One thing I learned early on was that you cannot expect to invest a small amount of money and then further expect your company to have all the infrastructure for reporting that a VC backed company might. Updates may come in the form of brief emails or quick phone calls vs. nice quarterly powerpoint presentations in a boardroom. Decisions are made fast and informally. Developers aren’t accountants or lawyers and sometimes things like balance sheets, income statements, non-disclosure agreements and other contracts lack the same sheen or structure that a larger company might provide you for your investment. This doesn’t mean things are broken. It just means you’re early and resources are limited. If the company is truly viable, it will grow and you’ll have to sit through PowerPoint briefings soon enough.

I met Jan and the gang over at Kasayka when they were just starting up. I opted to start Curious Office instead of joining them but I keep checking back to his great blog called Flow | State which deals with interface design in a much deeper way than just about anyone else you’ll ever meet. From 2001-2004, I was the user experience architect for the forthcoming release of Microsoft Windows Vista. Think you know interfaces and workflow? Give these posts a read and you’ll get a bit of enlightenment every time.