I heard about a new company in Seattle which is supposed to be kind of interesting but I don’t yet know what they do. Some of the developers who work there seem pretty bright. I heard they were raising money so maybe we’ll hear from them.
Archive for February, 2006
Some folks who know us here at the office of curiosity know we’re working on a new web platform called ImageKind. There aren’t too many good reasons to totally spill our guts about what we’re trying to do but I can say its supposed to be a fun place to build and buy things made from digital imagery. Being the internet-cultured folk that we are, I’ve worked hard to ensure that we pay special attention to things like usability, remixability and other so-called web2.0 tenets. I can say with a straight face that we’re not doing this because its (still just barely) trendy to say such things but because I think we can take great cues and lessons from other web platforms that have been successful. You know who they are. I’m sure I the last person in the blogsphere to have read this post by the good folks over at Adaptive Path but that’s ok. I was, however, a bit interested to take a few moments and reflect on how our own internal thinking maps to this essay. I find we’re taking nearly all of these observations into account in our planning though we certainly weren’t using the fancy verbiage such as “Foundation Attributes” in our internal project planning process.
In our case, we’re pretty much focused on building a business that makes money from sales of good (e-commerce). One thing that this essay didn’t spend much time talking about was promotional tactics. It strikes me that there are old ways of driving traffic, new ways of driving traffic, and a few tricks that marry old and new. For example, in this so-called web2.0 context there’s a more deliberate rejection of paid advertising, TV spots, print catalogs etc. Word of mouth plays a much more important role. So does blogging. It is an interesting issue. You can build the most compelling new app and still not develop enough of a userbase for any of it to matter. All the shared calendars and project management systems coming online lead me to believe that 2006 will plow under many of these passionately developed systems. Driving traffic and converting visitors to buyers is something we spend way more time worrying about than just about everything else.
Though I maintain a blog over on my personal site at kellysmith.com I am still embarrassed to admit that it took this long to get a blog up and running for our company Curious Office. Inexcusable. Laughable. Even pathetic. I got flamed more than a few times…even once last week from Scoble and I didn’t even bother responding because he’s right. I figured the moments spent trying to come up with a clever response would be best served installing WordPress.
So, here it is. I’ll post each and every day except on days where I don’t post.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Curious Office, I encourage you to read a few of the press links in the sidebar of the main site. Also, I understand we’ll have brief mention in a national business/tech magazine who’s name you know so look for that next month. On this blog, I’ll spend my time musing on the trials and tribulations of launching a new start-up, web apps I like and don’t like, companies I think will be successful and people who inspire all of us here at the office that’s curious.
