This week in San Francisco I got the chance to finally meet up with my cofounder after just over 7 months of working together. It was a pleasure talking in person with Tyler and his wife Heather, they both made the long journey down from Portland by car. Our first meet up was to attend the Tech Crunch 5 year reunion, which was a little too loud for conversation level. We headed out early to catch a trolley down to Fishermen's Wharf and hung out on the patio by our hotel playing with the iPad and talking over interfaces. Thankfully Heather and Michelle kept each other company so neither of them was too bored listening to Victus Media techno babble.
It feels like both an eternity and the blink of an eye when we began working together last October on an alpha version of the Intelligent Media Manager. We've refined the design of that social browser to focus it much more heavily on people instead of ads, and since then added several more utilities to our reportoire. Both Tyler and I have made big strides with web development which is helping towards our next hurdle, achieving social proof with a product (traction, membership growth, etc).
Techno Babble
Technically, I have some homework this week after work to kick up a Thin/Sinatra client to see how it plays differently from other dev environments (no instance variables, simpler file structure) and read up on comet implementations. After that I'll begin work with melding the curatool front end to our OpenGard.in back end by breaking the task up into fragments (understand the python/GAE setup, extract a stand alone JavaScript example, and then refine the interface to OG). I'd like to kick up a simple iPhone/iPad app time permitting. A touch manipulative interface front end to the Curatool/OpenGard.in has piqued my curiousity.