The last dozen years of working on multimedia and online communications have been a remarkable journey for me, and I'm looking forward to what will come next. Here, I take a few moments to share some highlights from that journey as well as my views of the road ahead.

Looking Back

Through the years I’ve already worked with a unique group of companies that have helped change the way things are done online. In 1999 my career started with MediaSynergy (flonetwork), building interactive commercials that were being delivered to users' inboxes, for the first time.  
In 2000 I moved on to work for DocSpace, a software company that quickly became the leading provider of web-based services for secure file delivery, storage and management. DocSpace was the first company of its kind to enable users to share, digitally sign and encrypt important files using only a web browser, instead of dedicated software. This changed the way businesses handled mission-critical files and made DocSpace an internet success story that was bought by Critical Path Inc for $568 million U.S.

My responsibilities at DocSpace included creating web branding and sales collateral, as well as easy to use interfaces and online training material that ensured that it was easy for users to understand how to use the service. Shortly after the acquisition by Critical Path, we joined the team in San Francisco and broadened our focus as a user-interaction group in order to take on a new challenge. Our goal was creating new prototypes for how all the tools and services could be combined and available over WAP using WL Decks and WMLScript. This was an amazing experience and was in fact remarkable considering we were building UI interfaces for cell phones in 2000.

When the Internet bubble burst in 2000, companies needed to trim their expenses and along came new opportunities. I joined Brett Marchand (known for revitalising brand Canada, by creating the ‘Rant’ TV spot) and partners at Onside Inc, and together we started an online business-to-business retail athletic service. Onside inc.'s technology allowed manufacturers to offer their customers the ability to design customized products using 3-D models and a rules-based engine, all within the parameters of basic structural and manufacturing rules. This enabled a buyer to view life-like, virtual samples of their designed product and see changes and modifications in real-time. 

We believed we were ahead of our time, as the photo realistic 3D models being created had to delivered over dial up connections. The models we created were 150KB and fully textured so that users could zoom in and out. The process was quite remarkable but proved to be a real challenge. Today you can see a similar example of this kind on online visualization service at http://nikeid.nike.com, which puts users in control to customize Nike products.

After onside, I took a break from working for smaller companies and decided to experience the fast paced world of corporate marketing by joining OnyxMG, one of the most successful marketing organizations in Canada, who's client roster included some of the most well known companies in North America. I was brought in to help them take their traditional in-store point of purchase marketing and deliver it online. While at OnyxMG I took part in creating the Skittle’s ‘Bite Me’ promotion which prompted users to enter a code found in their wrapper to get access to online games and prizes. I also worked on several other promotions and in 2003 we won the Promo! Award for our Duracell Fire Safety campaign.  

In 2001 an article caught my eye about the Hockey Hall of Fame, which had chosen Viewpoint and diginiche to showcase hockey’s highest honour, the Stanley Cup. While at Onside, we had used Barry Fogarty of diginiche to photograph and create the silhouette models that we used to produce the sporting apparel. Subsequently, in 2003, I joined diginiche, who by then had become one of North America’s leading providers of interactive online virtual tours places and products. 

We combined the art of photography and design with cutting-edge visualization technology to deliver high quality interactive images that invoked the experience of being in a place or interacting with an object. We helped some of the world’s most recognized brands such as Seiko, Ford, Toyota, HP, Hitachi,  to name a few, compete successfully in the global business environment. We created award-winning work that featured a variety of formats and technologies including 3D imaging and animation, CAD, virtual hosts and touch screens.

As a production and services business we faced a constant challenge in getting input, approval and sign off from creative directors at the ad agencies we worked with. Generally our clients were in L.A and New York and we never seemed to get that input and approval when we needed it. We tried using email and FTP, but nothing ever seemed to worked well enough. What we needed was a synchronous 3D viewer to view 3D models together online and get feedback and direction. We needed something simple that didn't require custom software, and we just couldn’t find anything that fit the bill, so we built it ourselves.

We created Octopz – an online collaboration service that was designed specifically to support the iterative ways in which we worked as creative professionals. With support for an unprecedented range of document types, intuitive mark-up tools, and built-in text messaging, VoIP and webcam capabilities, Octopz enabled team members to work securely, either together in real time or asynchronously, with all the work being saved automatically. Each session was easily retrieved and reviewed by anyone who had access to it, at anytime, and from anywhere. Our first-hand insight into the creative process informed every decision we made during the software’s development.

Octopz was eventually launched as a standalone service in the spring of 2007. On launch at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, we were named a finalist in the “Webware 100”, went on to be named as one of Canada’s Companies to Watch in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards, One of Branham’s ‘Top 25 Up and Comers’, grabbed a Top Award at the Inaugural Canadian Innovation Exchange and received a Pick 20 award as one of Canada’s twenty up and comers Web 2.0 pioneers who are leading the evolution of the Web and just this year were named one of the “10 Canadian Web 2.0 Companies to Watch”.

Looking Ahead

As more and more media messages come at us at an accelerated rate and fight for our finite attention, simplicity will become a greater competitive advantage going forward. And while PCs were once the primary means of accessing the internet, more and more people are turning to mobile devices to receive not only email and text messages but multimedia-rich information. We can look to Apple's iPhone at a great example. That single device is already displacing notebook computers for many people on the go, and most of its users are relatively young technophiles; half under the age of 30 and are soon going to be our main demographic. 

Many are wondering if the iPhone's success will fizzle out like most products that have littered the mobile industry landscape in its short history. In the early days of PDAs many people thought they would replace notebook computers. By in large, that didn’t happen; a PDA was not a good enough substitute. But today with the kinds of applications and information users can have access to on an iPhone or similar smartphone, the mobile devices seem finally poised to become the first choice of information workers. It will be very interesting to watch what will happen in the industry as Apple, Microsoft, RIM and Nokia, to name a few, position themselve to take leadership roles. Only time will really separate the winners from the losers.

But the most interesting part of this unfolding story to me is that more and more people are going to be using the mobile devices to get news and information. Whether by using text and multimedia messaging services, mobile search or geographic services, all these users will need powerful mobile devices with simple and effective interfaces to accomplish a wide range of tasks. More and more of these devices will soon be shipping with more PC-like graphical web browsers that will require websites and online services to be redesigned and redeveloped to be used more effectively on smaller screens.

As a designer, developer and mediamaker, I’m looking forward to tackling the challenges of making the web and other online services more compelling and effective on mobile devices as well as more accessible to a wider range of people from all walks of life.
Stay tuned for more dispatches and updates on this unfolding story.