I’m using this blog to test an early version of a media player widget that ScribeStorm is developing for our 3Mix portal. If you look to your right below you will see a widget for the band She Swings She Sways. Have a listen, let me know if it breaks and offer feedback.

We received a number of submissions for our alpha launch and chose She Swings She Sways as our first band because they are local (Ottumwa Iowa) and they sounds great.

P.S. - we’re looking for local investors to keep development going to our release. I’m available for a presentation of our unique model - email me at info {@} scribestorm.com.

Bugs and issues we know of:

1. Band name not obvious unless you play a song. We’re designing a way to make the band name much more prominent.
2. The top bar looks like crap. Our design “department” is working on it.
3. Tour Dates is broken. This is because of a MySpace error (we grab tour dates from MySpace).
4. The Bose ad is a placeholder. Soon to be replaced by something the band approves of and is local.
5. Clicking quickly between “Songs” and “Extras” will break the menu item that has focus.

The ScribeStorm website has never been a priority. Our plates have been full with so many other urgent projects that the one I threw together and designed last year stayed up for a long time. After months of searching I finally found a kick ass designer who’s vision fits well with the team and he produced a cool design for us three months back.

After some delays in launching our site it is finally completed and our blog is functioning. And Collin and Dave are already blogging (which makes me happy for some unclear reason).

Not sure who the audience will be other than prospective employees, clients and investors, but then again it is a “company blog”. But there are some cool company blogs out there. My friend Ariel’s Microsoft Blog comes to mind.

During the WHO TV interview the other day I was asked how long we’ve been in this office (here in Fairfield). I said, “about a year”. And then it struck me - February 10th would have been our one year anniversary. Wow that went fast.

We moved here in November 2006 and I started working with Milo, our first hire here in Fairfield, out of my home office in December. Then in February we hired Mike and moved into our current office space. It took a while longer to build out the team with additional skilled developers, but there are now six of us altogether in the office.

We’re also coming up on a one year after we received our angel funding. We used that funding to develop and build the production process for the software portion of Warner Music Group’s MVI format (an attempt to revitalize Disc based delivery of music). We were told there would be 30+ titles a year, but were unable to secure a contract for that number. That was a red flag we saw back in the Summer of last year that as a management team we should have addressed. We’ve produced just shy of 20 MVIs since last May. However that faucet seems to have turned off since the beginning of this year. It’s unclear when, or if, we’ll see another MVI project come in and because of that we had to lay off our multi-media developer last month.

Lesson 1: never develop another company’s product without a contract or other strategic relationship in writing. In our defense, we were advised by our investor not to pursue a contract.

We were also hit hard by the fall of HD-DVD. I still argue that HD-DVD was a better technology than Blu-Ray, but it was marketing and partnerships that won the format war and not technological benefits for the consumer. Our software has the ability to power either format, however the Blu-Ray format is not at the point where it can utilize the interactive features we developed.

Lesson 2: you can be too early. There’s a lot of pressure to be first to market. But if you show up and there’s no market . . . We developed interactive technology for a platform and client base that isn’t ready, and may never be (see VOD).

The good news in all this is that these mistakes have forced us to focus on our talents and our vision of how media delivery should work online. Which brings me to . . .

Lesson 3: follow your passion and instinct. If you don’t, you’re wasting everyone’s time, including the people who disagree with you.

So now the really challenging part. We’re head down, developing our vision of a three tiered online media marketplace. Everyone we talk to is excited about the model and eager to be involved. It’s the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on. We’re two months away from our beta release and we’ve got barely two months of cash to get us there. We need a second round to add 5 more positions here in Fairfield and a sales and marketing team.

We’re starting a tour of Venture Capital firms on the West coast to pitch our model. And I’m trying to find the right people in Fairfield and greater Iowa to present to as well.

I’ve grown fond of the team we have built here in Fairfield and I feel a responsibility to keep the team together so we can deliver the product that has been the result of a great collaboration over the past year. And that’s really what this office is all about for me - the opportunity to build a dream project. If we can find the capital to allow us to fully execute our vision, I am confident we’ll be here another year.

As part of a story on Lisco’s Fiber to the Home project, WHO TV (channel 13) stopped by the office Friday to see how the ScribeStorm development team is taking advantage of the fiber optic service. Roger Riley, the camera man from WHO TV, seemed very interested in the technology we’re building and ended up spending some extra time interviewing and filming the team members. Great guy with a fun job - he gets to fly around in a helicopter all week, meeting and filming people and places.

The story is scheduled to be aired Monday, March 3rd at 5pm. I’m a little scared to see how I turned out on camera. I felt the introvert in me creeping out the entire time the camera was pointing at me.

Our designer is nearly finished with the avatars of the ScribeStorm development team. Here’s a sample of them with our new logo. He captured my bad hair day pretty well.

Three more iPhones arrived at the office this morning. I know this looks like unshameful startup spending but it’s not. We’ve been spending money (lots of money) on long distance calls between Fairfield and the West Coast and with AT&Ts mobile to mobile free calling plan we can pay for the new iPhones with our long distance savings in a month’s time (actually in about 3 weeks time going by our last bill).

We’ve also been dragging our feet to install a full fledged phone system with handsets on each desk, multiple extensions and conference calling. But the iPhone’s conference calling is pretty slick and again, we save the cost of installing an office phone system.

But wait there’s more!

ScribeStorm’s email is hosted by Google Apps, which means we’re on the Gmail platform (no Outlook server for us), and gmail on the iPhone is a treat to use. Now we all have one number to reach us at our desk or on the move, and it’s a cool iPhone to boot.

One of my tasks as CTO of ScribeStorm is to come up with engaging features for new media platforms. Currently I’m focused on the HD-DVD format. For those that are not familiar with HD-DVD, it is a new type of DVD format that essentially provides three improvements over standard DVD:

1. High definition video.
2. Interactive menus (this means that you can pull up the menu window while the video is playing and not have to go back and forth between stopping playback and selecting new scenes or set up features).
3. Connection to the Internet. HD-DVD players have an ethernet port which allows you to connect the player to the Internet. This allows for data to be pulled from the web, right into the video playback stream.

What ScribeStorm does in the HD-DVD space is focus on building features that take advantage of #3. On that note I’d like to perform a little market research here and ask readers to post what they would like see in a connected feature. Meaning, what type of information would be interesting to you that could be accessed either while the movie is playing (perhaps in a little pop up window) or accessed as a separate feature from the menu (as in you stop playback and the screen is devoted completely to another feature).

I’m looking for out of the box, home movie fan thinking.

Legal: all ideas posted to this article become public domain. By posting an idea you agree that no person or other legal entity can establish or maintain proprietary interests within a particular legal jurisdiction. Your idea will be considered to be part of a common cultural and intellectual heritage, which, in general, anyone may use or exploit, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

I’m sitting here working with Collin in the Technicolor offices and just felt that rolling motion like you’re on a boat out on the ocean . . . except we’re in an office building.

Not that big (knock on wood) at magnitude 4.7 - click here for details.

I turned to Collin about mid way through the quake and posited, “we’re having an earthquake?” His face went white - this was his first.

There’s a chess set in the courtyard between the Technicolor and Yahoo! offices in Burbank that can be seen from space. Well at least from a Google spy satellite.

Milo, Sam and Collin standing near the same chess set.

I’m over half way through my three week trip to Burbank. I’ve got two ScribeStorm developers with me working on site (consulting) at Technicolor on a project I can’t talk about right now. It’s been exciting and exhausting, fun and stressful. There’s been very little smog, but the heat has been pushing past 100 degrees daily.

We work long hours with few breaks, but the food has been great - in addition to the great dining Burbank has to offer, the cafeteria shared by Technicolor and Yahoo! is yummy. I’m gaining weight for the first time in . . . well since I was like 2.

The best part, and biggest irony, is that my commute these weeks in Burbank is even shorter than my commute back in Fairfield. I am actually walking to work from the hotel. Who walks to work in southern California? It’s crazy. The Marriott we’re staying at is right next door to the office building and one of the entrances to the office is less than a hundred yards from the hotel. We didn’t even plan it that way. The first day here we drove out of the Marriot parking lot and then drove into the parking garage right next door - it was comical.