The Lunch break entrepreneur

My friend Thomas just launched escapeer.com, a site that makes it easy to find leisure and adventure activities. The site makes it a easier to find and book activities and it's pretty complex. It will only get better as more activity providers sign up.

Activities can be booked instantly online – 24 hours a day and the site has a sophisticated inventory management system that allow service providers to manage their activities and users to find and book them in an easy, simple, comparable manner.

Pretty cool!

The NYT has an article about a recent project that we did at frog design where I work as Director of Business Development. The project; a point-of-sale device concept for Intel. We took the retail experience and pushed the limit in terms of the user experience and sustainability. The display incorporates many of the elements of cross-sell you will find on the web and is much more eco-friendly than conventional cash registers. The user interface is amazing and it got a great reception.

Why spend all that time getting ideas out? I was just checking the top iPhone apps on TIME and saw that my idea for a near location based app was the number 2 app on itunes. Kicking myself repeatedly for not doing it sooner. I didn't know enough about iphone apps to create one at the time, but developed the idea on www.swiftmap.com. It's got more legs than the site currently shows so if I win the lottery it might just get made.

Currently I am working on two additional iPhone concepts, one is a light social networking app around summershares, an popular way of sharing summer houses for those not familiar with the term, the other is a music app with what I belive is huge potential. The sumrshr.com idea is not to create a massive new social network, but to make all the tasks of running and participating in summer and wintershares fun and easy. As always I try to develop the concept online first, developing online is fast and cheap and it help trouble shoot concepts, and I believe it's good to have a web based destination to supplement the iPhone apps.

I am now blogging using the new flock 2.0 browser and it's pretty awesome. I essentially have all my social networks and assets under one roof. Blogging, Facebook, upload to YouTube and Flickr etc, you name it.

The flock browser is built on Mozilla so it has the same site compatibility as FireFox which is great, you are not using a brand new browser such as Google's Chrome.

I recommend giving it a try.

And of course you have to have some fun in between ....

I want to make sure that I have every detail of sumrshr.com mapped out and all functionality accounted for. When I turn the site over to programmers its full steam ahead and doing detailed wire frames helps resolve most issues before they become expensive during programming. I spend a lot of time on this and run them past friends often to get feedback. I pretty much have it down during the process I have eliminated some features that I think will add more cost than benefit. Here's a picture from the living room mess.

I wanted to use a tool that I can find everywhere so this time I used ... PowerPoint. I am in the interactive industry and have built many large complex web sites so I'll probably hear a lot about that, but it is actually working out very well. PowerPoint is easy to use, anyone has it on their PC so when I am showing it to someone I can make changes on the fly. And PowerPoint can be hyper linked so that I was able to create a simple prototype by exporting it and uploading to a server. This has allowed my to share it with others and do some really rapid prototyping. If I had used Visio it would have looked more professional which is good with clients, but it would have taken me ages.

So far the feature set is as follows:

• Registration
• Create summer share home page
• Invite friends
• Browse summer shares (browse home pages)
• Upload photos (house, personal and profile)
• Discussion boards / chat
• Personal profiles
• Announcement (from admin)
• To do list / shopping list
• Calendar
• House email
• Weekly house email update
• Fan / friends of the house
• Members management
• House info
• House rules manager
• Friend finder
• Google maps

• Import profile from facebook, myspace, hotmail etc.
• Import friends from facebook, myspace, hotmail etc.
• Chat from meebo.com
• Payment from Paypal
• Image resizing from GD or ImageMagick (not misspelled)

The logo. The six figure branding exercise with identity design. Yea I forgot about that. Since I have decided to do this site on a lunch break budget I used http://creatr.cc/creatr/ to "develop" my logo. I came up with a nice effect, the name sumrshr.com is easy to remember by itself and I can add some logo creative to the end of it down the road if all goes well. The fact is this that large companies rebrand themselves all the time and spend a lot of money doing it. That makes all the sense in the world because they spent millions building a brand already, I haven't. So with some experience I can say that my logo is just right.