Pek Pongpaet

I’ve known about Animoto since I first saw them at SXSW last year. I recall they had booth babes in short skirts and boots. Anywhoooo… I digress. These guys have an amazing product that is super easy to use. It’s a slideshow creator that generates a video slideshow of the photos of your choosing. You can upload your photos or import them from a variety of online sources.

Their slideshows are really cool. The number of awards they’ve won speaks volumes of the sleekness of their videos. Here’s one I made from one of my Flickr photosets.

What I like about Animoto as a company is that they have a REAL business model. You can create a free 30 second slideshow at low resolution. If you want a full length one in a higher resolution then you cough up some dough. Also, you can order a DVD of said slideshow for a fee. They have some other business models as well I’m sure.

This year while at SXSW, I got to meet Tom Clifton and Erik Bjornard from Animoto. They’re really cool guys so I thought I’d give them some link love and finally get around to blogging about their product.

Popularity: 8% [?]

My friends Shelly and David have been hard at work at Autodesk ever since their company was acquired and wanted to share their brainchild with me. Project Dragonfly is a free web based application available through the Autodesk labs site that allows you to create home floor plans complete with furnishing in top view 2D mode or 3D isometric view. I saw an earlier version a few months back, and it’s really quite impressive.

What’s amazing about this application is how intelligent the system is. Objects that belong on the wall automatically attach themselves to the closest wall. There is built-in collision detection so you don’t create furniture abominations. Objects that belong on the floor such as rugs automagically go underneath sofas.

For you tech geeks, you should know that this is all done in 3D and the performance of the application is amazing considering how many 3D objects there can be in the scene all with pretty high resolution textures.

Read more about it here.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Monday I had the opportunity to go to Jelly. What is Jelly? According to the official Jelly website:

Jelly is casual coworking. We invite people to work from our home for the day. We provide chairs and sofas, wireless internet, and interesting people to talk to, collaborate with, and bounce ideas off of.

The Chicago Jelly meets at the Noble Tree on Mondays and Wednesdays from noon to 4PM at the Noble Tree Coffee on 2444 N Clark. You’ll find all types of people showing up from designers, programmers, business types and so on who either have a very flexible day job or are freelancers or have their own startup. Anybody’s free to join. The idea is the alternative is just sitting either at home by your lonesome or in a cube.

Pek goes to Jelly on his day off work. What a nerd.

Jelly’s a very cool way to network, bounce ideas off people, and just be more productive. If I had a question, I’ll just throw it out there. Chances are somebody has an idea.

For more information on Jelly Chicago, visit this website.

Popularity: unranked [?]

This is my first Tech Cocktail. I’ve been wanting to go for a while and I missed the last one. This one was held at John Barleycorn in Wrigleyville. A few startups showed their wares. I got there at 6 and it was pretty dead. However the place got packed pretty quick. By the time I left it was standing room packed. It was just insane. I’m glad I went though as I met some really cool people as well as ran into some old friends. The likemind crowd was there. My old buddy Jason Rexilius who owns HosteLABS and runs BARCamp Chicago was there and FINALLY introduced me to Harper and the other Threadless guys. I’ve been wanting to meet them for a while now. Threadless, in case you are not familiar with, is a brilliant company. On the surface, they sell t-shirts. The beauty of it is that they don’t design the t-shirts. The designs are crowd-sourced from designers and artists all over the world who submit their designs to Threadless. Visitors vote on which designs are cool and ultimately determine which designs will be printed. The winning designer gets a cash prize.

On to some of the cool people I’ve met:

• Andrew Huff, from Gapers Block, a web publication about Chicago
• Ars Technica – I met a few of the editors there. I didn’t realize these guys are from Chicago. It’s a technology blog so you know I am a big Ars Technica fan.

So here are some of the cool companies I saw:

• callpod – mobile device hub charger. Their product looked very stylish. It’s Chicago based, but they outsource the manufacturing to China and Malaysia.
• mocklinkr is an online mockup collaboration tool. They just launched today. I poked around their website before coming to the event but there wasn’t much there. They had a really cool video demoing the product at Tech Cocktail though. It looks very promising.

All in all, this excursion was a success unlike some of the other tech events I’ve been to. I’ll probably go again next time.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Zappos.com is an online store that sells shoes and is slowly adding more and more products. That may not sound very impressive but they are on target for doing $1B in sales for 2008. For an 8 year old company, that’s not too shabby. I only first heard about Zappos.com at SXSW. Tony Hsieh the CEO gave a presentation on Top 10 Lessons Learned in E-Commerce. Below is the slide.

I was very impressed by his talk. It had nothing to do with technology or fads or tricks. Rather his talk was about good old customer service and treating the customer right. Very few companies go above and beyond the way Zappos does. Nowadays, companies want automated machines to be the first line of defense, with an actual human being the last thing they want their customer to interact with. He had many stories about Zappos customer service reps, who on their own, went out of their way to help customers. He’s instilled a culture of excellent service that has generated great word-of-mouth for Zappos.

Just to set the record, I have yet to actually BUY anything from Zappos. As much as I like shoes, I also enjoy the process of trying them on, touching and feeling my merchandise before I make a purchase. I know I can do that by ordering a whole bunch of shoes from Zappos and sending back the ones I don’t want for free. That just seems kinda wrong somehow.

Anyways, all I know from Zappos comes from my episode at SXSW and from various blogs and sites about startups and entrepreneurs. Which takes me to my story. I read somewhere that Zappos publishes an annual culture book for their employees. That book is available for purchase on their website. And since they had such happy customers as well as employees, I wanted to learn more about that by reading their book. Well, I spent a few minutes on the site and could not find it. Since I follow Tony on Twitter (cuz that’s how I roll), I decided to message him to ask where I could find his culture book. A couple hours later he messages me back asking my mailing address so he can mail me the book for free. We email each other back and forth for a bit and he invites me to take a tour of Zappos if I’m ever in Vegas. I was just in awe. This guy probably gets flooded with tweets and email all day, but he’s taking the time to personally respond to me. I’m not even a customer. I also get an email from Zappos saying that the book has been shipped with a tracking number. Having heard stories of their overnight deliveries, I was not suprised to see the book arrive at the office in the morning the next day.

I’ve briefly read bits of the Zappos 2008 Culture book which is basically a collection of every employee’s thoughts on the Zappos culture. It’s my impression that everyone sincerely loves being there. It’s both awe inspiring and contagious. With so many people working at jobs they either hate or have no feelings for, it’s refreshing to see a company that makes people excited to work there.

I want to end with a video that is currently featured on the bottom of the Zappos homepage. I’ll probably have to try buying something from Zappos.com now, but it probably won’t be shoes.

Popularity: unranked [?]