It’s good to get out and see some (other) start ups. SF Beta plays at the fun end of the spectrum. Set at the 111 Mina Gallery, it’s a light-hearted-demo-area-meets-schmooze-fest-meets-club-night (with great post-punk tunes on the soundsystem) frequented by SOMA’s connected cool-kids. I passed through there last night and here’s what I saw:* A location-based toilet finder called MizPee. Seriously. It was featured in Daily Candy no less…* A Dogster competitor called MyDogSpace. Apparently, they already have 200,000 users on a sister site called DateMyPet. Again, seriously.* Super functional cell phone social network Loopt. These guys are actually seriously serious. You can find them “on deck” with Boost mobile today, with a “big 3” carrier deal coming very soon.* And my favorite… Blabberize. Take a picture of your face, upload it, use simple photo-editing tools to select the mouth (which then moves up and down, Monty Python cartoon style), record a snippet of sound, upload that, and voila! It’s the simplest way to amuse yourself since YouTube came online.We’re going to do a me.cast with Blabberize’s founder, Mo Bouy, next month … so he can guide us around his site and show us the best Blabbers. The promotional campaign starts here!

It has been an interest of mine, since joining the forces of software engineering almost 20 years ago as a meteorological support hack, to study and write about the software development process. I’ve coded, administrated, authored a book about and managed software projects, and now I am embarking on my next challenge; Director of Software Development at Me.dium, Inc.Like every development organization, we manage tough schedules, conflict, and the tides of rapid change. What we don’t suffer from here, however, is a lack of passion. Passion is a force of enthusiastic commitment to an ideal, and the tireless actions that drive that commitment. Every engineer here, without exception, is devoted to solving a problem that has never been solved before: To further the ideal of building the people dimension of the Internet.Sound almost spiritual, rather than traditional software process and methodology? Well, okay. But we’re just not going to accomplish what we’ve set out to do at Me.dium, without spirit and passion. We have built a team of very smart and experienced people and we are generous with each other about sharing what we know.I’m continually - albeit pleasantly - surprised by this gem of an organization I stumbled on to. With a mixture of talent, commitment, skill and humor, we are solving some very cool problems of massive scale and compelling products that will dynamically generate community on the Internet.It’s not always easy, but pioneering rarely is.

Me.dium conveys a lot of information in a very small space. I’m used to working on products that use top-level, re-sizable, windows that effectively give you all the screen real-estate you need. That situation provides a ton of flexibility around what you can do in order to visually represent what you need to.Browser side-bars are another story entirely. You have a narrow strip of real-estate in which to convey your value. That’s a challenge for almost any application, but an amazing design challenge for something so packed with value and information, such as Me.dium.Working within boundaries does some strange things to you. For one, you pay more attention to design that you normally would. We’re lucky at Me.dium to have incredible designers/programmers that can seemingly design their way around any issue that comes up.One of the most challenging things we face is conveying a lot of information to the user, in a very short period of time. If you don’t understand what Me.dium is quickly, we lose our shot at having you become a member of our service. This has led to some incredibly powerful techniques being created and used in our product. We’ll be deploying a technique we call “Progressive Introduction” in the near future. The simplest way to describe it is to compare it to a movie trailer. A movie trailer can convey the salient points of a two-hour movie to you, often in 15-30 seconds. We’re using “Progressive Introduction” to convey the depth and value of Me.dium to you in a condensed period of time. I can’t wait for you to see it.Jud Valeski, Director, Product Management

Wow, there’s big buzz around the Me.dium offices today after winning the Webware 100 award.With an unbelievably talented and dedicated team of engineers as well as a host of others, who have been working very long hours, giving up weekends and having to explain to kids, spouses, and boy/girlfriends why they can’t make it home until late, it’s a wonderful thing to get some external acknowledgment for their efforts.However, this award also reminds us that the reason we are doing this, is to create something that of all of you value. And we heard from you with this award. You all voted for us against some very big competition and that means a whole lot more to us than you would think.It’s easy to get caught up in our own shorts talking about things like funding, new releases, etc. But when our users vote, we have to remember that that vote can always go either way. So, thanks again for reminding us why we’re doing this and never hold back with the real time input: good, bad and ugly - we need it all.You have every right to post a chat, drop us a note, or show up at our door and say, “Hey all you people at Me.dium, in case you’ve forgotten…it’s all about Me.!”

Woot!It’s just been announced that Me.dium is a winner in the Webware 100. We’re pretty stoked here at Me.dium HQ and we owe it all to you.We’re sending our congratulations out to all the other winners and asking the losers who their daddy is…Thanks again for the vote of confidence.