EdgeCloud

Day in, day out, all I hear is “why haven’t you blogged yet?” Well, here I am, Rick! Happy? Blogalicious.

Anyhow, enough ribbing on ol’ Rick. He’s about 40 posts ahead of me, so I can’t really talk. Speaking of talking, though, what am I to write about? That’s what I kept asking him and he didn’t really care. And so, my first post is prolly going to ramble. I apologize in advance, and will accept chastizing with a repayment of only thrice. You’re welcome. That’s my Special First-Post Deal.

So EdgeCloud, huh? Man, what a roller coaster ride. Laws, regulations, accounting, customers. Products, late nights, cokes and laughs. And still more to learn. Looking back, it’s hard to believe how far we’ve come. Looking forward, it’s daunting to think how far we’ve yet to go. So many plans, hopes and dreams. And yet, only 24 hours in a day. Of which, sleeping, eating and working “the day job” take up a substantial part. Leaving precious few hours to hack at EdgeCloud.

And of course, to maintain our sanity we still have to relax with hobbies, families and other distractions. For example, music. I have music playing probably 90% of the time I’m awake. I listen to most everything.. Techno’s my favorite, by far. But I listen to rock, jazz, classical, opera ( occasionally ), swing; just about everything.. Right now I’m enjoying some Nat King Cole. You ever heard “Mr Cole Won’t Rock and Roll”? Great song. Very tongue in cheek. Check it out sometime. Oh, and I have to make a confession. *deep breath* I love ’80s music. Erasure? Duran Duran? Oh HELL yes, and many, many more groups. There will be posts dedicated to such things in the future. I’ll try and preface them with a warning and disclaimer for you Non-Believers.

Then I have a “few” projects. I’m sure over time you’ll hear about them, but the one I’ve been working on recently is my old Subaru. I picked up this ancient Subaru XT Turbo for $350 a few months ago. 1986. Oh yes - 20 years old. It was running when I got it - but sadly the drive home was too much - oil pump seized up and ate one of the timing belts. Anyhow, I’ve been rebuilding it and have some preliminary pics and descriptions up here. Just got her running again earlier this week, so hopefully I’ll be cruising in the Death Star soon! ( When I update that site with exterior and interior shots of the car, you’ll see why I call it the Death Star )

Wordy! I can get long winded once wound up. Kinda like those toys, I guess. On that note, I sign off. I’ll be better about this blogging thing, both in quantity *and* quality.

Cheers

The name EdgeCloud, was pieced together by Nathan and I on a Sunday evening a little over two months ago (you can see that from a quick whois check). After racking our brains for what seemed like an eternity the eureka moment of EdgeCloud made itself known to us. I believe Nathan actually enjoys the honor of speaking the name first - it stuck with the both of us though, even after deciding to sleep on it for a night.

Cybersquatters don’t make things easy for those trying to “earn an honest domain.” Every conceivable (and not so conceivable) combination of wording in the english language is shrouded by a page that retorts that the domain can be had for “$888″ and given our modest beginnings we simply mumbled a few choice words and moved on.

The name is important enough that even after number of such squatters’ pages we continued on, braving the new world ruled by these creative-spark-killers. We poured over numerous books and wikipedia entries, looking for keywords, ideas and practices that we could use to generate new names. I had picked up nameboy (since that seemed to work out for my previous gig “Axiomfire”, which I always thought was a cool name) and started using it repeatedly to sift through combinations. The only other word that stood out to us was Axon but even that was problematic and there were already hundreds of domains with that name taken. Additionally, we wanted to avoid using suffixes like “systems”, “technologies” or “enterprises.” We wanted a single name that said it all, was less than three syllables and didn’t use any extra suffix modifiers.

And EdgeCloud was it. Nathan and I concluded adamantly that it was probably taken but a cursory check concluded that it was still available. But we didn’t grab it at that moment. We slept on it and in the morning after still liking it, we purchased the major TLD versions of the name.

Visually, I think the name is striking. It evokes so many different thoughts and gives so many soft, subtle, yet distinct sets of imagery. Luckily, we were able to find a font to match that sensation from House Industries. If you are ever in need of a font - or design inspiration, then head on over to their site. These guys are kick-ass. (Perhaps more later on the massive, hard-bound, nicely-printed book received with said font package purchase).

Rendered font and all, we forged ahead. I made some minor modifications to give a “cloud” illustration to the logo name area itself. It went through many revisions to get to where it’s at today. I’ve never felt it was complete, but I do feel it’s currently in a reasonable and comfortable place for doing business.

So what is an EdgeCloud? A Google search seems to indicate something along the lines of a star nursery here in the Milky Way (EdgeCloud2). Regardless of any explicit definition I certainly feel that the name provides us with a very strong branding opportunity and I hope we’ll be able to leverage that here in the coming months. It’s interesting to see how strong the desire has been to identify the business even from conception. Even more telling was the compulsion to say that something as simple as “Great Web Applications, Inc.” just wouldn’t do. No, No. It’s about creativity, passion, discipline and intelligence. It’s about “rigid flexibility” and understanding where you fit in the grand scheme of things (either personally or in your market). And it’s definitely about providing a brand that evokes a positive response or emotion whenever it is seen or heard.

What’s in a name? Everything…

With new projects I usually like to take some aspect of it and utilize a new resource, tool or strategy to implement it. This ensures that I’m able to get the job done and thoroughly review new items/ideas to see if I can integrate them into my usual practices. I recently started on a flyer and thought that I might use Apple’s Pages from it’s iWork ‘06 series. Luckily, a free trial comes with iLife ‘06 (which I just upgraded to) and so I decided to give it a spin. My short review: I don’t pull my hair out nearly as much with pages as I do with Word. And that’s saying a lot. There are plenty of times when Word is simply overkill for doing layout based writing vs content based writing and usually to the detriment (or hair) of the author. I’m not well versed in Quark or InDesign (yet) but I don’t necessarily need those for what I’m trying to achieve, which in this case is a simple flyer.

The templates presented to you on launch are rather nice and elegant but certainly didn’t fit my needs. I could see where they might fit nicely into a number of user categories and fill the needs of mosts but I wanted more control. Undaunted, I started with a blank template (gasp!). I guess the more difficult aspect of this was simply my not knowing how I wanted the flyer to really come out. I was an empty glass ready to be filled. Luckily, Pages is pretty easy to navigate and the controls to do things that you easily want to perform often (font changes, line-height and spacing, shapes, etc.) are readily available and there isn’t the endless insanity of menus and toolbars to rove through. I had no problem navigating any adjustments to my document. Granted, my document ends up being rather tame for a Pages doc but this is my first time out of the gate.

Now, the other aspect of this is the flyer itself. After a long day it’s terribly difficult to find the right words to express your marketing message in a clear and concise (and exciting!) manner. Even for the English degree (yours truly) it can be difficult. So the copy is still in flux but I’m ok with the design (though maybe more vibrant colors would be useful). I really wanted the logo to stand out in the flyer and I didn’t want to put in any stock photos (I’m anti-stock photo unless the marketing message is very clear) in there either. Check it out. Odds are this will change anyway as we start gravitating towards specific market segments. Time will tell.

This blog, hopefully, will serve as a means by which to share our experiences in forming EdgeCloud in the hopes of helping others. Already, I can tell you there is much to share and I am thankful to have learned so much in such a short time. I hope that our adventures here will be enlightening and that they will also provide some insight into who we are as a company and what our intentions are within the next few months. I’ll try to post some background information as well which should provide some context into why this company was founded, where we come from and why we should be the choice for your next project on the web.

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog. Please bookmark us or grab the feed and keep an eye on us. There are many great things yet to come.

Cheers.