Defining who/what you are, & more importantly, what you are not

FoundIt has evolved, a little at a time, but based on my own fascination with helping to get to information when we need it. The problems now are problems of plenty: there is too much information even on our own computers, & a lot of what we do everyday may be easily avoided, if only we remembered that we had done this before, & have the stuff somewhere.

So the current FoundIt you see now is one that has grown organically out of our understanding & experiences with managing information,as well as what some early user surveys revealed. But this version is still an underpainting. Those of you not familiar with this term, an underpainting comprises the initial broad strokes that a painter puts on the canvas, to essentially map out masses & tones on the canvas, oftentimes using a single color such as sepia or a yellow ochre. This is a great means to break down all the decisions that go into a painting into manageable, distinguishable ones. Once the artist is happy with what he sees in the underpainting, she can start to put in more detail & volume & color.

So with FoundIt, the underpainting is in place. The way we hope to develop FoundIt is organically, based on your experiences & what you'd like to see the application do. I see the latest issue of Time magazine has 'You' as Person of the Year, because well, you control the information age. This isn't really as ridiculous as it sounds at first. There has been a huge shakedown of a lot of institutions in the last year or two: big media, publishing, social software that makes ordinary people capable of contributing to & being heard in a way never seen before. And as a designer, I do believe that the best applications need to be made from the inside out, growing & developing based on actual needs & experiences. So FoundIt will continue its goal of an application that brings your key information to the forefront, just in time, every time.

And equally we have to be clear about what we will not be. In the recent weeks that we have been promoting FoundIt with various groups/ people, blogs, we have heard back from a Venture Capitalist or two that they are interested only in funding social software. That's interesting but oddly, we had gotten in touch with them because they are avid bloggers & not because we were looking for VC money. But it certainly got me thinking that if one did need a lot of money to get up & running, one would spend not only a lot of time & energy in other activities such as writing business plans & making ridiculous 5 year forecasts, but that one would also be under immense pressure to alter the complexion & nature of the product. We are more than willing to shape this & other products based on user feedback; but to have a financier twist you out of shape simply because everyone in their tribe is looking to birth the next YouTube or MySpace is absurd. At least to me. And thankfully for us, we do not need millions of dollars to bring our ideas to fruition.

And so we will continue down the path of organic, evolutionary growth.