Our client, Carlos Garcia of Scrapblog proved this week that embracing the chaos can expose exciting opportunities for a startup.
On Tuesday afternoon, Chris and I stopped by the Adobe booth at ETech to chat with Michelle Turner about Apollo. Adrian Ludwig was also there, preparing for the hot Apollo demo they were going to do on Thursday morning. Somewhere in the conversation Scrapblog came up and Adrian said, “You know, if they could get that working in Apollo by Thursday, we really need another great app to demo….”
So, instantly, I called Carlos, who only hesitated because he had been pushing his lead developer, Omar, so hard.
“I’ll see what Omar says.”
Carlos is a super organized guy. He sends us all sorts of timelines and feature roll out plans and has everything planned down to the minute of the day. A radical shift to building Scrapblog as an Apollo app was not in the cards for some time. Within a couple of hours, they confirmed that they would do it and Adrian jumped in with some Adobe resources to help them out.
They demo’d a beautiful Apollo version of Scrapblog this morning to many oooo’s and aaaaa’s.
But that isn’t the best part. The best part is that Scrapblog has also stepped up to help out Adobe by showcasing their new technology in a really schwank way, so, of course, Adobe is more than happy to continue showing this demo going forward and we look forward to seeing what else may transpire along the way. Carlos’ open-mindedness (and Omar’s amazing endurance!) has opened all sorts of doors that weren’t there previously.
I continuously try to make the point about actually getting yourself out there instead of sitting over a computer. Sure, opportunities don’t always arise when you are out and about, but they are more likely to. And you shouldn’t always be actively looking for them, either. You should just go to experience. When you are actively looking, you might be too focused and miss out on the hot opportunities. We stopped at the Apollo booth because we wanted to chat with Michelle about Apollo and mention our desire to do a Flashpit at the Adobe SF offices.
Carlos is great at recognizing this. The more he opens up and has faith, the more unplanned, but amazing opportunities will arise. It’s what keeps happening with Larry of Ma.gnolia.
Oh…and if you didn’t already know, Scrapblog is in beta testing mode. If you go to this URL, you can give it a whirl. I’m a little biased, but I think they’ve done an awesome job. 
5 Comments
Thank you, Tara. It’s been an amazing experience getting to this point and the past few weeks have been very intense as we prepared for launch. Although our launch got announced a bit prematurely, in the overall scheme of things it’s all good. Amidst all the attention, we’re glad we could collaborate with the Apollo team and look for great things from them in the future. Omar and his team deserve kudos and I’m sure they’ll step up to the plate again as we explore the possibilities of rich internet applications.
Thanks again and see you soon at Web 2.0 Expo
Tara - thanks for connecting the dots! I’m really excited about Scrapblog and just psyched that it all came together. It’s a beautiful app (and I can’t wait to use it!)
Hi Tara, Thanks for the info and preview link of Scrapblog. It is a really amzing and powerful and easy to use app. Can’t wait to see what the app will look ike after beta.
Cool, thanks for this post Tara. I just went to give Scrapblog a try, and it looks very rich. I posted my thoughts over on my blog.
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! oqhywfsxgn
4 Trackbacks
[...] Today I was reading Tara Hunt’s excellent HorsePigCow marketing uncommon blog and learned about Scrapblog, a new startup with yet more interactive web candy for us to play with. Except… this time, it’s really about building scrapbooks. It’s a very rich Flash-based application (possibly soon to run on Apollo) which allows you to build galleries and screenshows in a scrapbook style. You can upload photos directly or pull them from Flickr, Yahoo, Photobucket or Webshots; you can add “stickers” (logos and patterns), change backgrounds, add frames and text. Once you’ve done all that, you can publish your Flash-based Scrapblog on their site, or share the static images on Flickr, where you could create a photoset and run a slideshow in a similar way. [...]
[...] They turned on the preview yesterday, so you can go check it out also. Read what Shel has to say. Tara has a great post on this also. TechCrunch write up. David has been playing with it with pics of his cute kids. Josh’s stunning Florida shots make for good scrapblogging too. (Love that photo of the oaks.) [...]
[...] Scrapblog, one of the better Flex 2 applications that I’ve seen, launched today with some high praise. In the conversation, I came across a post by Tara Hunt and I thought it was worth highlighting because I think it shows just how easy it is to take a full, production Flex application and port it to Apollo: On Tuesday afternoon, Chris and I stopped by the Adobe booth at ETech to chat with Michelle Turner about Apollo. Adrian Ludwig was also there, preparing for the hot Apollo demo they were going to do on Thursday morning. Somewhere in the conversation Scrapblog came up and Adrian said, “You know, if they could get that working in Apollo by Thursday, we really need another great app to demo….” [...]
[...] wrote a couple of weeks back on how our client, Scrapblog, embraced the chaos and benefited from it. We had another client, who shall remain nameless, who totally lacked the ability to embrace the [...]