Montreal Tech Watch

Christmas is early for some of us apparently. While many are working hard on getting benevolent investors fund their projects, and trying to get their product online with minimal resources and time, Duncan Moore (@duncano) “just” applied to an innovation award started by U.K. based web development agency Deep Blue Sky Digital. The award’s homepage lists 5 criteria for winning projects: innovation, value, engagement, realism and originality, and Duncan Moore’s proposal apparently won over the judges, with £10000 worth of web design, development and consultancy to bring life to the idea in a couple of months.

For a web entrepreneur, this is equivalent to discovering in a evening walk a genie in a bottle, granting his wishes. Of course, you would also wish about having DHH as a lead developer and Caterina Fake the app designer, but that wouldn’t be possible, even with a powerful genie, so we have to consider Duncan Moore as the luckiest and perhaps also the most creative person of the month, having won the web award for innovation.

I did an email interview with Duncan Moore and Jim Morrisson, Deep Blue Sky’s rep.

Can you present yourself?

I’m a Montreal-based independent consultant. Together with a network of experienced freelancers, I provide services related to online strategy, naming, and content strategy & creation (copywriting & translation). Previously, I helped to brand and launch both CakeMail and Bloom Digital Platforms, the makers of AdGear. In addition to client work, I have been building another Web application, currently in private alpha, which will take some of the pain out of the naming process by making it easier to verify the availability of names online.

Duncan Moore (left), a while ago at BarCampMontreal3

Can you tell us succinctly about the idea? Such as the problem it is going to tackle and the general approach you’ve chosen?

The idea has to do with link-sharing on Twitter, which has become the way most of us get and share our links these days, although it was never designed for that purpose. We think we can add some functionality that will improve the link-sharing experience on Twitter.

Any other people behind the “idea”? Or you are the only person so far committed to the idea?

I discussed it at length with at least one trusted collaborator who is an experienced programmer, in order to validate feasibility before submitting it, but at this stage it’s just me. Once it’s launched, we’ll see. If it really takes off, it will likely need additional resources.

Aren’t you both afraid of working with a partner thousands of miles away?

Duncan Moore: Not in the least. When I was at CakeMail, we had team members in Easter Europe with whom we collaborated daily. More recently, while orchestrating the rebranding of Nexalogy, there was a critical point in the process when I was in Hawaii, the Nexalogy guys were in Montreal and designer Daniel Mireault (@dmireault) was in Thailand. Despite the distance, the end result is solid.

Jim Morrison, Deep Blue Sky Digital: Not from our perspective, no. From our correspondence thus far Duncan strikes me as just the kind of forward thinking person we enjoy working with. We have quite a few local clients but we also enjoy really great relationships with clients further afield for years sometimes before finally meeting face to face.

The prize is listed as “£10,000 of free Design, Development and Hosting for someone to bring their groundbreaking idea to life on the web.” Is it something you do frequently or is it the first time? Can you provide us of examples of websites or applications you did with less than £10,000 ?

Jim Morrison, Deep Blue Sky Digital: This is the first time we’ve done this. In September I instituted “Fridays” at Deep Blue Sky. All our Fridays (that’s 20% of our time) is spent on internal projects; learning, experimenting, blogging and having a bit more fun. First we got our own little site redone (deepbluesky.com), then we built findmebyip.com which has had a bit of an impact in the HTML5/CSS3 space, we designed an interactive QR-Coded lion sculpture which lives in the centre of Bath (spotthelion.com) and then finally we launched the Web Innovation Awards. Building the winning idea was the team’s choice of how to spend some of their Fridays.

Most of our standard CMS websites come in under £10,000 to be honest. dickiesworkwear.com is an example, at 8 European languages. The most fun and interesting have been iStylista.com – an intriguing personal shopper service – and of course cheddarvision.tv which was just an insane idea that caught people’s imagination… taught me a think or two about building lots of servers in a hurry too!

Can you present Deep Blue Sky? Especially, what are your technologies or methodologies you wish to highlight with this AwardingIdeas project?

Deep Blue Sky (@deepbluetweets) is a digital agency specialising in joining three disciplines together; design, development and consultancy. We believe pretty strongly that the three disciplines need each other to be effective. We’re just about to enter our third year as an agency and we’re really enjoying the projects that our clients are trusting us with.

One thing that’s lovely about working at an agency with a client base like ours is that we get to split our time pretty evenly between going out an learning about a client’s business and then implementing some innovative ideas to move that business forward. Sometimes the conversation happens in a boardroom and sometimes it happens in a cowshed – quite literally.

We a very creative, ideas driven little team and so projects like Awarding Ideas, Spot the Lion and FindMeByIP.com give us an avenue to express ideas that client work sometimes doesn’t quite provide.

Congrats again to @duncano! I’m looking forward to see his idea online.