As you’re perusing Increo on Ideas, you might notice references to the OIT (Official Increo Tablecloth), our recent order of OIFs (Official Increo Fleeces) or a mention of the OIVP (Official Increo Vacation Policy).  Walking through the office you’ll see the OIPS, the OIS, and the OIP (Official Increo Paper Shredder, Official Increo Scissors, and Official Increo Projector, respectively).

Adding OI to everything is fun, silly and pokes at the dynamism of a startup.  If being “Official” is nothing more than dubbing it so, we have tremendous flexibility in the way we do things.  Adopting new tools, frameworks and processes, latching onto those that work, and discarding those that don’t has allowed us to find the optimal arrangement.

With that, I’ll pop the tab on an OISD (Official Increo Soft Drink) and return to the OITDL (Official Increo To-Do List).

Last Tuesday, Increo was excited to be able to take part in the ROCKSTAR Startup Fair hosted by DLA Piper and Social Walla. A fun experience, to be sure, and useful to boot, but we took away some very intriguing insights.

Our “booth” was a desk in a small room; there were perhaps a dozen other companies with other desks, all ringing the perimeter of the room.

Lesson #1

Covering your table makes you look good.

When you have no idea what kind of situation you’ll be in, this is a variable you can control. Distracting wood grain? Cheap plastic? No place to stow your stuff? A cheap table cover takes care of all of those problems. The Official Increo Tablecloth isn’t even expensive; it’s just a couple yards of inexpensive suit fabric.

Read the rest of this entry »

The scene: it’s 8 am on a Thursday morning in a second-floor conference room in a building that’s barely been finished. China Basin, San Francisco, across the street from the ballpark. You, surprisingly awake yet bleary-eyed at the same time, are really just longing for that cup of Philz Coffee you didn’t have time to stop for on the way in. Two venture capitalists have acceded to showing up to talk to a bunch of starry-eyed entrepreneurs in the midst of the meltdown on Wall Street, perhaps to calm some nerves.

Twenty or so people fill the room. You go around the room to do introductions and see the contrasts among the assembled group. Some are doing hardware, some software. Some have funding already, some don’t. Those who don’t appear to be a bit more desperate than the others, surprise surprise.

Some have come from a couple blocks away in the startup hotbed known as South Park. Some have come from the South Bay, like yourself. Some have come from as far away as the other side of the country or around the world. Everybody has one thing in common, though: they love creating amazing new technology.

The message is clear: yes, investors are skittish about putting money in to companies right now, but no, they haven’t run out of funds to invest. The mood is, as our heroes on Wall Street might say, “cautiously optimistic”. Now is the time to innovate! Stop wasting capital and get with the amazingness!

The hour goes on, filled with more venture capital jargon than you can shake a stick at, and you can tell that maybe half the room has glazed over. The sense you get is that what really matters is having an incredible concept and an incredible team to bring that concept to fruition.

This is, of course, what we love for here in Silicon Valley: the chance to meet people who have really great ideas in their heads. People who have a chance to act on their ideas in a place where they can really effect something great. And honestly, nobody in the room is entirely worried, because great ideas live on, regardless of the current funding climate.

Eventually, you walk out of the room an hour and a half later, feeling inspired by the amount of excitement all around you, having made a few connections, ready for that cup of coffee a block over at Philz followed by the short one-hour trip back down to Mountain View.

Over the coming weeks and months, we hope to provide an occasional window into the more technical side of Increo’s products and share some of the more interesting challenges we’ve faced and problems we’ve solved with the greater web developer community.

The topic this week is Flash 10, but please let us know if there is another technical aspect of Backboard that intrigues you and you want to know more about!

Now, to the story:

Starting a few weeks ago, we began hearing some intermittent reports from users that they could no longer create a Backboard by uploading a file. They said they kept clicking the “Select File” button and nothing happened. 

We were understandably disturbed, as the ability to create Backboards is rather critical to the site… but despite numerous attempts, we were unable to reproduce the problem. We were busily working on brand new Backboard functionality, and the reports were infrequent enough that we chalked it up to a potential incompatibility with another browser plugin. Or maybe they just had Flashblock installed and didn’t realize it? Yep, that had to be the problem.

Flash matters because we use the excellent open-source SWFUpload package to handle document uploads on Backboard. This allows us to not only customize the appearance of the upload buttons themselves, but also display informative progress bars as the file is transferred. Being a tight-knit combination of Flash and JavaScript, SWFUpload takes a bit of work to configure and integrate, but the results are well worth it.

A week ago, we located a computer that exhibited the problem, and it was immediately clear that it was an issue we could no longer ignore: the other Flash that we use on the site worked fine, but the Select File button did nothing when clicked.

After a quick check on the SWFUpload forums for news of recent incompatibilities, the cause was immediately apparent. Unfortunately, the solution was anything but…

Read the rest of this entry »

So I’ve officially completed my first week as a Software Engineer at Increo and it has been action-packed! After filling out all the boring paper work and setting up my desk and accounts and all that jazz, I was able to jump right into working on Backboard. The first few days I was the resident newbie, asking questions every 15 minutes about this data structure or that control flow. However, by the beginning of this week I was making many fixits and squishing a few ugly bugs. There is definitely a lot of code and I still have a lot of coming up to speed to do, but when I left the office today, I felt I had made some solid progress.

The office culture is a good mix of intense and casual. We’re always pushing ourselves to develop better software and create a productive, enjoyable experience for our users: sometimes it’s through hardcore coding sessions, other times it’s by mocking up user interfaces on the whiteboards. But we’re always able to squeeze in some fun, such as 2-minute dance parties or writing ridiculous phrases on the Increo quote board.

One of the very cool things about working here is that we love using the products we develop. For example, several Backboards a day will be shared with the team to get feedback on virtually anything we’re working on at the moment – from webpage graphics to business card designs to marketing handouts (although I’ll occasionally use the red mark-up pen to draw silly pictures as feedback).

Ultimately, what I value most at Increo is being a part of a close-knit team that works on challenging problems, brainstorms and discusses innovative ideas, and makes important decisions within a fast-paced Silicon Valley startup.

We ordered Increo’s second set of business cards a few weeks ago.  After a few (dozen) iterations on the design, we settled on something everyone liked, and started filling out names and titles.  Names were pretty straightforward, but titles evoked some creative discussion.

“Defender of User Experience.”  “Bugslayer.”  “IE6 Martyr.”

In the background, I cringed.

Certainly creative job titles are not unusual in the Valley, with Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s “Chief Lizard Wrangler,” and Jerry Yang, officially the “Chief Yahoo.”  But at Increo?  We’re providing software to teams, departments and companies.  What if we lost a sale?  What if someone didn’t take me seriously?  What would my mother think?

As I thought about it more–why not?

We’re a young, dynamic company pushing the envelope on the way business is done.  Our products are all about facilitating a sense of ownership and pride around the innovative things people do every day.

Why shouldn’t we have titles that represent what we love to do?  Reflecting how we individually contribute to the company, titles like “Bugslayer” promote the same sense of ownership and pride we’re working to evoke in members of teams that use our software.  Creative titles provide a window into what motivates the talented individuals on the Increo team.

As we order another set of business cards for the growing Increo team, the message is this: pick a line for your card that fills your heart with pride and makes you smile.

(Kimber is still deciding on a business card title.  Any suggestions?)

At its core, Increo is a company all about ideas. We believe that too many ideas get shot down and that the only thing preventing a lot of wonderful creativity is a missed connection between two people’s thoughts.

Of course, we can make grandiose statements about ideas all day long, but that would get boring quickly and do nothing to set us apart from the ivory-tower CEO on the 96th floor of his billion-dollar high-rise office building.

Our goal is to help people, and our products do just that. People write us every day to tell us how much they love Backboard, even if they never realized they needed it before they found it.

In the coming days and weeks, we’d like to show you some of the stories behind Backboard, from the people who built it to the people who use it to the decisions that led it to being the great product it is today. Hopefully, you’ll have a chance to get to know Increo a bit better!