It was 10 years ago last week that the idea for PhotoTablet came to me—an Internet tablet that takes care of your pictures. The day that name came to mind, I bought the domain and started writing a business plan.
Today we reached an important milestone in the short history of Webvanta—we closed the next phase of our financing. We now have the capital we need to take our platform to the next level.
For the first time in more than a dozen years, I’m boatless. Well, nearly so, as there’s still a couple of kayaks and dinghies.
One year ago today I embarked on my current adventure, leaving Adobe after five years there and two years creating the startup they acquired, Fotiva. At the time I left Adobe, I had only the fuzziest idea of what I was going to do, but I knew it would be related to the web, and I was pretty sure it would be connected to Ruby on Rails. And that it has turned out to be.
It is often said that failures are more instructive than successes. In this spirit, I’ve done a lot of reflection on what went wrong at Fotiva, my previous startup that we sold to Adobe at the end of 2001.
Today was my last day at Adobe. It was an odd feeling walking out the door for the last time.
Just in case you want to dig into my deep dark past, during which I wrote hundreds of articles on microprocessors, personal computing technology, and even digital photography, here’s a few of them. These are all pretty old – I put my writing career on hold for my seven-year dive into digital photography software – but I think they stand the test of time reasonably well.
From late 2001 through November 2006, I was at Adobe Systems. I joined Adobe when it purchased Fotiva, a startup I cofounded two years earlier. My most recent work there was as director of a small research team that prototyped leading-edge features for future products and evaluated advanced imaging technologies for licensing. The features my team developed include the Flash photo gallery in Photoshop Elements 5 and Lightroom, the map view in Photoshop Elements 5, and the auto-stacking feature in that product. Other features remain in development, so I can’t disclose them.