I’m not sure how many trusted readers we have by now, but I bet there’re quite a few. Like you. You’re coming back tomorrow to read our blog, right? So you’re a trusted reader. Okay, that’s one at least.

Anyhow, as our trusted readers have noticed by now, Playing With Wire has been redesigned completely. We swapped out the standard Blogger theme for something that’s a bit more ‘us’. Based on minima++, the new design has got a new fresh logo, cleaned up links and improved minimalism. It works in all modern browsers and even limps along alright with IE6. We’re following our own advice and making our site cross-browser you know.

We’ve been at this for about a year already so we have seen our share of problems with our business plan. It seems like every other day some new competitor shows up. They still don’t do what we plan to do but like with artillery shells it doesn’t feel good when they start hitting close. So yesterday I went back to basics and started doing the math and predictions. If we make this much money per amount of resource we pay for, are we doing alright? That’s the question.

The other day’s post mentioned the importance of being able to refocus when the inevitable downturn comes. I think we had a bit of downturn yesterday but we’ll refocus and come right back up.

These last few days we have created a foundation for the work within our new company. Basically, we have configured and installed some internet related stuff. For now our ‘virtual base camp’ includes the following:

1. Eventum for project tracking. This lets us keep track of what needs to be done, when it has to been done, and who’s doing what. We’re going to apply this to software development and project development alike. It’s like our virtual whiteboard.
2. A Blogger account or two (or three) for this blog.
3. A Google Sitemap to make sure we can start staking out our claim in cyberspace.
4. Online document collaboration through Google Docs and Spreadsheets. This is pretty cool stuff, especially when working a lot online like we do.

Since we’re such a modern company we’ll probably be using many more online tools before we’re done.

It might be that a lot of ‘old school’ companies are still wondering how the heck these things work or why they’re even good. But I think some day people will be wondering how companies got by at all without this stuff.

Today Alex and I are signing the Article of Organization-paper that is a required form to start up a company here in California. We chose LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) as our form of incorporation, since it gives us many benefits. One benefit is that the required administrative paperwork is less than other corporation forms. Another reason is that LLC (as the name implies), protects us as individuals from economical liabilities in case of something goes wrong, and we get sued. If that happens, the worst thing that can happen is that the company goes bankrupt.

For further information about forming an LLC, I’d recommend you to visit the Secretary of State in California. There you’ll find all the forms and information that you need to form an LLC.

Take care,
Viktor

Hey guys.

This is the blog of a startup currently in stealth mode. Even that we aren’t giving you the company name here, you can at least see that we are insanely good at naming blogs.

Now this would be the place where I told you a little bit about the company and our grand plan. But like all startups our resources are ideas. Big companies might have many other resources, so they don’t have to keep their cards as close to the chest. But small companies, like this one, only have ideas. So we’re going to play it safe and tell you all about our vision later.

Most of our attention is going into design of our software right now. We’ve been at the drawing board for a couple of months and have some very fancy diagrams to show for it. There’s also the matter of paper work for setting up the company. We’re a bit behind with that, but that’s alright. Viktor made some contacts who happen to know all about it. We still have plenty of time to get all of that set up as well.