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So this is a sad moment for me. As a kid I adored Hostess cakes. My grandmother lived in Natick, MA and on the front side of the Natick Mall right before Speen Street there was a Hostess Factory and Store where we used to stop on every trip to her house. Driving to see grandma on Sundays was like a Pavlov experiment. The minute we entered Wayland I started salivating for Fruit Pies. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Twinkies, Cupcakes, Ding Dongs, Ho Ho’s or Suzie Q’s but there was something about a Fruit Pie (Yes, it deserves to be capitalized) from Hostess that made all the bad things go away. Plus Fruit Pie the Magician was the coolest. FPTM was the Hostess Fruit Pies mascot and everyday hero to millions of kids across the country. The guy could make Fruit Pies instantly appear with a wave of his magic wand! I mean come on. Could there be anything more amazing to a 10 year old than a cartoon magician who made snack cakes appear out of thin air and tried to save the day with sugary goodness? I don’t think so.… Read the rest

I remember driving with my parents to New York (A trip worth forgetting with mom at the helm and her uncanny ability to miss important turns) when I was about 12 years old or so. We were on I-95 in Stamford, CT and the agony of the trip was starting to wear on me as was the funk of the empty McDonalds Big Mac wrapper sitting on the floor next to me. I glanced out the passenger window as we were cruising in the passing lane going 45mph and saw something that sparked my interest. It was a billboard. Now I had seen many billboards in the past but this one erased my ADD temporarily and I just stared at it with an unparalleled curiosity until we passed it. The billboard was a picture of the typical cartoon chiseled handsome guy in sunglasses and it said only two words – Ray Ban. We all know about Tom Cruise and his emerging role in Risky Business around that time but I wasn’t as enamored by the coolness of the sunglasses as much as I was the words – Ray Ban. The words were just downright beautiful. It wasn’t a… Read the rest

As iconic as the Grateful Dead are my reference to their classic compilation has more to do with my business adventures than it does with the hazy resemblance of cross country concert tours. The last seven years of my professional life have been hectic and daring with a sprinkle of urgency to say the least.

It began with an ending. It was 2001and I ran a marginally successful web design company that I started in ‘97. The reason I call it marginally successful is because I had a decent dot com client base and was able to charge an abnormal amount of money for a service that is now commoditized by template engines and cut rate service providers. Back in the mid to late nineties websites were a new and unknown territory for businesses who typically relied on print advertising for getting their message out. Newspapers and magazines were how people kept up with news, pop culture and niche verticals that were specific to their tastes. The idea of digital media was foreign. I will go into more detail about “the web design fad of the ’90s” on another post but wanted to give you an… Read the rest

It’s been two years since I originally contemplated starting my blog. Seems like a long time considering it’s a such a natural element in today’s web existence. As a matter of fact one of my closest friends and business partner Ben Saren, who has a great blog (Your Suspect), consistently picks on me about my “pretty looking” blog with lorem ipsum all over it.

Being an entrepreneur and living in the clichéd Web 2.0 space I have experienced enough to justify that I have some valuable insight, enough in fact to start sharing my adventures using this blog as an avenue. This is not to say that my words will have any wisdom but I do feel that by not blogging I am actually hindering my growth as a professional. I have seen blogging evolve from personal diaries and soap boxes into a sophisticated network of vertically driven information vessels. It just seems like it’s about time to jump aboard and see where it takes me.

What am I going to blog about?  Well the foundation will be about business, product development and design/UI/UX. The rest will come as I see fit or wherever it takes… Read the rest