Introducing Larry Staton Jr.

I was speaking to a Martin King, founder of Exbiblio, about the desire to expand Bee Documents and bring on some more people. We were chatting about who the next person should be... a programmer? an assistant? customer relations? a web expert? a graphic designer?

His insightful answer was that a competitive advantage of Bee Documents so far is that I have been doing all of these tasks myself and thus can bring perspective from one discipline to another. For example, the feature design and prioritization is directly related to the customer service conversations I have on a daily basis. He suggested hiring more generalists who can do a bit of everything alongside me instead of hiring to take certain focussed tasks off my plate.

With that in mind. I'd like to introduce Larry Staton Jr. who is helping me on a part time basis from his home office in Charlotte, North Carolina. Larry has been a long time customer of Bee Docs' Timeline, signing up for the very first beta mailing list back in December 2004 when he was a law student. He was also part of the "T2 Customer Design Panel."

In 2005 we collaborated to design and build a custom web application for a law firm in Florida. Larry is now a full fledged intellectual property lawyer and runs a blog called Scripting for Lawyers. He is also a Web / AJAX developer and knows some Cocoa programming too.

Larry has been helping me update the beedocuments.com site as well as prototyping some web-based timeline interface ideas. Also, I have asked Larry to help field customer service e-mails, so some of you may get to hear from him over the coming weeks. As a long time customer of Bee Docs' Timeline, Larry should be able to share some good tips and tricks especially concerning the integration of Timeline with other applications using Applescript.

Everyone give Larry Staton Jr a warm welcome!

Working Situation

As some of you have surely noticed, I said goodbye to Exbiblio two weeks ago. This has been a full time job for me for about a year and a half.

The relationship ended on good terms, and Exbiblio is even allowing me to rent back my office space for my Bee Documents and contract work. It is a great office in Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle. Here are some pics:

I'm not sure what is next for me as far as a day job. For now, I'm limiting my search to a few "dream jobs" and am instead focusing most of my time and energy on T2.

This should be good news for the T2 project which can definitely benefit from the extra time that I now have available.

I'm Blogging Exbiblio

Exbiblio has asked British Journalist turned blogger Hugh Fraser and me to blog about Exbiblio's project to transform the way people interact with paper documents.

I will be writing from an insider perspective and Hugh will be writing as an outside observer. We are looking forward to great discussion with the blog reading community about the way people interact with documents, our company, and the future of paper.

I will continue to use this blog for Bee Docs' Timeline updates and personal tidbits like book reviews, but my posts at Exbiblio will receive more of my energy and focus over the coming months, so please come over and join us and be sure to add the new blog to your RSS reader.

Exbiblio

We were recently approached by the folks at Exbiblio. I am going to help them build software to demonstrate their futuristic document technologies.

I can't say much more about it now (top-secret, y'know). However, I think it will be great a great partnership as both Bee Documents and Exbiblio are focussed on making documents more useful and more powerful but we are coming at it from different angles. I look forward to showing all of you what we are working on someday soon. It is pretty exciting technology.

And fear not, we will also continue to release and update our own software products such as Bee Docs' Timeline and Bee Docs' Call Out. There should be new releases for both of those products by the end of the year.