Well, the secret is finally out! Last week at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) conference in Anaheim, our partner Tripod Ventures finally unveiled a really cool project that we’ve been working on over the past three years. The application, called Pixtorio One, is a completely new type of photo platform for retailers that leverages rich internet application (RIA) technology and a rich user interface to fundamentally change how customers order prints and other photo products both at in-store kiosks and over the web.

Pixtorio One provides photo retailers with a single customer experience for both web and kiosk environments, a unified order process for all photo products, and a robust back-end photo management solution.

We worked on the concept, development, design of the multi-platform web application as well as the creation of the back-end infrastructure that is architected to handle massive volumes of simultaneous users and process huge numbers of transactions daily.

You can learn more about the project by visiting the Pixtorio One website. Congrats to our partner Tripod Ventures on a successful launch!

For the past couple of years, our blog has mainly been focused on outside issues and the impact they have on our clients’ businesses. While this information is interesting, it hasn’t allowed our readers to get to know the team here at INM and to better understand who we are. Moving forward, we’re going to be injecting a bit more of ourselves and our personalities into Impact. We’ll be sharing more about what we’re working on, and what makes us tick.

We’re going to kick this off by introducing you to our new client-facing team, our Product Owners. This is a role that grew out of our adoption of Scrum development methodologies about a year and a half ago. For years, we followed the industry’s traditional model of sales. This meant that we had a few employees who were solely focused on outbound business development. However, as we all know, this model really doesn’t work for anyone anymore. We decided to change this and offer our clients better service, right from their first interaction with us. This meant putting clients immediately in touch with someone knowledgeable that could guide them down the right path, right away. So instead, the first person a potential client now speaks to is also the person who will work on their project and knows the issues, challenges and best practices for their project inside and out. This led to the creation of our Product Owners role.

Today we have four targeted Product Owners, each with a different specialty, all of whom are veteran INM employees with first-hand knowledge and lots of hands-on project experience. This team is responsible for working with interested clients, proposing relevant solutions and overseeing the product development, deployment and operations.

Over the next several weeks we’ll be doing more detailed profiles of each Product Owner. Until then, I wanted to provide a quick introduction. Each of these individuals will also be more involved in the public face of INM, so you may see them pop up here on Impact from time-to-time.

Our Product Owners team:

• Jason MacDonald is our ePublishing and eContent expert. Jason can cut through the clutter and he’s a pro at helping clients create the right environment to publish their content, whether it’s through software, digital documents, online/offline projects or an eLibrary.
• Raluca Ene is our User Experience/User Interface expert. Raluca hasn’t met an application interface she couldn’t improve. She leverages best practices to help ensure every interaction is an efficient one and that every project is perfectly aligned to user requirements and corporate branding.
• Francois "Frank" Boissonneault is our Engineering Project expert. Frank is a developer at heart and loves to come up with innovative techniques to fix our clients’ business problems through technology. He embraces a good challenge and can always navigate to a creative solution.
• Nadine Husain is our eBusiness expert. Nadine’s always looking for an audience and her specialty is helping our clients to find and engage theirs. She’s well-versed in eMarketing techniques and is a pro at setting up technology solutions for engagement, and advising on eMarketing.

I’d encourage you to leave them a welcome message or post any questions you have for them in the comments section below.

Since the original beta launch of Adobe AIR almost two years ago, one of the key features missing for making it a really useful tool for companies looking to leverage it for ePublishing applications was the limited functionality offered for local printing. We had looked into using Adobe AIR as a way to create a truly online and offline ePublishing solution for delivering PDFs through the browser, like we do today with our INM Reach product online. However, the lack of control in the initial beta version of Adobe AIR meant a lot of workarounds and customizations.

The new AIR beta 2 release now makes this much more feasible. This release provides developers with tighter integration with the desktop, including much more control over local printers and improved support for cross-platform printing. In addition, it also offers support for detection of mass storage devices, added support for secure socket layer communication and even the ability to open a file with its default application.