Surprised Again!!!

Professor T. Frank Saunders, who tried to teach us to think at University of Arizona back in the 70s, founded SEEP -The Society for the Elimination of Exclamation Points. His point, as I recall it, is that if we really knew how to think, or doublethink, as he put it, then we would never be surprised.

Clearly I failed. Here I am, surprised again. At the three exclamation point level. I got together with some guys last year (thank you Norwest Venture Partners and Outlook Ventures for believing in us with so little to go on - and beyond thanks to my co-founders) and we tried to do something simple - create a tool that would make it easy for software QA folks to accurately describe bugs without all that typing and remembering. And to give them a little more credibility with the developers, so they wouldn't have to hear "It doesn't happen on my machine" quite so often.

And next thing you know (literally) we had invented the telephone. Well, not literally, but it felt like it. When we added narrative voice to the the nascent app, it transformed itself into a way to do a ridiculous range of things. Within 48 hours I was using it for contract reviews, sharing a Jackson Hole paragliding extravaganza, recording ecommerce transactions, recommending web sites and books - on and on. Oh - yeah - and reporting bugs...

Next thing you know, we dropped into deep stealth, and have spent the past year trying to make it simple enough for anyone, with packaging that makes it easy to try (and buy- if you are that kind of user). What we ended up with is called QlipBoard, and it lets you make Qlippits - multimedia files that you can attach to an email, send as links that play at http://www.qlipmedia.com/, post to YouTube or Photobucket, stuff into your profile on Facebook, stick into your blog (see below).

Qlippits are funny things - faster and easier to make than a text email (or a text blog entry, as I am discovering), and much less likely to be misunderstood, or ignored. And you don't need any special software to play them, so it's OK to send a Qlippit to anyone.

QlipBoard looks and works like this. At the moment on Windows XP/Vista, but coming soon on Mac (sorry - but we just had to get it out for folks to use, and the Windows version was done first).

http://www.qlipmedia.com/ShowQlippit.php?ID=a988cc2cec887288f9f9a94d0fcec5e0b51ef33fd98ebfca697d3ec862a2aec5

And now (pace Dr. Saunders), we'll see if any exclamation points show up...

- Chris