Weblogsky: Polycot

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Polycot

In thinking about my involvement in the Marqui blog project, I realized that I should be posting about another company, i.e. my own, Polycot, which is a partnership with Jeff Kramer and Matt Sanders. We formed the company in a series of online meetings throughout the summer of 2001: Jeff was logging in from San Marcos, I was coming from Boulder, and Matt was coming from Rome, Italy. Our entity formation was filed September 12, 2001, not the best time to have started a business, especially one that's Internet-focused.

We were Polycot Consulting, L.L.C., but we've dropped "Consulting" even though that's a component of most of our projects. We've all been involved with the Internet for a decade or more – in my case, since 1990 – and we have complementary backgrounds: Matt writes code, Jeff builds and manages networks, and I have business and project management in my background. Others who work with us: Honoria Starbuck, PhD, is an instructional designer with specialization in usability and accessibility. Honoria holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Education and Communication with a specialization in Creativity in International Networks, and she's also an artist and impresaria of the cyberopera Honoria in Ciberspazio. Phil Brader is a business consultant with 30 years of broad business experience ranging from management consulting to executive management in small to large, private and public, corporations in consumer (& industrial) products and services, manufacturing, wholesale, and retail. David Nunez is a brilliant software developer and former Information Technology and Future Media Cluster Director with The Capital Area Training Foundation. David builds robots and creates multimedia art when he's not writing code.

We're primarily custom web developers. We're not designers, though we have designers that work with us (and a couple of us have done some limited web site design). We also do custom web hosting and network support, as well as strategic web consulting and business consulting (with Phil in the lead). We have a core site engine that is often our platform for custom development, but we also do installs and custom modifcations with CivicSpace, Drupal, and other Open Source content management systems. We have extensive knowledge of social software platforms that support various kinds of interactions, including meetings, customer relationships, political and activist endeavors, online publishing, etc.

Polycot's turned out to be a great company and a great experience for all of us. In a future post, I should write about our business philosophy. We focus less on growing the company internally than on building relationships and forming alliances that extend our capabilities. I tend to think that smaller, agile companies that do cooperative work together will be more common in the future than large companies that try (often with significant difficulty) to integrate many internal divisions.

(If you want to know more about Polycot's services, drop me a line at jonl at polycot.com.)

Polycot is based in Austin, Texas.