For the last couple of years I've been working with with a group of fine folks under the name of mediagonal. That company is no more. But now there's Liip. I take this as an opportunity for some personal reflections and explanations on how this came into being.
So it's been a pretty good time with these friends in Fribourg, I certainly enjoyed helping grow a company from two guys of us in a living room to a serious SME with like 15 employees, a prominent customer base, a couple of really cool and truly innovative projects - and an enjoyable climate.
It's been a good place for me all the time, so good I neglected my studies quite a bit - but there's always been such a lot to learn in the real world. Working on software actually relevant to actual people, developing ideas on the actual brink of the doable, directly translating "how things should be done" (semantic, accessible, open and interoperable, and so forth) to "how things are being done here" (as said) and taking actual responsibility still sounds attractive to me today :)
We've had our little issues in management, too, of course: My role's been the one of the rusher, the forward always neglecting defense, oriented towards a superbright future and willing to take above-average risks. Luckily (I guess ;)) my friends in mediagonal's management are a little older and more reasonable, which always had a beneficial compensating effect. This lead to a company that turned from a wannabe full-service publishing provider to a "web 2.0" (in Nova's sense) software development shop, to a company (even if that may sound a little lofty) both pragmatic and creative, down-to-earth and innovative - and, in the end, sustainable.
Now one of the ideas that, after some time, made a lot of sense both for the risk-averse and the risk-affine was doing a merger with mediagonal's long-time partner bitflux. If you read this blog you probably know these guys anyway, suffice to say they've been working on the forefront of web development in this country for some time now. They often were the "techies of the techies" (first version of this blog software here, local, work for some design-oriented agencies, ..), mediagonal in turn more often worked directly with non-technical clients - in fact, finding reasonable synergies and examples of "more than the sum of its parts" is so easy I don't have to do it for you. Sheer size (two dozen soon..) and sites (Fribourg/Zürich/Bern) sure belong to them.
So having explained the situation to you we could now speculate a bit about the future of the merger's product Liip AG. What I can say is that Liip's going to demonstrate some kick-ass stuff in the months to come - buzzwords like "Enterprise 2.0" and "Radio 2.0" (Blabla 2.0.. yes sure) come to mind, but there's also a large-scale public (e-)education project in the making, which you will find pretty interesting, I'm sure. If you want to keep yourself updated on these things, I recommend dropping the feed of this blog from your reader and adding our company blog's feed instead: http://blog.liip.ch/rss.xml.
That said, I can also tell you that I'm stopping to write on this undead weblog here and instead will write on blog.liip.ch for the foreseeable future. So see you there, and wish me luck with keeping the one adjective I liked most getting used with the old company make being used for Liip, too. That attribute has been "authentic".
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