As I mentioned in the last blog post, we’re now moving along quickly. The company structure is now formalised, we have a bank account, and we’re spending money. The later, which is of course exciting, is also scary. There really isn’t any turning back when you’ve started spending investors money.

Other than development and design, we’ve spent a little money on trademarking the name of our service (we’ll soon make that public). I felt it was important to trademark, though as I eluded to a few weeks back, I have my concerns. On the one hand we want to protect ourselves from any malicious intent, and so making sure our brand isn’t misused is import. However, we’d still love to support anyone wanting to mashup, remix, or support our service without hamstringing them legally. I guess we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

I emailed Chris Messina asking him about his community mark idea the other day. He responded and pointed to an interview he did recently on EdTechTalk, and Mozilla using the CM idea for the RSS Icon.

It looks like an untested idea at this stage, not as established as Creative Commons. So we’ll have to keep an eye on where it all goes. Hopefully we’ll still be able to work with our community and in some fashion allow the use of our “mark,” if possible at all.

Saying that, it was exciting to apply for a trademark. Marketing being my bag, it really felt like we’re on the road to starting a fun and exciting brand.

Things are really hotting up in Web2Thing land.

We’ve secured a small round of financing. Enough to speed up development, and really put us in a position to launch something in a few months. The exercise in getting the money, setting up a business, doing due-diligence in a few areas, have all been very interesting and exciting.

Saying that, it’s not half as exciting as getting some early designs of logos and interfaces from the company we’ve enlisted to ramp up development.

We managed to find Digital Ventures, a local design and development house, when hunting for a Python guru. To be honest they probably found us, but regardless we’ve been pretty damn happy with the outcome so far.

They’ve been coding away on some of the features we believe are core to our service, and also working on the branding. So to be fair, they’ve done a heap of work already, it’s just the initial user interface (work in progress) and logo (also a work in progress) they’ve sent through are the first real visual representations of our vision. So for a quasi-marketing guy like myself, it’s a fun time.

Check out their Enjo TV commercial.

I was too busy earlier to post about Google Docs and Spreadsheets. I was way too busy using the Spreadsheets to do Discounted Cash Flow and Docs to continue adding my business plan.

Along with my business partner Graeme, I’ve been using Writely and Google Spreadsheets for the last few months to collaborate on starting our business. So, you could say, I’m right into using the applications already. No need to sell me on the upgrade, having them in one spot just makes it easier to use.

There are a few bugs here and there, and some of the formulas aren’t intuitive, but I’d say I’ve struggled with those issues since I started using office “productivity” suites.

Other than the fact that they are free (I’d like to see Microsoft duplicate that), I love the collaboration features. It’s insanely easy to start a document or spreadsheet and share it with anyone with an Internet connection. I’ve started several, for business, and with friends and family, for various reasons. Given that you can import, and export, various document formats, if you want to collaborate documents or spreadsheets I’d encourage you to sign up and give it a go.

By the way, if anyone knows how they can easily explain Discounted Cash Flow financial models to me, then please fire away.

Here is a fantastic myth list by Ron Garret. He runs through a few myths that any geek entrepreneur should understand when starting a company.

This blog post is more a bookmark for me to ensure I re-read the myth list a few times.