P I L A N G O

It’s been a while since the first posts in April and the Pilango story has had its ups and downs, working with bright people to nail down the product concept, talking to prospective partners and customers about what could work for them.  I have had the pleasure of benefiting from the mentoring from family, friends and business acquaintances, and now after several iterations, I am happy to say that Pilango Ltd is now officially a limited company incorporated in the UK.

This was all possible because of two great partners.

First, Companies Made Simple which I highly recommend for anyone looking to start a UK business.  Their online application is smart and simple and their process highly streamlined.  I spent some time looking for the right agent and I’m definitely glad my research finally brought me to Companies Made Simple.

Second, HSBC which is truly a global bank (well, maybe missing some coverage in America).  Thank you Rita for overseeing my application and Bertrand and Jacques at the branch office here in France for your help and support.

And finally thank you Emily for your help and support.

Now on to a first contract starting next week and more posts later to talk about Pilango Workplan, my current software development focus, and Balsamiq Mockups, a great new tool for UI design that people around the web have been discovering recently.  I will be using Mockups to design the  UI for Workplan.  More on that later because Mockups is such a neat tool it deserves a nice detailed post (at least one !) all by itself.

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Stefano Mazzocchi wrote a short note about catalysts that reminds me of what we are doing for our customers at Pilango as concerns their approach of the US market:

• enable their market development to happen more easily
• increase the likelihood of success

Stefano goes on to note his surprise that there are so few human catalysts in organizations. In some way that is reassuring since at Pilango we are offering our human catalyst capabilities as a service provider for a customer base of innovative European startups.

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I didn’t get a chance to attend the OSBC conference in San Francisco this year, but its on my schedule for next year ! Meanwhile I’m looking through the presentations which where published a couple of days ago.

I found Matt Asay’s keynote presentation particularly encouraging and relevant to the type of business we are looking to develop at Pilango.

Helping our old world customers realize the potential of the abundance economy by driving product awareness, implementing demand based feedback loops that drive excellence in product development and providing superior service to corporate America are the challenges that make us fired up, ready to go !

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Pilango started operations on April 1, 2008 (and that’s no joke !) and after setting up an initial one page web site earlier this week, we are now setting up a dynamic one using Wordpress. We are also using Google Apps for our email, calendar, document sharing and intranet services and Remember The Milk for our task lists (which are growing by the minute). Our hosting is provided by SilverRack which provides affordable VPS hosting and great service.

We are currently using a slightly tweaked version of Anthony Baggett’s Networker 1.0 theme which we will continue to personalize as time goes on. Fred, our graphic designer friend is helping us to find a color scheme that walks our talk although I personally like revolutionary red and hope we will stick with it.

America here we come ! (More on our visit to Atlanta in April a bit later…)

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