Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Setting up Silverado - version 2.0

Its 12:06 AM in the morning as I write this and my family has long since gone to bed...

[Correction--true to form, Calvin has gotten up at least twice as I wrote this entry...I swear that kid could put us all to shame by staying up every night of the week with a cup of coffee and Conan O'Brien on the 50"...]

However, I remain inspired to continue this blog by my friend Mike Curtis at HD for Indies since his posts are some of the most voluminous in the industry. I figure I have a lot of catching up to do before I can claim any number of posts even remotely close to him. Keep up the good work, Mike.

I remain awake trying to get as much work accomplished as possible on our new website:

Silverado Systems

My man Rob Rauffer at BigRig along with his amazing crew have done a phenomenal job in creating the infrastructure for what will take us into the next five years of growth as a company. We've gone from one to two, and now to five people in the course of just a few years. And temporarily, we were at 8 people last week as we were doing a ton of data entry.

Rob has been absolutely the best partner to work with by taking our site and making it completely e-commerce enabled. We are at a point where we can customize systems to a degree that no one else is offering today.

The site is actually live now, but I've run across a few funny tidbits. Someone called up this morning and asked "Can I really buy the Xserve RAID listed on your site for $999?"

Frantically, I checked the site and realized whoever created the product options mistakenly set that product up to default to $999 from $5999.

So, I have a lot of Q&A to do before our grand opening of our new office on February 1st. And just so we are clear, if you find a Mac Pro on our site for $49--no, you may not buy it at that price.

:-)

Macworld came and went a few weeks back and I realized any posting I may contribute to the Ether about the iPhone, Apple tv, etc...would fall on ears deafened by the overwhelming cacophony of press, posts, blogs, etc...

So, nothing new to post about Macworld announcements that hasn't already been said.

No, we have an entirely new idea to throw out there that no one is talking about. I am actually pretty blown away that I am the only one who has thought about it openly so far...

Regardless, this idea is mine to spill and I am going to write it up big time by the end of the day on Wednesday. Just stay tuned here and you are in for a juicy idea.

We get our last piece of furniture delivered tomorrow. Its a 3/4 partition that separates an open work area from our demo counter. Without it, the area looks pretty open and certainly not focused. With the addition of this panel, our office will really take on a complete look.

Also...another tidbit on the furniture. Most of its from IKEA. I think we saved around $25-$30k by going the IKEA route versus something from Herman Miller, etc... The exception is the color correction suite, where we have a monster Winsted desk which is just amazing. Close to near $130,000 in that room alone with the following:

eCinema DCM23 Color Correction Display
Tangent Devices CP100 Color Correction Panel
Apple Xserve RAID 7.0 Tb
Apple Mac Pro
Panasonic 42" Plasma
Panasonic 17" NTSC Monitor
etc...

Also have a Panasonic 65" 1080p display hooked up to our Intel Mac mini which is running HD content to it either in the form of rotating HD trailers or looping in Keynote kiosk mode. Keynote really makes for an amazing combination when you pair it with a high-end plasma like the Panasonic 65" incher.

I am really enjoying the new office and everyone who comes over calls it a "Toys 'r Us for Pros..."

Signing off here at 1:11 AM and back to work on the site for a few...

tl

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