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Well, lookie what we got here. As I'm backing up all the old TCEP sessions committing them to DVD as their final resting place, I can't believe it's been over a year since our last show. I've been struggling to decide exactly what to do with The Cubicle Escape Pod for a long, long time. It's been an albatross around my neck -- a constant source of guilt. We never intended to leave the show hanging for a year and I hope you, our faithful audience, can understand that life just got in the way. So what have we been up to? When we last talked to you we were struggling to bring our newest venture to market. Mired in another long development cycle, our partnership began weakening as each of us were bombarded by life in general and our day jobs or other businesses. At work, my boss resigned and I took the interim-CIO position which demanded quite a bit of my time. Shouldering a whole new realm of responsibility, I held the position for nearly six months before we hired my successor. During that period I was set on seeing our venture launch. "Live or die" was my mantra. I would accept either to see closure on the project. We informally launched InkOutLoud.com back in February with the agreement that we would test the market for about a month before throwing in the towel. We felt the market had passed us by and the podcast/web audio trend was quickly dying as video was where our target market was moving. We made a few phone calls, entertained a potential client, but in the end we gave up and moved on with our lives. Personally, I was so burned out on the entire thing I was relieved to see it put to rest. Matt, in particular, has had almost as many life-changing events as possible in the span of one year. He bought a new house, got a new job, got another new job, had a baby and moved to Tallahassee. Free of the University and a stint at a horrible job, Matt settled in with his new family in the rolling hills of Tallahassee with his wife, Lindsey, and beautiful baby girl, Lillian. Matt now holds the title of Director of Marketing and oversees interactive marketing projects. Bert continued to focus on his growing design business. He made the leap from home office to office office, hired an assistant and now has a couple freelance designers picking up the slack. Bert struggles with being the "manager" (E-Myth anyone?), but it's the natural evolution of being a business owner. Our fourth partner began focusing on his other startup -- a real estate marketing company. I took a very small ownership stake in his company to help bring his idea to market. After a few months of development, we launched his business back in July. It is doing fairly well and he has expansion plans already in the works. Unfortunately, his business requires more of my time than I'm able to give so I'll be fading myself out while he redevelops his website on a new platform. As for me, shortly after my new boss took the helm I was promoted to Director and Chief Architect of a new Enterprise Architecture group. My new mandate involves managing three Domain Architects (Software, Data and Network), building new hardware and software platforms to drive the business for the next 5-10 years. It was a much welcomed promotion as I was able to distance myself from the day-to-day tactical issues of keeping the company running to a more strategic position where I can do what I do best -- play with new technology and find ways to solve business problems with the new technology. Here and there Bert and I have collaborated on a few small website-based efforts which will probably not see the light of day. Other than that I've been mending my broken entrepreneurial heart and clearing my mind for the next round, which may come very soon. As for the show, Bert and I kicked around the idea of 3.0, but it has been only talk thus far. While we both want to continue the show, we just don't know where the time will come from. If any of you are still out there, perhaps you can convince us to give it a shot. In the meantime, I have no idea what I'm going to do with the website and all of the material. According to our Feedburner account, we still have about 350 people subscribed to the public feed and another 32 on the Modcast feed. I will leave the site up as is for now until I figure it all out. Until next time, thank you all for your ear over the last two years. In its day, TCEP was one of the most gratifying projects I've taken on. I felt we had a really great little community and I'm sorry we couldn't keep it going. If you're interested in seeing what I'm up to, you can check my blog at jonathansthoughts.com. Take care! Jon Write Comment (2 Comments) |
