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This year has been busy, very very busy.  Considering this is my first post in over 2 years, here’s what went on in these past two years.

The Tangent

Well, for starters, the economy went down the shitter right about the time of my last post.  Considering it was our second year of business, that was both a good and a bad thing.  Good, because it was easy for us to strap down and control costs and navigate the uncertain times.  Bad, because let’s face it, who wants to be in a recession!  Well, we spent all of 2009 just “figuring it out”.  Bottom-line…not only did we survive, we did it without letting go of any employees (yes, each of them is instrumental in their own right).  Come 2010, we were adamant in getting some exciting projects to work on.  With persistence and a little bit of luck, we did.

LottoGopher.com

By far one of the most exciting projects that we worked on (and continue to) is LottoGopher.com.  It is an LA based startup headed by James Morel of Dr. Tattoff fame.  I met James in a coffee shop (no, actually it was a Thai restaurant but we only got coffee) way back in March.  At that time, his online startup idea to reinvent the national lottery was 2 years and 3 development companies old.  The companies never worked out and his site was never finished.  Fast-forward 7 months and we helped released lottogopher.com.  Simply put, LottoGopher allows you to play the lottery online.  You sign up for a membership and then order lottery tickets using your credit card.  It has a social-networking layer that allows you to create and play your ticket in a group….hence, increasing your chances of winning.  It still amazes me that the Lottery is a cash-only manual business.  Anyway, in the first week of its launch, NBC news covered it on their 6pm segment.  You can view the clip below:

Not only was this a very exciting project to sink our teeth into…it had the ingredients for a great experience.  We inherited really bad and buggy code with a lot of missing functionality.  Moreover, there were some interesting modules that still needed to be developed.  For example, the site automatically prints lottery bet slips right from the admin interface with all your numbers pre-filled in.  And you can take these pre-filled bet slips to the store in order to get your tickets (cool, huh!).

We’re really excited about launching this and it gaining traction.  We launched it in California for starters and the next phase opens it up to other states.

2010 was great with a TON of lessons learned.  We’re currently busy chugging away with projects for Warner Bros., California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and a couple of other hot LA startups….2011, watch out, we ain’t slowing down!