Who Is Arc90?

Through our five-year existence as a company, we’ve done a great job at making noise, particularly by way of the tools we’ve released through our Lab. Readability, TBUZZ, Arc90′s PHP Twitter API Client, and JSON Lint are fairly well-known. Most people who have heard of Arc90 likely know us because of these tools. So is Arc90 some sort of R&D shop that builds and then gives away interesting productivity tools?

You’d never know it based on our [now previous] website, but Arc90 has a long history of consulting success. Companies we’re currently working with or have worked with in the past include Insight, Knovel, McGraw-Hill, GradeGuru, AppFirst, The New York Times, and Wolters Kluwer, among others. So is Arc90 a consulting firm, focusing on strategic consulting, design, and Web development?

And then there’s Kindling, our idea collaboration tool and our first product to market. Kindling is currently being used by organizations large and small: The US Department of Veterans Affairs, LeapFrog, Medtronic, AOL, Symantec, and many more. As far as these customers of Arc90 are concerned, we are a product company responsible for supporting Kindling. So is the future of Arc90 product development – is Arc90 a product company?

Yes. Yes. And yes.

Arc90 is all of the things described above – an R&D shop, a strategic consulting firm, a Web design/ development company, and a product company.

Five years ago, the company was born out of rejection – a rejection of the hostage situation that is often corporate IT, a rejection of the business model of the turn-of-the-century Web company, and a rejection of development-lead software efforts. The company attracts individuals passionate about technology and the Web, those that don’t fit the mold of the 9-5 corporate culture, and those that love what they do and don’t view work as work.

The business has grown steadily over five years, adding clients slowly but consistently, mostly through the scattering model. During this period, we viewed our Web presence as sort of a placeholder; it said nothing about the company and wouldn’t educate the uninformed about our services. A visit to Arc90.com over the last five years left the visitor confused, at best. The site created a fun mystique around the company, but as time went on, we’ve become more visible and this became a problem. It was time to introduce the world to Arc90.

So I’m very happy to announce the relaunch of Arc90.com. Throughout the stages of building the new site, through concept, design, and production, we’ve tried to focus on one specific use-case: a visitor trying to answer the elusive question…Who is Arc90?