10. Sing horribly in front of your peers

From happy hours to talent shows to our annual summer outing, we like spending time together. It’s over drinks (or video games!) that we brainstorm some great ideas and blow off steam. Plus, can you take someone seriously if they haven’t sung terrible karaoke in front of you?

9. Go forth and learn!

We’re serious about professional development and to that end, we send people to conferences all the time. We’ve had a strong presence at SXSW the past few years, but also make it a point to attend smaller conferences (Strangeloop, Web 2.0, Brooklyn Beta, among others).

8. Design and Code reviews

We're THAT efficient.

We regularly hold Design Reviews and Code Reviews where Arcers share designs and code samples for group feedback. It’s a great way to figure out what’s not working in a design or to get insight into new frameworks to leverage.

7. Get the goggles & Bunsen burner!

Everyone has several Lab days a year to pursue projects for the Arc90 Lab. Both Kindling and Readability started as Lab projects and we consider our Lab one of the cornerstones of our business!

6. Weekly lunches (and the occasional impromptu ice cream run).

Bad jokes, good company and (when we’re lucky), amazing baklava. Getting together in the same room once a week keeps us connected, regardless of the projects we’re on.

5. “If I can’t make it there…”

While a few of us are remote, the majority of us are based at our office in midtown Manhattan. That means food trucks for lunch, easy access to tons of subways and a short jaunt to Central Park.

4. Key requirement: both sides of the brain

Arc90 brings together the creative and technical. There are no walls between design and development. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful to date.

3. 100% USDA Interesting Work

Between our longstanding strategic relationships with our clients to our innovative product work, there is no shortage of exciting and thought-provoking work at Arc90.

2. THE PEOPLE!

Over 40 of the most talented designers and technologists make up Arc90 today. We’ve always been about the people that make us who we are. Great work is a byproduct of inspiring one another.

1. Scratch that itch

Every employee who walks through our doors has the opportunity to do great things at Arc90. We reward those who bring passion, enthusiasm and a desire to innovate – regardless of what they’re working on.

We’re looking for all sorts of skills to help us grow. Whether you’re a developer (front or back-end), designer, product manager or strategist and Arc90 feels like the place for you, get in touch with us. We’d love to get to know you.

Arc90 has been practicing content strategy fundamentals in its client and product work for years. But there is much to be said for what’s distinctive in their approach and where it marries with mine.

When Content Meets Product

1. BROADEN HORIZONS WITH “BIG TENT” CONTENT STRATEGY.

Content is a critical business asset, but where content is the business asset—think namely, but not exclusively, of publishing or broadcast media—the principles of product development apply. This is part of what I call “big tent” content strategy, wherein we try to solve business problems with content rather than limiting ourselves to addressing (sometimes parochial) content problems alone. A big tent content strategy accounts for product, platform, and people considerations.

Incidentally, this is how we become better critics of something like the AOL content strategy. Seasoned content strategists are uniquely qualified to contribute to wider industry conversations.

In the big picture, content and product are a weave of business strategy. Our work practice, pluralistic as it is, can ladder up to address bigger needs. For example, how can an organization single-source its content production, enabling a genuine “author once, publish everywhere” publishing solution, and what’s the ROI? Process and technology standardization here influences how this organization works with content, yet no one would say such analysis is native to content experts. Content work is a catholic practice and content strategy’s credibility rests on how its practitioners rise to the wider collaborative challenge.

2. DAY 2 IS A PRODUCT PROBLEM.

A product development approach to content strategy addresses the Day 2 problem: namely, what do we do after launch day to be effective with content? The postlaunch paradigm requires editorial strategy—that is, dealing with content problems, and engaging an audience, over time.

Again, this is familiar territory to traditional publishers and product professionals. There is a specific name for ongoing, serial content in this context: editorial. In broadcast television, the equivalent to editorial content is programming. Entire businesses, such as the video on demand field led by Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, are predicated on the scope, volume, and inventory of its programming. Day 2 is where content matters most to many areas of business. Questions of product licensing and syndication are completely germane to the content expert.

3. EDITORIAL STRATEGY IS PRODUCT STRATEGY EXECUTED.

As Paul Ford has argued, real editors ship—meaning they are involved in active product development work. The proverbial Day 2, the operational life of an organization, is where both publishing and product development rises or falls. (It’s also where content strategy successes and failures are best evaluated.)

This is the meaning behind editorial strategy as I practice it. Put another way: an editorial strategy is the follow-through, or the operationalization, of a content strategy. Your website is not a magazine, but it should be, inasmuch as it commits itself to the planning and resources required of ongoing professional content care and feeding. Likewise, masthead workflow and conventional publishing practices, like style guides and editorial calendars, are instructive of what’s entailed by being an effective publisher online, or anywhere else. This is why content strategy is “an integrative practice,” to use Joe Gollner’s tidy expression.

4. BUSINESS MODELS ARE THE BUSINESS OF CONTENT PEOPLE.

The marriage of product and content strategy does not stop at support documentation and knowledge bases. As experts in how content, technology, and organizations interact, we’re all management consultants now.

A genuine product strategy for a content offering must consider the business model, remembering always that content is expensive. Free, paid or otherwise on the one hand, and the possibilities of licensing and syndicating content on the other, a complete content strategy must take a position and rationale on the business case of its recommendations. This is being played out all over the web today, in paid content models of subscriptions and advertising, and from SEO-friendly pay fences to apps to content “windowing.” All of this should be core to an understanding of content strategy; it’s prerequisite to knowing product.

5. TACKLE WIDESPREAD USER PROBLEMS.

Content production and consumption are the twin frays of Day 2.

Content production problems are rife in organizations today, as are the opportunities for developing next-generation editorial planning tools. The rise of big data (and efforts like database.com) all but ensures a wave of them around the bend. Like any UXer, content strategists can see problems through to products, and I’m excited to see our analytical chops and problem solving reach wider audiences this way.

Similarly, as user experience professionals, we understand intuitively that content of any stripe can exacerbate general information overload. Done well, great content exerperiences can combat it, too, standing apart from the alternatives. As such, content consumption is an experience to be designed for with care and empathy.

The Content Strategy of Readability

Arc90’s Readability is an example of a product—with its own highly innovative and rapidly evolving business model—solving particularly for the challenges of content consumption.

Readability has cut a fresh path forward for readers and publishers alike by insisting that pleasurable reading, reading on readers’ own terms, is an experience for which people will pay. Credit the entire team here, and incomparable talents like Erin Kissane, for turning a simple sentiment into a real product. In a fragmented market glutted with players trying to rethink how we read online, Readability simultaneously takes a stab at advancing web standards, radically refashioning the reader-writer-publisher relationship, and building a revenue bridge for publishers to the economics of “read later.” (More on that another time.)

As the proverbial read later reader myself, traveling 100 miles a day by train, I cannot imagine a project that has gone further more rapidly than Readability in space-launching beyond our parochial user experience hobbyhorses to breathe fresh life into the future-of-content conversation.

Are You Going Our Way?

The future of content, and certainly that of reading and publishing, will be played out in product.

Somewhere between expertise, experience, energy, and luck, you get the work you deserve. But you don’t pick your time, which makes 2011 all the more exciting for what’s ahead of us.

The future of content, and certainly that of reading and publishing, will be played out in product. There are no more first drafts. The world does not need another wireframe. Ideas and inklings—a Readability, a Donahue, the next new thing—these simply must get out into the world, realized, to find their footing.

It’s true what you’re hearing: Arc90 is rising up as a big-think, liberal arts 37Signals—but its own beast, too, dripping with heart and talent. In New York UX circles, it’s already beaten down the door of best kept secret. I’m proud to thicken its ranks.

Readers and writers, advocates and fans: all of us have a horse in this race about where content is headed. It’s the call of brighter prospects for the stuff we cherish, enjoy, and appreciate. Here’s to leveling up, and to all that’s next for everyone invested in the project of making content matter.

Jeffrey MacIntyre, Arc90 Lead Strategist, is forming its content strategy and information architecture practice.

Product is the Future of Content

Everyone’s a critic, as the old saw goes, but the lament counts twice-over in the future-of-media discussion. Stir in digital industry folks you follow on Twitter and, well, stand back.

Tear a proverbial page from my feed any day this week. Many of us became expert in the viability of the NYTimes.com pay fence and its app-bundled offering. Several, myself included, openly clucked over cash-flush Flipboard’s fresh financing round, and pondered the state of aggregated magazine experiences along with Khoi Vinh. Netflix announced a foray into original programming while YouTube coaxes along similar efforts.

“The simple takeaway here: content is product.

Meanwhile, in the past week at the Arc90 office, Readability noted The New York Review of Books’ and TweetMag’s partner integration while the team was heads-down down on a raft of promising new service enhancements. A short week earlier, the Donahue live experiment kicked off at SXSW, to say nothing of other product and client ventures afoot.

What do all these events share in common? Each are product announcements; each involve us both as everyday consumers and digital experts alike; and each take content as the core aspect of their experience.

The simple takeaway here: content is product. But I believe there’s a bigger leap sitting in wait.

Product is actually the future of content.

This is where the most pressing problems of content production and monetization will be solved, and where the richest opportunities, to innovate the user experience of content presentation and consumption, will be realized. (Consider an app like Reeder, for example.) This is how digital publishing moves forward.

Why Arc90, Why Now

When I look at it closely, the Predicate project today feels genuinely satisfied and complete.

Content strategy alone can feather your nest, but it won’t fly you the places sound design, development, and product thinking can.

The louder drumbeat about content’s future—what comes after the book, the newspaper, and whole businesses and other industries, all in a digital fast-fade from their native selves?—will assuredly be driven by technology, but decided by product. Pragmatically, how will businesses of all kinds position to keep ahead of the perennial sea change of digital technology and media? My bet is with folks that conceive, design, build, and ship their own products: namely, a shop like Arc90.

A Product Take on Content Strategy

My working definition of content strategy has been to call it product development for content. A little shopworn, yes, but it’s been just the sturdy, succinct turn of phrase non-initiates seem to appreciate.

But what is the bearing of a product sensibility on content?

What is the role of content strategy in organizations where content is their business?

And what’s the value of a content strategy that does not make some sense of the tangible challenges we face as digital consumers and producers?

I have a few ideas of what has mattered most in my practice as a content specialist. More to follow.

In a follow-up post I share more about where I see the intersection of product and content taking the practice of content strategy. For now, let me extend my gratitude and excitement to all the very fine, far-flung folks I call family, friends, and colleagues: here’s to everything sitting on that dazzling horizon for us in 2011.

One of the most important lessons we’ve learned in designing and building product end-to-end is that great product demands great content. We’ve always believed that a great experience leads to a great relationship between user and product. And a great relationship is built upon great communication. The way a product speaks to a user and the information it shares – whether instructional or substantive – can make or break that relationship.

Watching from afar as the term “content strategy” began its ascent, we couldn’t help but look at one another and say, “Hey, we do a lot of that.” You can’t have good product without good content strategy. While we patted ourselves on the back for sort of being in the mix, we knew we could (and should) put more energy and focus on content.

Today, I’m happy to announce that Jeffrey MacIntyre, formerly of Predicate, is joining Arc90 as a Lead Strategist. Jeffrey has been working with us as an advisor on Readability for the past few months. Ever since we started working together, we’ve realized just how much we’ve enjoyed playing in the intersection where his skills and ours meet. Jeffrey will have a hand in both product and client efforts, as well as helping us build out the content strategy and information architecture practice within Arc90.

We couldn’t be happier to have Jeffrey join our ranks. Be sure to read his two-part perspective on product, content and where we plan to take things.

Welcome, Jeffrey!

Last Friday, I wrapped up almost 3 months as an intern at Arc90. I came into it expecting this (video), but really, I’ve loved every day I’ve spent working at Arc. While there were no one-man swimming pools or beach volleyball courts, I made some great webapps, learned great skills, and met some phenomenally talented people. But the funniest (saddest?) part about it all was realizing how much of my college education I’ve wasted in two years worrying about grades. College is about inspiring new ideas and being creative, and it took me a summer at Arc to learn that.

A Retrospective of My Creativity

I had a pretty awesome childhood. I biked, ran through the woods, scraped my knees – things kids did before the world had 3D games to simulate them. But of everything I dedicated my time to, drawing definitely sucked in the most of my time. I had this massive pad of paper – the sheets covered my entire torso, altogether it must’ve been at least 2 inches thick. I poured my ideas and imagination into it: fantasy mega-planes/trains/cars/trucks, epic beam rays, cataclysmic volcanoes, and other stuff that belong in Michael Bay films. Even when I made the transition from paper to digital canvas in middle school, my supply of ideas remained as fresh as ever. It was like a golden age of creativity for me.

My college education, in stark contrast, has been a depressing cycle of answering problem sets, counting down days to Fridays, and battling nodding off to sleep in class. These things are especially bad at a school where double-majoring is considered the norm, and pulling all-nighters are the punchlines of far too many stories. It’s not that classes are uninteresting or impossibly difficult, it’s that they pile on so much work that I have little to no time for the creativity I practically oozed as a kid. My time split between doing work and having fun to take my mind off doing work. It was pretty disheartening.

We laugh about it ...and then we cry.

As you might’ve guessed, working at Arc was a big shock. I’d be given a project with no rules and practically no limitations (something I’d never get at a corporate internship) – complete creative freedom while doing “work.” And I wouldn’t be given jobs like “find a way to creatively deliver my coffee”; I was expected to develop full web apps based on nothing more than a few interviews and a list of suggested features. Plus, I had no web development experience beyond simple HTML/CSS. AJAX was ammonia cleanser as far as I knew. Despite the fact that I spent a few nights this summer crouched over a CouchDB or jQuery book, I felt a legitimate catharsis of creativity. I’d be building an interface, coding its underpinnings, fixing its bugs, delivering it to production. Not only was I learning more in 2 months than in 2 years, I was getting paid for it, not paying $54K for the privilege.

Attention to Ideas, not Grades

When I said earlier that I’d “wasted two years”, I meant that I’ve wasted two years completing requirements and maintaining grades instead of being actively creative and kindling innovation (complete coincidence I interned at a company whose speciality is just this). Today, creativity and ideas are the tech world’s measure of talent. And it’s an exciting world to be a part of: there are innumerable venture capitalists, angel investors, tech communities (TechCrunch, VentureBeat) that are always looking to fund and support the next big visionary idea. Ideas are what get tech followers hot and bothered – advances in programming to an extent, but not in the numbers say, a new phone OS or social networking site does. And when you look at the increasing trend of outsourcing basic programming and menial tasks to India and China cheaply, ideas and innovation really start to shine as differentiators in the American tech landscape.

Don't have academic tunnelvision - expand beyond your major.

But I don’t belittle the work of my professors. They’re among the most dedicated people I know. Nor would I drop out of college to pursue ideas (you need an idea first). College is a fertile place to kickstart a life as an innovator. Upwards of 10,000 briliant engineers and entrepreneurs are clustered at Carnegie Mellon, some of whom will be on the front page of NYT or TechCrunch someday. I’ve got access to hundreds of knowledgeable professors who can link me to investors. And this school offers a lot more than a tech education. For two years I’ve been siloed in programming and tech classes, rarely straying beyond requirements. This semester, I’ll be taking psychology, philosophy, entrepreneurship classes to support and develop new ideas, not hover on the ones I already have. Alex Mann wrote this enlightening post about college entrepreneurship where he writes, “[college] can provide a four-year experimentation platform with less risk than the real-world to test ideas in an intelligent feedback mechanism.” It’s all about making the best of your education.

This second-grader, with just an idea, outsourced the production of his iPad game to an offshore firm. When programming becomes America’s next “outsourced resource”, it’s the ideas that are going to really define a technologist’s talent. If I’ve got any lasting advice for college students in the tech field, it’s to spend your time networking and growing ideas instead of focusing too much on getting through classes. And be bored.

Long story short: Interning at Arc has been awesome.

They’re all part of a talk that Tim Meaney and I are giving at SXSW Interactive: The Revenge of Editorials. It’s scheduled for Friday, May 12 at 5pm. You can find all the details on the SXSW site.

We’re a Web shop, so it sort of goes without saying that we love the Web and we believe in the power of the Web. While the Web is borne out of technology, it is – in so many ways – a product of humans. It’s got it all. Intellectual discourse and low-brow ramblings. Pornography and pornography addiction support groups. We play games, do business, meet people, make friends and (virtually) kill enemies.

That said, many people don’t think very much of the Web. The constant buzz. The noisy layouts. The general lack of care into so much of what’s produced. It’s a messy place.

One of our biggest fears, and a key motivator for this talk, is that this frustration will lead people to move away from the Web. These other "places" (whether an App Store or some new-fangled digital magazine) are inviting, but they run counter to what’s made the Web so captivating today.

Our talk will focus on elevating experiences on the Web, rather than bussing people off to some sanitized "other place." We’ll view the Web through the lens of history and look ahead to how we – as content creators, designers and technologists – can do a better job of elevating the Web.

We know the Web will always have its darker corners. We just need to make sure that we create great new experiences inside the Web.

We hope you can join us. It’ll be Arc90′s first showing at SXSW and we’re really excited to be there. Our talk is part of a series on content strategy.

Now when you view a Readabilitied page, you’ll see a new “Help Haiti” link on the left that will take you to Google’s Haiti Crisis Response page where you can donate, volunteer, or provide or seek information on missing people.

Please understand that we don’t take this step lightly. Strictly speaking, we promised that Readability would remove extraneous junk from web pages, and now we’re violating that promise to suit our whims, however benevolent they might be.

We hope that you will forgive the betrayal. We’re keeping the link small and unobtrusive, and we have no relationship with the organizations listed other than deep appreciation for their work. We simply feel that, even in a difficult world, this disaster stands out in its scope and human cost, and we’d rather make Readability a little bit worse if we can make the situation in Haiti the tiniest bit better.

We’ve heard variations of this story time and again from our Kindling customers and tonight’s Kindling release of Campaigns directly addresses this need. A campaign is a time-sensitive call for ideas about a particular topic or goal. As some of our users know, motivation can be a real challenge for any organization. Campaigns are extremely useful tools that help you continue generating new ideas in an on-going manner.

Campaigns are easy for any decision-maker to create. Choose the Room that the campaign belongs in, then add a title, description and the dates that the campaign will be active. Though you may be tempted to run a longer campaign, we recommend an aggressive deadline to increase motivation even further.

Kindling now also offers the ability to attach a reward to your campaign. This additional incentive can drive even more activity to your campaign.

Once the campaign has ended, the ideas that have not been approved or declined remain in the Room. Sometimes the ideas generated for a campaign deserve more time for debate and discussion.

Campaign activity is also accessible via Kindling reporting, so decision-makers have access to the full set of information regarding the campaign at any time.

We know first-hand that motivation can be a real challenge for any organization and we’re hopeful that campaigns will make it easier for decision-makers to kick start their employee’s imaginations. Campaigns is the first of many exciting features that we’re planning for Kindling in 2010 to keep members of your organization engaged with the innovation process.

We can’t wait to hear the success stories that campaigns inspire for our clients!

If you’re not yet using Kindling, sign up at http://www.kindlingapp.com.

The word is probably a front-runner for Most Abused Marketing Term. Is there any phrase more inane than “business innovation”? The term is so badly overused (and misused) that it’s taken on that wrong kind of buzz.

Rather than talking the talk about being innovative, the best way to be innovative is to do something innovative. We’ve tried to create that culture here at Arc90. While we can yammer on all day about how innovative we are, our Lab is our attempt to actually walk the walk.

To feed our own curiosity, we’re always looking around us for inspiration and motivation on how we can better innovate, but more importantly establish a culture where innovation can thrive. In that spirit, we’ve created a place where we’ll be sharing innovative ideas, products, articles, thoughts…just about anything that can inspire and motivate us.

It’s called the Cult of Innovation. It’s mainly a place where we’ll point the way to all things innovative. Yes, the “cult” part of the name is a little, well, cult-ish. Don’t let that scare you away. This is the good kind of cult.

Wikipedia defines “cult” as “a group whose beliefs or practices could be considered strange or sinister.” Let’s lop off the “sinister” part of the definition. Anyone that innovates breaks new ground and challenges the status quo. So “strange” may not be that off-base. It’s all about the undiscovered. The “out of left field” stuff. We hope you’ll enjoy the Cult as much as we’ve enjoyed seeking out and sharing the innovative things we’ve found.

If you’ve got anything you think is worth sharing on the Cult, don’t hesitate to share it with us. You can also follow the Cult on Twitter at @c_o_i.

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?