The Interactive Ideas Blog

Consulting Services for ProtoShare are now available. If you need help prototyping a complex website, simulating rich Internet functionality, or transitioning from another system, let us do the heavy lifting. We will work with you to plan and build custom solutions that meet your specific needs and that support your overall business strategy. Your success is our primary goal! To request a quote, please complete this form.

We offer a wide range of services covering all aspects of the prototyping process including:

Building templates

Creating resources that can be reused across projects by multiple stakeholders is an important way to maximize your team’s efficiency and success. In ProtoShare, templates are the primary way to reuse resources such as headers, footers, and sub-navigation.
ProtoShare Consulting Services can build a flexible and extensible library of templates that meet your current requirements and that grow with your future needs. We can create a collection of stock company templates or custom templates for your key clients.

Creating custom components

To support the creation of rich prototypes, ProtoShare includes a large number of built-in components. These components can be used individually or they can be combined in unique and complex ways. Moreover, you can create any component by specifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

ProtoShare Consulting Services can create custom components that suit your specific needs. From complex navigation schemes to completely customized components, we can create a prototyping experience that is visually and functionally compelling.

Transitioning from another tool

Prototyping has been accepted as a best-practice by many software professionals and organizations. This wide acceptance is matched by the large variety of tools used to create prototypes. Everything from simple drawing and presentation applications to complex development environments have been tried – with varying levels of success.

ProtoShare Consulting Services can help you transition from your legacy prototyping tool to ProtoShare. We can reproduce content and interactivity from almost any tool, providing you with continuity and peace of mind for all your projects.

Incorporating branding information

Whether your audience is an internal development team or a big-name client, branding can be an important way to bring your prototype to life. Including a client’s logo and design aesthetic, or a corporate color scheme and terminology can add a comforting feeling of familiarity, while strengthening project ownership.

ProtoShare Consulting Services can incorporate your branding information. We can create brand-specific designs, content, and styles to produce the desired look and feel.

Training your team

ProtoShare projects typically involve multiple stakeholders with diverse skills such as information architects, designers, and developers. Bringing everyone up to speed can be a real challenge. And with advanced functionality such as rich Internet simulation, stateful wireframes, and complex navigation schemes, there’s a lot to learn!

ProtoShare Consulting Services can train your team on how to maximize the benefits of ProtoShare. You’ll learn the necessary skills to efficiently develop compelling prototypes, while increasing efficiency, productivity, and satisfaction.
Get started today.

As part of a comprehensive look at prototyping solutions, trends, and what the future holds, three of us from ProtoShare were recently interviewed. Check it out. And if you really have a keen interest in all of it, there’s even an un-edited 32 minute audio interview available, for your listening pleasure. We were interviewed by two smart, well-prepared, and knowledgeable people, Sasha Kovaliov and Ludmila Kurbatskaya. They had just started a new online project called “CIO Happy Hour.” As they were preparing to post the interview, we found ourselves wanting to know more about them, and what they hope to accomplish with their new venture. We switched roles.

Please share a little bit of history about CIO Happy Hour?
The CIO Happy Hour project appeared when we were thinking about better ways to engage our customers, who are mostly IT top managers and business owners. From our own (corporate) experience one of the main issues in discussing technologies and business is the lack of understanding: businessmen and tech people speak different languages, therefore business needs decent “translation” into language of technologies, and vice versa. New technology opportunities require both business strategies and planning Our goal is to make these two worlds closer, give information about the tools, talk about IT business, listen to the questions and issues of the readers and provide exclusive answers from real people.

Where are you located?
Our office is located in the development center of Itransition in Minsk, Belarus. We’re also coordinating sales and marketing activities in other markets (Ludmila is responsible for the Dutch region, and I am for the UK) very often we travel there as well.

What made you think of featuring the wireframing and prototyping industry?
We were rambling through emerging trends, and I came across the poll “Best RIA apps of 2009.” I noticed the majority of the apps that were nominated were in the wireframing/prototyping space. After a brief analysis, it was clear, that the wireframing topic is what we need. On one hand, it’s a great opportunity for development and collaboration optimization. On the other, there are a lot of new players in this market and it’s not easy to be aware of the latest changes.

Initially we planned four interviews, but after our first discussion we got quite a lot of attention from other companies, so we extended the list a bit and changed the format to a more prolonged marathon. We also noticed that the community of UX designers and IAs is very strong; we’ve received great feedback on Twitter and Friendfeed that helped us a great deal.

Any additional tidbits or information you would like to share with us is most welcome.
We are still experimenting a bit with the format. For the next round, we will conduct a poll that will let you decided on the topic. We want to know to who our readers want to talk, and what’s on their mind. We are flexible and open to new ideas and will continue focusing on business and IT cooperation, unique professional content, and comprehensive burning answers.

Are Google, Blogger, Oracle, Adobe, and hundreds of other companies with browser-based HTML editors potentially violating someone’s trademark?  According to the Cease and Desist letter we received from a major law firm, someone believes the answer is “yes.”

Site9 CEO, Andrew Mottaz, writes regarding a recent Cease and Desist letter about ProtoShare.  Keep reading to learn about the letter, nebulous laws involved, and how we resolved the issue, but didn’t answer the bigger question.

What happened?

A few months ago, I received a Cease and Desist letter from a law firm representing three large, well-known corporations.  They claimed our product ProtoShare® violated the copyright of their font software.  Apparently, someone from one of these companies had seen the open-source HTML editor we use in our software.  From a drop-down list of fonts (image at right),  the other side reached the conclusion that we were embedding the fonts in our software.

I am the first to agree that embedding fonts you don’t own is a violation of copyright law.  However, we don’t embed fonts at all.  As anyone familiar with HTML knows, when creating an HTML document, the suggested fonts are added to a CSS style ( or font tag ) as a list of suggested fonts.  The browser will then choose the best font from the list.  This is how HTML works. ( As an aside – who knew that ‘Fantasy’ was a default generic font? )

I immediately contacted their attorneys, and explained that we don’t embed fonts.  Their response was, “OK, well in that case, you are violating our trademark by listing the names of the font in your HTML editor.”

I asked for clarification and received the following letter.

I am a bit amazed by this.  However, as I thought about the issue, it occurred to me that whether they were right or wrong about the legal issue, it was not completely clear cut.

What are the legal issues?

Trademark rights attach when you use words, phrases or artwork in the course of commerce to represent your product.  We trademarked the name of our product, ProtoShare, because we don’t want someone else using the name.  One important issue is whether a potentially infringing use of a trademark is likely to result in confusion among consumers.  You might have heard of the ‘moron in a hurry’ test, which is: would a moron in a hurry think that Acme Computers and Acme Plumbing were the same company or represented the same product?

There are some affirmative defenses to trademark infringement.  One of them is nominative fair use. At first glance, our usage appears to fall squarely in the nominative fair use category.  After all, there is no other way to create a font tag for the Arial font than by using the word “Arial.”  In my view, the possibility of a consumer thinking that our product is associated with or endorsed by the owners of the Arial trademark is non-existent.

However, the argument made by the font companies is not that you can never list the name of their font. The argument is that you can’t list the name of their font in such a way that indicates the displayed font is their font, when in actuality it is not.

As an example, one of the most common font-face tag sequences in HTML is “arial,helvetica,sans-serif.”  Depending on your available licensed, installed fonts, (which often depends on your operating system) you will see text rendered in the order listed, using either the font Arial, the font Helvetica, or some other default sans-serif font. When using an HTML editor, a user may highlight text, choose ‘Arial’ from a drop-down list, and see the selected text change font.  However, it’s possible the displayed font may not be Arial, since it’s not on the user’s system. Instead, a similar sans-serif font may be used.  If you think about the ‘moron in a hurry’ argument, you can see how this could confuse your product with a competing product.  Now, because we’re web developers, we think in terms of font tags, so we realize that by choosing Arial, we will get Arial or some similar font.

How did we resolve this issue?

What do the companies have to gain from this letter?  It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the font companies are trying solely to get a new revenue stream, but it’s not that simple.  First, the law compels these companies to enforce their trademark.  If they ignore trademark violations, they run the risk of losing the legal status of their trademarks.

So what did we do?  Clearly, we didn’t have any interest in litigation.  I believe our prior usage of these trademarks falls into the nominative fair use defense, but I’d rather spend our time and money somewhere else than deciding this issue in court against some deep-pocketed parties. We decided, instead, to go generic: we replaced our list of fonts with generic names.  For our tool – a prototyping tool, after all – this seems like a workable solution.  Most of our customers only use one or two of the font-faces anyway.  We actually thought the editor was more clear using generics (image at left).  Yet, I would prefer to definitively know that the usage we had was nominative fair use, or, with minor terminology modifications, it would be.  This clarification would benefit both ProtoShare and possibly the font companies, not to mention the hundreds of other companies out there using similar editors.

The Bigger Question

This issue illustrates some of the pitfalls of how intellectual property is handled in the USA, and the high cost of litigation.  In this case, the companies on the other side were only interested in maintaining their trademarks, and not looking to extract fees from us.  Consequently, they worked with us to reach a solution that satisfied both parties.  The issue cost us, nevertheless,  a considerable amount of time and money to implement.  Were the companies required by law to prevent us from having a standard list of fonts in our product?  I don’t know.  There certainly are plenty of other companies, very large and small, out there doing the same thing. If you have a minute, I’m interested in your thoughts. Are all online text editors in violation of trademarks? Is every company using an online editor susceptible to a lawsuit? Is HTML itself in violation of the law?

Last Thursday, Google Co-founder & President, Technology, Sergey Brin, posted the annual founder’s letter on the official Google blog.

Brin had many fascinating insights and observations about the state, and future, of search, online advertising, browsers, mobile, and more. Of particular interest to us here at Site9, however, were his comments about the benefits of online applications, cloud computing, and collaboration.

“The benefits of web-based services, also known as cloud computing, are clear. There is no installation. All data is stored safely in a data center (no worries if your hard drive crashes). It can be accessed anytime, anywhere there is a working web browser and Internet connection,” wrote Brin. “Perhaps even more importantly, new forms of communication and collaboration become possible. In fact, today I have worked on this document using three different operating systems and two different web browsers, all without any special software or complex logistics.”

What more can we say? Last year, as we surveyed the market in website prototyping tools, this philosophy guided us to develop a web-based collaborative prototyping tool called ProtoShare. It’s good to see Brin and others out there pointing out the many advantages of web-based tools. If you haven’t yet joined the thousands who are enjoying the benefits of collaborative website prototyping, you can check it out with a free trial. And if you are already using ProtoShare, thanks for helping us continue to make the tool even better.

ProtoShare is attending and exhibiting at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. If you are attending the event, 31 March – 3 April 2009 at the Moscone Center, stop by and see us at booth #729. We’ll give demos of ProtoShare 3.0, answer all questions, and listen to feedback from anyone using, or thinking about using, ProtoShare.

We’re sending down a team that includes Site9 founders Blake Johnson and Andrew Mottaz; Director of Sales, Josh Chaney; and Product Marketing Manager, Peter Uchytil. We also have some exciting product announcements to make during the Expo. We think you’re really going to like what you hear, and see. (Hint: A much speedier process of working, major user interface refinements, and an uncomplicated method to simulate rich Internet functionality.)

The Power of Less is the theme for the 2009 Expo. The Web 2.0 Expo website states: “2009 will be a tough year in many ways, but now more than ever, the core concepts of Web 2.0 provide an advantage. Lightweight tools, user interfaces, and development models will help streamline productivity and focus resources.” That sums up well our philosophy about the current state of things.

On Thursday, 2 April, from 12:20 – 12:30, at the Solutions Showcase Theatre, Blake Johnson will present Get it Right in the Prototype: How Collaborative Website Prototyping Reduces Costs, Time, and Headaches. Johnson’s presentation is during the lunch hour, so bring over your finest convention-hall cuisine and grab a seat; he’s scheduled right between Novell and Amazon.

We think Web 2.0 has definitely evolved into more than just a catchy – some may say passé – slogan. If you throw out the term and embrace the concept of cloud computing, an architecture that enables easy participation and collaboration, and tools that cost nothing to maintain, we say that sounds pretty good. As O’Reilly Media writes, “The web as a platform has shown us a new direction. Now is the time to answer the call and make its principles real in your organization, whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a brand new startup.”  Stop by our booth at the Expo, #729, and let us know what you think about Web 2.0, ProtoShare 3.0, or anything else.

For a FREE Web 2.0 Expo Hall Pass visit: https://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2009/public/register
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