Watch this Space

At press time, partners Bill Sewell, Taylor Tyng, and Mitch Bassett finally got an office bathroom. And they have earned it. After eight years of building their Wiredrive and Iowa Interactive business to 15 employees in an 1,800-square-foot, plumbing-free workspace, they have nearly tripled their real estate just weeks before their summer launch of Wiredrive 2.

Although the building isn't finished, Wiredrive 2 looks mostly done — a slick, comprehensive update to the company's asset management/presentation environment (Wiredrive Library) and project management/review and approval environment (Wiredrive Projects). Both products are available standalone, or they can integrate into Iowa Interactive's gorgeous public-facing custom website designs.

Sewell (bass) and Tyng (guitar) met in a band. At his IT day job, Sewell was building an intranet for CBS 12 years ago when asset management, QuickTime, and intranets were all in their infancy. Tyng was a web designer experimenting with what came to be called rich media.

In what turned out to be a prescient — if initially difficult — melding of missions, the pair started building both a web-design business for production and postproduction companies as well as QuickTime-based review and approval/asset management/hosting tools. These seemingly unrelated endeavors would, by 2005, start to merge, giving the companies a unique advantage. It's the idea that sales and marketing is part image and messaging, part communication environment — an updated take on medium-as-message. Iowa Interactive can help you build a great brand look; with the Wiredrive tools, you can speak Web 2.0 with your clients and prospects, both before and after the sale.

In keeping with modern workflow (and workloads), these tools are totally practical. They take ingrained behaviors and provide interactive, web-enabled ways of doing them. For example: the demo reel. With Wiredrive Library, production and postproduction salespeople have the company's entire portfolio of assets at their fingertips in a keyword-friendly searchable or browsable interface. So they can quickly build custom demo reels with notes and other features. Through a simple email interface, they can pass those demo reels on in a variety of ways. Clients and prospects can forward the reels easily to others, save them to iTunes, and podcast them to one or many. And the video is fast, small, and beautiful.

Anyone with a content creation business to sell and market can probably pay for the annual cost of Wiredrive Library with one decent sale. As for Wiredrive Projects, in a time when people are cobbling project communication together with email, FTP, shared servers, and other IT workarounds, having a common, purpose-built interface to access project files and data, review and approval elements, etc. is vital for some enterprises.

I've watched asset management struggle to make it for more than a decade, watched companies hack away at it with their best minds and best intentions. Wiredrive is one of a group of modern companies that can finally look at asset management in a new way; they can work backwards from existing revenue-generating behaviors and online habits (thank you, iTunes). It's a big change from the past when assets — not behaviors — were the starting point for designing asset management. Now we may finally get somewhere.