Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

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Posted July 17, 2006
eHub Interviews Mikons

Thanks to Mark Smith and the rest of the team at Mikons for this email interview.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

Mikons: Mikons.com, the website, is about reintroducing an ancient way to communicate that uses modern technology (the web) as the vehicle for that communication.  It is about connecting people through visual symbols that they can draw using our Mikon Machine.  The application was designed by my genius friend Alan Watts.  It uses a Shockwave platform as an online editable vector graphic program.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

Mikons: It is where my passion is.  My purpose in life is to connect people through their own life experiences and passions.  Mr. Rogers said, “You can love anyone once you know their story.” You can go to Mikons.com and type “mark” in and see what I have to say further about that.  Nevertheless, I was a mildly successful entrepreneur in Austin who was tired of business for the sake of just making money.  The idea of Mikons was an inspired gift. I sold the farm, as it were, to do this.  The idea for Mikons was inspired by iconographic work done for Lance Armstrong by the artist Futura (Lenny McGurr) in collaboration with Nike to commemorate his heroic life and unprecedented Tour de France racing career.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?  Do you have a day job?

Mikons: Within three months of receiving the idea, I got rid of the manufacturing company I owned and started Mikons.  Two months later we started programming.  Six months after that, on June 7 we launched.  How much do I spend on growth?...my wife says too much, but she knows that is what I have to do.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

Mikons: We have nine members on the team of various backgrounds and many good-hearted advisors.  I selected team members that could plug into specific areas of executable expertise.  I am the only one of the group who had nothing to do with the internet.  I didn’t even know what myspace or flickr was until last August.  In fact I really didn’t know what a blog was.  This team is a group of passionate and compassionate people who immediately saw the vision and I am grateful for them all.

Randolph Bias - Randolph Bias a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and began a 20-year career as a usability/human factors professional.

Stephen Dulaney - Stephen is our social web expert.  He has had his hand on the pulse of the web for over 10 years.  He leads SocialDynamiX which is a blog publishing tool, web browser, and news aggregator.

Dave Evans - Dave’s expertise is his ability to match marketing goals with consumer’s communications preferences.  He is a social media word of mouth marketing pioneer.  Dave co-founded HearThis.com and currently serves as VP, Social Media for Digital Voodoo (http://www.digital-voodoo.com), a marketing consultancy firm.

Carlton Jones - J. Carlton Jones is Vice President and CFO of Biometric Access Company.  He is a CPA with six years of “big five” accounting firm experience and over twenty five years of senior level corporate financial management experience.

Eric Lawrence - Eric is our web designer.  Since the early flourishing of the web, Eric has specialized in front-end design and development for web and multimedia applications.

Leisha Richardson - Leisha has spent nine years as a marketer and publicist for financial services technology companies.  She is our public relations and communication specialist.

Kenna Smith - Kenna has been in the Internet Banking Software industry for 12 years; much of the time as a project manager.  She is my wife and mother of four children.  She helps me keep my eyes on the ball.

Alan Watts - Alan is the man.  He created the Mikon Machine.  He is the only functional genius I know.  He dreams of ways to help people procrastinate using creative expression.  In 1995, while in college he created the first drawing application on the web.  Resembling an Etch-a-Sketch in its crudeness and ability to frustrate, he dubbed it Web-a-Sketch.  After a fiery lawsuit resulting in its untimely demise, he soon followed with 16 Color, the first full-featured web-based animation program.  With its low- resolution and simple interface, moviemakers created over 40,000 miniature films and participated in the monthly Pixelfest.  Alan has licensed his content creation technology to various companies, including Nickelodeon and Mini Cooper.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

Mikons: Simplicity Speaks, Less is Best, Sublime is Fine.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

Mikons: First online vector drawing tool, Mikon Machine^TM, using Shockwave
XHTML/CSS front end, Web Standards compliant
AJAX helps provide enhanced interactivity
LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

Mikons: We’ve been live since June 7.  The most requested feature is adding color.  Just wait.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

Mikons: We have over 20 countries represented in Mikons.  Hot spots right now are: USA, Spain, and Japan.  South America and the EU countries are big too.  We even have Chinese Mikoners.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?  The next 2 years?

Mikons: In six months, we are still learning what the community wants and addressing that.  We want to focus on the Connect experience, increase the merchandise offering and the buying experience.  At the end of six months we are engendering more mashups and collaborations.  We have no intention to compete with anyone; we have no - build fast and sell early agenda or try to be the next myspace plan.  We just want to be a catalyst for people connecting in a way that is meaningful to their lives.  And whatever that is, that’s good.

In two years...in a word, evolution.  Possibilities include: some aspects of a new symbolized language has evolved, people are co-brand themselves with major corporate brands, the benevolence aspect of Mikons will allow benevolence organizations to connect with people in more meaningful ways.  Our intention is to connect people through the telling about themselves through images.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

Mikons: Expressing ourselves and vision efficiently and clearly.  Some people call that Marketing.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

Mikons: Continued passion and commitment to the vision.  Everything else comes of it own if that is there.

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

Mikons: Yes, but first we started with a Vision Plan.  It was like a manifesto.  I wrote the VP first and still refer to it to keep me focused on that rather than the business aspect (i.e., making money).  The business model is simple: Mikon merchandise, premium services, joint ventures in co-branding, joint ventures with portals to help drive user content based on user-defined tags, and perhaps drawing tool licensing.  But I want to emphasize again, the model came out of the vision, it don’t drive it.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

Mikons: We had the good fortune to get an invite from Google Analytics the day we launched.  Since its implementation on June 8 and today (June 12) we’ve had 10,000 visitors and 44,000 page views.  The blog community gets the credit for those results.  We are grateful for the interest and passion of bloggers.  They are part of an awesome phenomenon.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

Mikons: That I am staying out of the way, and everyone on the team is working like a well-engineered German sports car.  The result is something that is pure and free and powerful.  Indeed, the users benefit from the idea, not my ego.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

Mikons: It is a reflection of the younger generation’s (the millennials) attitudes.  They seem to be freer in spirit and more inclined to share and accept other ideas and people.  I am very bullish on the future of human relations and in particular where the web is going to engender that.  It is changing business models too.  The idea of competitive advantage may give way to collaborative benefit.  We may start sincerely looking at the “we” rather than the “me” way of doing business.  Those people disposed to sharing are going to inherit the mantle of business titans.  We will find that profit is a natural by product of sharing.  Large conglomerate-type companies and their bureaucracies may be on the endangered species list.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

Mikons: Yahoo!, BoingBoing, Technorati

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

Mikons: Eight. I am not a late night geek.  The developers have that covered.  I wake up early every morning and see what they have done.  Then they sleep and we talk in the afternoon.

Thanks to Mark Smith and the rest of the team at Mikons for this email interview.

Visit Mikons
Originally added to eHub on Jun 12, 06

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

Also see eHub Interviews in Japanese at CNET Japan