As most of you probably noticed, I have been mentioning Pixel Dreamer many times in my tweets and comments around the Internet.  Pixel Dreamer is my new company, which was founded by Mac Sheller-Ogden (my partner) and myself to help small and medium sized business’ find success in the online world.

Mac and I started working together at a marketing firm located in Georgetown, DC where we both found common ground on web practices and standards based solutions.  Over time, I became increasingly frustrated with the firm with their lack of web 2.0/3.0 practices, and eventually left toward the end of summer 2008.  Mac worked there for a while longer before moving to Chicago doing exclusively remote work for the company, until finally leaving to start Pixel Dreamer.

After enough money was saved, we decided to make a run for our money and start preparing Pixel Dreamer for launch this past September.  At its core, we wanted Pixel Dreamer to be done right from the get-go.  We setup our online client management tools, invoicing systems, work-spaces, and various other communication tools. Just for reference, here are the tools that we use to get things done:

• Backpack – 37 Signals – For notes, ideas, and write-boards.
• Highrise – 37 Signals – Contact Management
• Action Method Online – Behance – Task Delegation
• Rackspace Hosting – Our Cloud Hosting Solution

Believe me, these weren’t the first system that we tried out.  We tested about 20+ management/administration tools that are available and we finally settled with this list.

In addition to opening ourselves up for business, we also created PD.AM – a URL shortener that was to be used with twitter to save character space in tweets.  We are currently in the process of improving the API documentation so that PD.AM has a chance at becoming integrated with popular twitter clients such as Tweetie, Tweetdeck, and Twhirl.  I believe we have a good chance since we still have the shortest URLs that can be found.  If you haven’t tried it yet, head on over to http://pd.am and shorten your important links!

Aside from Pixel Dreamer, I am also finishing up my studies at university.  Oddly enough, I will be receiving a BA in Philosophy of all things…nothing to do with web development.  I was in Computer Science for a long while, until I discovered web programming and realized that’s what I was really interested in.  At University of Maryland, they do not touch upon web programming languages in Comp-Sci, so I had to learned everything I know on my own, on my own time.  Having some Java programming experience did not hurt either .

Anyways, I am looking forward to the upcoming year, great things will happen with Pixel Dreamer.