Here is a really cool CAPTCHA implementation from www.captcha.net and is based around the concept of tracing around a specific image from a set. It is called squigle-pix: http://server251.theory.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/sq-pix . I would like to see a bot break that!! Only problem is, I can’t find an easy to implement version of this; it seems like it just exists as a proof of concept.

It all started back in 2003 almost 7 years ago… Ramin and I both trained in Kickboxing and attended Champions Martial Arts. Ramin was 19, I was 17 and we were not even good friends at the time, in fact I clearly remember Ramin picking on me. We had been training together for more then 5  years at the time and knew that we were both computer geeks. Ramin was into graphics and 3d rendering and I was into linux system administration; we were both into gaming. This is how we first connected, by fragging and ganking each other in Counter Strike and other such games. One day I was approached by Amin Sabounchi, another member of Champions, asking me if I knew how to make websites because he was interested in getting a new real estate site for his business. I told him what any 17 year old underachiever, wannabe computer hacker would say, “Of course I do!!”. To tell you the truth, I did not know how to make a website, especially a dynamic real estate website.. all I knew was some super basic HTML and the general concepts involved.. I had no programming experience and absolutely no design skills. Armed with nothing but an idea of where to start, I bought a book on Perl (Programming Perl!!) and called up Ramin with a proposition.

Version 1

Ramin agreed to work with me on the project and thus our partnership was born. We both learned how to make websites pretty much on the spot and we learned how to do it together. My mom used to drive me to his parents house after school and on weekends to work on www.sabounchi.ca (amin’s website). I would sit on the edge of his bed or on a wooden chair that permanently damaged my ass and can still feel to this day; we would work together on the design and web coding. Ramin would be the one actually using photoshop while I would do the backend programmer, but it formed a very important pattern in the way we work today, one based on collaboration and team work. When we finished the website, we did not know what to put at the bottom of it as our credit line, so we started thinking of names for our company. We were teenage computer geeks so we kept thinking of things like ‘Binary Design’ or ‘Binary Networks’ but everything like that was taken. We did a google search on the word binary and found references to it being a base 2 number system. We then looked up base 2 and randomly saw a reference to other number systems including one to base-10 which is the most widely used number system in the world, the decimal system. We actually didn’t know that at the time and picked base-10 because it sounded cool and only found out that it was the decimal system after people started asking us what is so significant about it and why we chose it. It sounds a lot better to say we chose it because it is the mosy widely used number system and how most all human minds think about numbers, instead of saying  it sounded cool.

Version 2

Armed with a name for our combined efforts and because we did not have a website of our own (we just made our first website ever!!) we created a hotmail address and put ‘Site by base10design@hotmail.com’ at the bottom of the website. We did not think much of it at the time and we were proud of our efforts but we were both busy with our normal lives at the time. I was busy hating high school and Ramin was busy working a day job and going to design school. What happened next was a surprise and an incredible stroke of luck; we started getting e-mails by the dozen, complimenting us on our work and asking if we would do their website. It seemed that we stumbled upon a niche that was not being filled in Vancouver; custom real estate sites with great designs. We knew we were onto something, but we also knew that we needed to be more legit, especially because we were so young. We figured no one, especially real estate agents, would take 2 teenagers seriously if we did not look and act the part. So we started our quest to officially create Base-10 as a company. We soon found out that I was to young to be part of a company so we created a sole proprietorship under Ramin’s name and decided to have the official company name be ‘Base-10 Design & Development’. The deal was that Ramin’s name was on the papers, but we would split everything 50/50. As soon as I turned 18 we reformed the company into a general partnership and opened a business account. We were now officially legit with our logo on our cheques, business cards in our pockets and a website of our own.

Version 3 Splash Page

Which brings me to our logo; you will notice that in our first website our logo was a bar  code.. we into the whole cyberpunk thing and bar codes were very cool at the time. Eventually we graduated from a bar code and came up with our current logo which represents a cell going through mytosis; once again we did not have this explanation until people started asking. We kept filling the real estate niche, which has been and still is our bread and butter, but branched out and did all sorts of different websites, from doctors offices to fashion design companies. The fact that we had a chance to work on projects in different sectors was very important to our growth and has buffered us from market ups and downs. It also prevented us from over specializing and allowed us to learn how to cope with any project that comes our way.

Version 3 - Flash

The last 2 years have been the craziest 2 years in our companies history. The 2 largest and most influential decisions we have ever made were to get an office and hire our first full time employee. Going from working in our parents basements to working in an office made us almost a million times more productive. It enforced semi-regular working hours, instant feedback from each other, collaboration and communication we never even imagined and the all important work/life separation. When we come to work, we work; when we go home, we live. It might not be the biggest and most glorious office in the world and is essentially a big room, a bathroom and a storeroom, but it is perfect for what we needed it for; gathering a core group of talented individuals and maximizing our creativity and productivity.

Version 3 - Lite

After we had a space to work in and starting working on the company, not just in the company, we made the biggest financial decision we have ever made.. we made the leap and hired our first full time employee: Thorsten Drobnik. I realized that my talents were being wasted on programming because of the fact that I didn’t want to be a programmer and would never aspire to be the best programmer. What I needed was time to work on what I enjoy and what I am actually good at, building the company and solving problems. Ramin and I still make all major decisions together and I could not do it without him, but he needed to be able to focus on the design work, so we figured that as our first employee, we needed a programmer. We put some ads out through various channels and got hundreds of responses (mainly from dubai)  but the one that stuck was from Thorsten. He and his wife had just moved here from Germany and coincidentally lived just around the corner from our office. Thorsten had years and years of computer science, lots of programming experience and most importantly, he was a perl guy. At the time we agreed to pay him twice as much as we were paying ourselves and he started working for us October 1st 2008. He instantly fit right into our culture of Martial Arts, stupid noises, beer o’clock fridays and general tom foolery. He is now truly part of the family and I can honestly say that he is an integral part of this company. As a side note, he and his wonderful wife have recently had a baby girl, her name is Ruby (not perl..) and she is also part of base-10.

Version 4

This pretty much brings us up to date and sums up our history. We are currently working on a bunch of cool projects and are continuing to focus on our core business. Every day is a learning experience and has the potential to change the fundamentals of how we do business. Today we are creating high impact custom websites, but who knows, maybe tomorrow we are running a ninja SaaS business.. or maybe we do both? It is a constant adventure and we never stop learning!

We have implemented a number of usability enhancements and finally eliminated one of my least favourite website features ever, the pop-up. To accomplish this we have utilized carousels, sliders and baseboxes. What’s a BaseBox you ask? It is our own implementation of a modal dialogue and has been written from scratch using a new version of the wonderful jquery javascript framework (an additional article will be written on this soon). Our goal was also to simplify the site and tighten it up to make it more focused. As part of the simplification process we examined the websites analytics and removed pages that were rarely visited, as well as popular exit pages that did not fit the sites focus.

Our next task is going to be tightening up the banners, removing needless animations and use exclusive photography.

Before

Old version of homepage

Old version of listing pop-up

After

New version of home page

New listing basebox

I hope you like it!