Brydie Ragan, who has been just five days into her job as Exbiblio’s “hardware evangelist”, says that she was still learning about Exbiblio, its people, and its projects. Even so, she wasn’t bowled over, as she’s worked on startups before, including one of her own, and “there are always surprises”. She adds that it’s just part of “life’s great adventure.”

Engineer, Brendan McNichols, tells me: “In a sense, I’m not surprised because it’s a startup and we’ve been spending a lot of money on a piece of hardware that was ridiculously expensive to bring to market. Where the surprise comes in, is that just a week previous, things had been seeming to be going okay. We’ve been getting software stuff on track, and then we’ve been hiring , and usually that’s a sign that things are going well.”

Ian MacDuff, the engineer who has been co-ordinating the relationship with contractors Synapse, tells me that he has been discussing with Exbiblio’s management how to wrap-up the hardware project. He suggested that they should document the oPen’s architecture and explain how it works. However, he adds, “I’m not feeling hyper-motivated. I would like to be, but I’m pretty disappointed about the whole thing.”

(update) Lauren Summers tells me: “I was surprised at the announcement last week because it was very sudden, and am sad to break up from this team of people. I do hope Exbiblio can figure out a way to make it work. The growing idea of the (working) device over the past months, and seeing each new development, makes the idea of not using it soon feel like a loss.”

Adam Behringer will be writing shortly about his own impressions.

Speaking to a couple of others off-the-record, I get the impression that there is not a huge deal of surprise about the event itself – these things happen in startups – but the timing and suddenness was unexpected. There is some bafflement about why the management appeared not to know about potential problems – even to the extent that they were hiring recently.

Ian MacDuff, who looks like a much happier engineer than last time I saw him, tells me that it comes down to good process starting to be implemented. There is now a list of tasks and milestones. As these get ticked off, people feel they are making progress. What he warns against is the “death march” which describes a project where you continually think that you are almost done, and constantly disappointed to find that you aren’t. It seems never ending, largely because you can’t see how far you have come down the road, or indeed where the road finishes.

Ian believes that good process begets more good process, because as people understand its value, they start to demand more of it. Information empowers, even if it tells you what you don’t always want to hear. There’s a motto pasted on the window of his office: “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” (Perhaps those words could apply to transparent blogging).

Ed Mahlum – for the management – also sees a discernible improvement: “I don’t think we were doing as good a job as we could in the way we were managing our work. We are now very specifically tracking all the work we are doing. Everything is much more concrete. This is bread and butter project management stuff.”

So why was Exbiblio not doing this before? I don’t think it’s because the management were naive or inexperienced, but it was a deliberate attempt to foster creativity and experimentation. Ed still says “the presumption of not knowing everything is a very good presumption”, but he now thinks that the creative / development process was too loose, and perhaps there should have been a better defined box to play in.

Ed believes that the improvement in morale is also due to better communication of Exbiblio’s environmental project, Compendia, which is starting to take shape.

“It’s always been there in word, but no one has been working on it, aside from a few conversations here and there. It makes it real to put effort in there and for people to see it.”

It boils down partly to practicality – what can be achieved given time and money – and partly to the best way to market it. Exbiblio, and in particular Martin, keeps coming back to the notion that you have to put the product in users hands, and see what they do with it, and only then can you reach a decision. It means that the feature list will be finally decided on rather late in the day.

While I’ve been away, I get the feeling that there has been a bit of a mini-crisis. There have been more little things wrong with the first prototype of the scanner pen than had been expected. This crisis seems to have been a shot in the arm.

The morning began with – would you believe it? – a meeting! Last time I was here, it was considered almost revolutionary to have a weekly meeting. Now there’s a 15 minute morning meeting each day. It was a brief recap of the milestones that the prototype has to pass to get working as it should. These were listed in a piece of software called “trac” and thrown up on a wall projector. Ed Mahlum took the meeting and went swiftly through each point, asking people – mostly Ian today – to say where we are.

The danger of morning meetings is that they can go on too long, and people use them to grandstand about how hard-working and brilliant they are. This was just the right length. It was very business-like.

Afterwards john durand told me that Exbiblio feels more integrated and is at a deeper level of working together. People are feeling motivated as the project passes milestones and gets past “blocks” and everyone understands how their work fits into the big picture. He told me that people are getting “jazzed up” – coming from England, I had to ask him if that was good or bad. He said that that it was good – it means they are excited.

If you build, they will come (i.e. customers).

This is Exbiblio’s position.

If you build a product that creates real value in the world, then you can’t go far wrong.

But still, I wonder, how is Exbiblio going to sell that product? Here are the main points of the marketing “plan” that I know about.

• The first “target market” will almost certainly be students.
• The primary method for spreading the word will be “viral” – i.e. those who try it will love it and tell their friends.
• Beta testing the product among 1000 people early next year will create buzz.
• The main selling point will be the Exbiblio website.
• Independent bookshops fit in well with Exbiblio’s values, and could help sell its oPen.
• Online bookshops are also potential partners for selling the oPen. They will see the value in linking the paper world to the online world, and so stimulating online book sales.
• There are some publishers who have online versions of their books, and similarly, they will see the value in linking paper with digital, and help sell the oPen.

In the initial months, following the launch of the oPen next Spring, the goals for sales will be fairly modest. All Exbiblio wants to do is prove that there is demand in the market. But are these plans concrete enough for this stage?

Way back then, Exbiblio had a Big Idea about the uniqueness of text (five or six words are usually enough to identify a document) and it wanted to do some cool things with that. Its plan was to take a scanner pen, and use it to link a paper document to its digital copy with a brief swipe of a few words.

Exbiblio began to experiment with some of the scanner pens on the market – worthy and useful products that serve their customers well – but found that none of them quite met its requirements for this particular job. And so Exbiblio made the fateful decision to make its own scanner pen, with unique features just perfect for activating a quick paper-digital linking task, while adding a voice annotation. This decision will cost a few million by next March and has added some thrills and spills to the Exbiblio story, some of which the financial backers could probably do without. All this, and it’s still a software company too.

When I first visited in July, as the oPen scanner project was getting underway, Martin told me that there were complaints among the employees about a lack of direction. He had to take a more active roll in leading the project. I don’t blame him. When money is burning fast, there isn’t a lot of time to sit around and discuss a 101 different plans. Top product development consultants from Synapse had been brought into the project. I sat in a meeting with Dave Zucker of Synapse, in which Martin – not a democratic committee – was taking the lead.

On our recent visit to JMK, the industrial design firm which is working on the look and feel of the oPen, I got a strong impression of how Exbiblio has been led over the past months.

This is how JMK often works with a company. It researches the market for potential users. It comes up with a host of possible designs. It presents these to the client. Gradually these are narrowed down to the ideal.

When Josh Kornfeld of JMK presented his ideas to Martin, they were all thrown out. Martin’s instructions had been for a “black obelisk” and that’s what he wanted. Not 59 different varieties of scanner pens.

‘It’s pretty rare that we work with companies where there’s one guy who’s calling all the shots. Here we are in this situation where this guy has a very clear vision of what he wants,” says Josh.

After that early meeting with Martin, Josh admits that he considered turning down the project.

“I went back to my office and thought about it and was a little frustrated and thought ‘Well so what do we do now? Do I tell these guys to go away or what?’ I said, ‘You know what, I think this product is a great idea, and I think that the morals of the company are outstanding, and that Martin is a really interesting guy, and a smart guy, and I want to see where this will go , and I didn’t feel that we had the egos to say ‘If you’re not going to do it the way we want to do it, then let’s not do it at all.’”

JMK feels that on this particular product, its role has been as adviser rather than as designer. However, there are a myriad of minor details that can make a big difference. For instance, there’s black and there’s black – the current black finish has a certain amount of green in it. A few millimeters added to the lens-cover changes the balance of the product. The corners of the obelisk can be more or less rounded. JMK is influencing all these decisions.

So is democracy or leadership best? Josh says that the most interesting products are sometimes the product of a single-minded vision:

‘When you have one person who is driving the show and making the calls and has a really clear understanding of what he wants then you have a product that maybe isn’t acceptable to everyone but the people who use it absolutely love it.’

As it turns out, I think the design is what the “democratic” Exbiblio team would have wanted anyway. If it has a fault, it’s a bit too Apple. I think this reflects a respect which not just Martin, but the whole Exbiblio team, has for Apple and the uncompromising way it does business.

It’s easy for me to stroll into work early as I’m still on London time and am staying just around the corner near Pioneer Square. I’m able to chat with the office early birds, Spencer and Claes Fredrik. I’ve not met Spencer before, but he helps me find a room in the new “wing” of the expanding office. I’m strategically positioned just near the table with the enticing snacks – fresh berries and tangy sheep’s cheese. Claes Fredrik helps me get my aging laptop plugged into the network. We chat a little bit about some of the technologies that have been showing up on the blog.

While blogging away in London, I’ve been trying to fill in the picture of the universe in which Exbiblio is operating. There seem to be a number of companies working on bridging the divide between paper and digital. They are rather disparate, and I don’t think you can quite call it a movement yet – but there’s a lot going on in this space. This week I’m planning to write more about what Exbiblio’s up to.

On this trip I’m hoping to see the first prototype of the Exbiblio Scanner Pen, code-named Falstaff. I believe there have been some glitches causing delays – which is only to be expected on a project of this nature, but it can be hard to get engineers to talk about glitches.

As Spencer has just been saying to me a minute ago, Exbiblio is a stimulating place to work, both intellectually and on the “values” level of not being overtly hyper profit-driven. It’s striking how recruits say they were attracted by Exbiblio’s values page on its website. However, I am hoping to tease a business / marketing plan out of the more “senior” people in its “flat” management structure. It’s time to write about matters such as useful applications for Exbiblio’s technology, target markets, return on investment – the sort of stuff that business people normally talk about. I haven’t heard a great deal of that ilk on my previous trips. Perhaps I haven’t asked the right questions, but I also get a sense that these matters are not always to the fore, perhaps because the technical challenges are so absorbing for Exbiblio intellects. I’m also going to ask about Exbiblio’s laudable aims to change the world for the better (which I think people will be very glad to talk about) but Exbiblio’s good intentions depend on being a business success first.

Naturally Mr. Blair was interested in what makes Silicon Valley so successful. One of the answers he received was “education”. He was also told that wage costs do not matter so much, so long as the talent can turn projects around fast.

Coincidently, The Economist Magazine has a different version of why America’s high tech firms succeed (Venturesome Consumption quoting a paper by Amar Bhide). According to this theory, investing in scientific education can be over-done. The “Venturesome Consumption” theory praises consumers, rather than inventors, of technology.

“The most important part of innovation may be the willingness of consumers, whether individuals or firms, to try new products and services.”

I have to say that on my first visit to Exbiblio, I was very struck how the office had adopted all the technological help it could get its hands on, from a wireless network, to AIM instant messaging, a wiki, and internal blogs. Using tools like these seems like second nature, at least in this American company. The same tools are freely available in the UK, but few companies are quite so quick to adopt them.

So Mr. Blair take heed: it might be better to leave great inventions to others, and to let consumers get on with enjoying their gizmos.

“Imagine the power of an organization where everyone was empowered to be a visionary?”

My question is whether this is a recipe for productive and creative chaos, or just chaos?