Excerpt from an email dated 3-May-2000:
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Tonight, I see three ways to differentiate ourselves:

1. clean, effective, attractive design (as opposed to the usual muddle)
2. data-intensive sites (not just static HTML)
3. personal treatment & handholding for real people with real needs (and fears)

This is a HUGE market. Let's focus on being real with real people.
Create functional beauty that makes people money.
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I like that last line. How's this for a tagline:

Immuexa - creating functional beauty that makes people money.

Yet another confirmation of what all good programmers know to be true (even though no one ever believes us). From Joel on Software:

"Here's the trouble. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into "flow", also known as being "in the zone", where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone.

The trouble is, getting into "the zone" is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity. Sometimes, if you're tired or have already done a lot of creative work that day, you just can't get into the zone and you spend the rest of your work day fiddling around, reading the web, playing Tetris.

The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- ESPECIALLY interruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone. If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you're in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone.

With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed."

Just back after three weeks in Florida. As usual, I became all fired up to develop Mezzaluna, though this time instead of "when we have time", I'll write a prospectus and find investors to secure three months to finish it. An interesting quote I just found on Slashdot which may or may not apply here:

"Failure is more frequently from want of energy than want of capital."