Calvin popped into the morning meeting. We are trying to talk and negotiate between costs and outputs. Some of the discussions had a light flavor between software vs web based. Both solutions are very viable but they do play differently.

Basic rates and such: For Calvin, we are going to be paying $100/month to help him get some reoccurring revenue for his multi FTP uploader tool and his MySQL editor tool. His current commercial rate is between $75 and $150. He is willing to do internal adilas work for $75. That may need to change in the future. We will leave that open.

We went over some short-term and long-term plans for building labels. It gets pretty complicated. We looked at some of the existing models and how they either play together and/or where they could go in the future. Lots of good conversations. We talked about pros, cons, Flash (animate cc), PDF, software, web, API, etc. We talked about fields, tables, mappings, custom sizes, verbage, and tons of other needs.

What angles could we attack this? What about a simple web-based interface where they could basically build the different labels. Name them, save them, and put in basics. We could then use that mock-up (that the users created) as the blueprint for actually setting up the label (a middle person who actually creates it). We could then use Calvin's backend tools to make and/or create the actual labels. Somewhere, we still need to interact with some heavy hitting backend code.

Idea... Go to the label homepage. They get to pick the label size (limited number), they pick where it comes from (source and/or host - 12 main players or web pages - limited number), they pick and build the label based off of data types and mappings (main interface). We allow them to set the mappings and also put in some sample data. We then allow them to save that (just the mock-up), and then we send that info out to the developer. Long story made short, Steve was talking about surfacing some of the building pieces and empowering users. Calvin said - Kinda like making a label order (key word is order - we still need to fill and/or make the order - actual product). That word, "order", was a big key that we got from our meeting. Make a label ordering system as a stepping stone in the process.

Budget wise, we are looking at another $10,000 on Calvin's side (backend code development) and another $10,000 on the user interface (label ordering side).

There are two main sides for labels. Consumer labels and commercial labels. We kinda need both.

Sometimes, Steve likes to break things so that you can come at it from different angles. If it is broken and/or up against the wall, sometimes you come up with other options and solutions.

Overall, a great meeting between Steve, Calvin, and myself.

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Eric popped in around 10:30 am and we then started working on some planning for the loyalty points, rewards, gift cards, and special account tracking stuff. See attached for our latest database design and spreadsheet stuff. He is going to look through things, make a few tweaks, and then resubmit. We spent quite a bit of time talking about pros, cons, and even running fake data through the mock tables. Good two hour session.