Here’s some of  the startling and diverse street sports they’ve been introducing the world to:

What was the inspiration for starting Streets United?
The idea of Streets United was literally conceived in a London pub over beers. The more official story is that Daniel Wood and Courtney Orange, both with backgrounds in athlete management, worked on a few projects together and then invited two good friends, DJ Lee Johnson (aka LDouble) and marketing expert Anders Wennesland, to start the business. We basically decided that each of our individual experiences and talents would be better utilized collectively.

We were frustrated at how little support is given to community projects, and at how traditional sports programmes are.  We wanted to bring the corporate world closer to their communities through street sports and art, and provide an open meeting ground where both professional and aspiring athletes can come together to promote their talents.

You have a strong mission statement, with core values of respect, responsibility for self development, and sustainability – how have you put these values into action?
We work tirelessly to inspire brands and agencies to invest in their local communities. This approach allows our growing network of suppliers and youth workers to achieve more sustainable results and to spend the bulk of their time where it should be: on the front line, working with the young people.

We believe that we cannot do everything ourselves, so we constantly seek to inspire artists to collaborate and take on responsibility for their own development. This is after all how they got to become a top athlete or artist in the first place – through self-determination, not through relying on a coach. We work with inspirational people and encourage them to always push themselves, so we can give them the best opportunities and builds trust in everyone’s work.

You offer workshops in beatboxing, breakdancing, power rising, street and freestyle soccer, graffiti, and BMX flat landing, to name a few – how does one attend one of these workshops?
We would normally create these with a sponsor, for a specific event. Typically any brand sponsoring a live event, like the Olympics, for example, will be looking for activities to engage their audience, and that is where we come in. It ranges from schools, brands, organisations in all industry sectors, housing associations, local councils and much more: it is very mobile and can happen anywhere.  Last year we introduced a whole host of ‘alternative sports’ to over 30 countries, and this year we’re poised to build even further.

What is the weirdest street sport that you’ve discovered, that everyone should know exists?
Extreme Pogo Stick freestyling & Yoyo Freestyling.

Why do you track time, and how do you guys use Harvest?
It is a huge convenience to have an online CRM system that helps coordinate and standardized project management and financial administration for the Streets United Directors, and Harvest is also a great tool for giving freedom and responsibilities to our growing network of Junior Consultants around the globe. Our ambition is to give young people the opportunity to manage their own local projects and learn to take handle business administration. Mainly we are looking to professionalize any individual athlete or group involved in progressive sports, by giving them all the tools necessary to succeed in the business.

What makes Streets United run?
The four main directors of Streets United work remotely from England, Spain, and Greece. We target a world stage and thanks to the blessings of modern technology, we can choose to live and work where we want.  Skype is an essential tool to keep regular and effective communication between the partners of Streets United. We also use Dropbox to store and access all documents online and Harvest for CRM and financial administration. Social media like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Streetsutd.com and our blog, are all essential to our networking. We also have a social network site strictly for professional athletes through ning.com.

Did you really perform alongside the SugarHill Gang?
Great times! Yes, it was an amazing charity event where we had a group of artists performing along side the legends. We’ve had shows in front of and alongside a number of famous people , like Christiano Ronaldo, Rio Ferdinand, Girls Aloud, Madonna, and, on the weekend of the World Cup Final, the football legend Pele.

What’s the Aston prison workshop?
On March 17th, 2010, Streets United entered HMP & YOI Ashfield to engage and inspire young people. In partnership with the 2nd Chance Project, young people were signposted into activities both inside and outside of custody with a view of reducing re-offending. A crew made up of football and basketball freestylers, MC’s and DJ’s engaged over 100 young people throughout the day providing a range of displays and opportunities for young people to learn new skills and develop interests, and showcase what they learned at the end of the day. This project provided a bench mark in the Streets United mission of creating opportunities for young people through street sports.

We are so happy to welcome Streets United to our growing family of Harvest New Founders, and are happy to support this inspired company showing youths across the globe how to get out there and get active.

To help companies get on their feet, The Harvest New Founders Program gives one year’s subscription of Harvest time tracking service to a new company each month. Think you might be a good fit for our New Founders Program? Learn more and apply.

What was the inspiration for starting your company?
Once we got Cold Coffee Media off the ground to give local businesses (and beyond) the most gorgeous and intuitive web presence available, we said “Man, I wish there was a hub for all the cool things going on in our home town of La Grande.  A place where people could find out where the live music is, where the good bike trails are, what movies are playing, who’s teaching a workshop or organizing an event, or sharing their thoughts: and have it be all local, by the people/for the people”.  So we created lagrandelife.com to be the local social networking hub we wanted to use ourselves.

In what ways are you employing social media, and what kinds of results/impact are you seeing?
The motto of the site is “What’s Happening.”  We have a street team of folks who tweet on location, giving viewers on the website real time updates.  People have browsed to lagrandelife.com and seen the Twitter feed at the top of the homepage saying “Open Mic at Ten Depot right now… Mike just finished a Pixies cover”.  They hop in the car, and in ten minutes they’re joining the crowd.

In terms of generating revenue, the idea is to have the site be sponsorship-based, not ad-driven.  For example, rather than ask a local chef to buy an ad on the homepage, we’d rather help him produce a weekly cooking vlog and feature it on the site.  It becomes a “destination commercial” that people navigate to and watch on purpose because it’s entertaining and has good information – rather than traditional ads or commercials that you trip over on the way to what you’re really looking for.

What does a typical day entail for you?
The two of us like to brainstorm on the balcony over coffee (First things first, you know).  Then it’s a race to moderate blog posts and comments, funnel info into the calendars, and post our own vlogs, before the phones start ringing and emails start dinging.  From there, it’s onto client work.  We have a vicious passion for making gorgeous websites for other people, so by lunchtime we’re trying to wrap up work on lagrandelife.com and move on to helping others with their web presence.

Creativity + hard work + and coffee (in that order) is our magic formula.  That’s where the name Cold Coffee Media comes from actually.  We have an ancient microwave that our coffee cups visit dozens of times a day — We figure if the coffee keeps getting cold, we must be working hard.

Why do you track time, and how do you guys use Harvest?
We do a lot of billable client work, so tracking time on those projects is essential, but we’re also finding that tracking our non-billable hours is valuable in helping us see how we’re doing.  We do a lot of things because we love to or because we believe in the people/thing at hand which is good for karma, but for the sake of the business, there’s a delicate balance to be minded.  By tracking all of our time we can look back over the day/week/month and evaluate our productivity, and then make a conscious effort to improve that ratio.  We are also looking towards the future of managing contributors, interns, and subcontractors, as  La Grande Life grows.  We do love using the Estimate and Invoicing features of Harvest, which has streamlined our flow and cut out the use of multiple apps to get these jobs done.

How do you see La Grande Life further developing and expanding?
It’s interesting what an economic low-point does to a community.  You start to see the Roommate Effect (we like to make up our own scientific terms).  By banding together and sharing resources, we’ve all got more to work with.  Ten people on a shoestring budget can tie those strings together and make one big rope.  So what do you have to offer?  Well, I play guitar so maybe I can attract some people into your coffee shop and you can help me sell some records.  That’s how we see the town growing, and lagrandelife.com is a reflection of that mentality.  It’s a resource for all of us, that increases our value.  The amount of visitors to the site is equivalent to almost half the population of La Grande… so we’re halfway there!

In the spirit of our new Hobby series, are there any hobbies you’d like to share with us, when you’re not working on La Grande Life and Cold Coffee Media?
MIKE:  I collect old typewriters, and write with them.  We use so much technology at work (which I love) that it feels like I’m working if I sit down at a computer to work on my screenplay, or write song lyrics.  So I can’t help myself anytime I come across an old manual typewriter.  There’s something about how organic and quick it is for your finger to slam the ink onto the paper.

CHRIS:  Disc Golf. It’s the most glorious of sports.  The people who are attracted to the game are very fun and chill folks, and what other sport allows you to drink beer and walk around at a casual pace while practicing your craft?  (Well, regular golf, I suppose, but you can wear flip-flops on the disc golf course?)

We’re happy to welcome La Grande Life in joining our Harvest New Founders family, and are excited to watch as they continue to grow their rural community involvement beyond the web, into actual, real-time events.

To help companies get on their feet, The Harvest New Founders Program gives one year’s subscription of Harvest time tracking service to a new company each month. Think you might be a good fit for our New Founders Program? Learn more and apply.

What was the inspiration for starting your company?
During the Great Depression, the WPA (Works Projects Administration) employed millions, repairing roads, building parks, and other public works. It reached out directly to people who needed it most, creating projects outside the U.S. Government’s usual remit. Now, the WPA-2010 aims to bring back small-scale, community-driven neighborhood recovery and action. We will provide employment and skill development for people to work in their own neighborhoods, to focus on projects chosen by their own community.  We even have a WPA-2010 Kickstarter project, to raise funds for these projects, and skill and employment programs.

Where are you located, and which communities are you speaking to?
We have secured office and workspace in the rural hamlet of Wassaic, New York, and Jamaica, Queens, and are finalists for a commission to open an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We want to use these WPA offices as pilots, to extend to other communities throughout the country, so we are currently seeking input and funding from other citizens to do so.  Funding is entirely through donations: from office and work space, construction equipment, a pavement press, time-tracking software from Harvest, silkscreen equipment, and organization of a series of community action workshops to spearhead this citizen-run WPA initiative.

The new office in Wassaic, New York.

What kinds of small-scale initiatives would fall within your scope?
Although we will not begin to implement ideas until we have run through a full Participatory Action Research / Participatory Community Appraisal with our host neighborhoods, we have already begun to collect a number of ideas. These have ranged from installing a D.I.Y. stop sign, to clearing an overgrown park so it matches an old etching of that park from the 1940’s, to hiring 1000 butoh dancers to block traffic, or sculpting glowing jellyfish to hang from lamp-posts.

How do you choose which projects to pursue? Are they nominated by the community?
As you can see, we get a pretty crazy range of projects, and we hold fast to the rule that it is not our responsibility to judge. Our role is to facilitate our community-members’ achievement of their goals. We use the process of PRA (Participatory Rapid (or Rural) Appraisal) to pull ideas out of a diverse community, and then help them decide which attributes will help them determine the specific projects to pursue. These PRA techniques include collaborative mapping of their past, present, and future neighborhood, comparative Venn diagrams of a community’s major groups, and a series of ranking and priority exercises to help choose the projects they want to complete.

These are all processes members of our team have put into action in the developing world, and we are currently piloting as project management techniques in the USA. These techniques are particularly useful in situations where you are trying to draw out people not generally involved in projects, and where several competing groups are vying for seniority.

The core team is Carmen Montoya, John Ewing, and Christopher Robbins, shown here while working on a related project in Wales in 2009.

What does a typical day entail for you?
Lately, I really have no typical day. This work involves so many different elements, and most of them hinge on building trust with people from different communities. For instance, let’s look at last week:

• Monday I presented to the Urban Studies department of Barnard College, Columbia University, on Urban Interventions by Public Artists (including myself).
• Tuesday I spent most of the day silkscreening WPA logos onto construction vests and equipment.
• Wednesday was an administrative day, calling contacts in Jamaica to establish partnerships, and writing grant applications for the project.
• Thursday I taught my course at the Rhode Island School of Design on “Guerilla Public Art: Socially Mediated Interventions.”
• Friday I spent in Wassaic, meeting with a variety of local stakeholders, eating borscht, and collecting slag with some new acquaintances from the riverbank.

Why do you track time, and how do you guys use Harvest?
With a schedule as flexible as mine, we have to be aware of how our time is being spent. My responsibilities include marketing, fund-raising, project management, training, networking, and hands-on construction and fabrication. Tracking my time with Harvest lets me keep track of how my time is being used, so I can be sure I am utilizing it efficiently, and allows me to decide where I should delegate, where I should trim, and what is counter-productive.

What are your hopes for the present and future of WPA-2010?
The Wassaic Office opens May 1. The Jamaica Office opens July 1. My hopes are to create a forum where people with very different views can discuss the future of their local community together, and to give a voice to people who are either too share or simply not interested in public works or civic engagement. WPA-2010 is a kind of real-life community street-theater: it will bring neighbors together, dressed as the WPA, doing the work of the WPA, fixing up our country with their own ideas and elbow grease. Part of this idea is quite audacious: we are pretending to be a government agency, so that the government will take notice, and hopefully, take over.

We’re excited to welcome WPA-2010 to our stable of Harvest New Founders, and are happy to support them in their goal of getting people involved in the destiny of their own neighborhoods.  If you would like to help their efforts, you can donate through their WPA-2010 Kickstarter fundraising campaign!

To help companies get on their feet, The Harvest New Founders Program gives one year’s subscription of Harvest time tracking service to a new company each month. Think you might be a good fit for our New Founders Program? Learn more and apply.

What exactly is pinstriping, and how did you find out about it?
Pinstriping is the art of laying down a thin straight line with a brush, on the surface of a vehicle.  The craft can be traced all the way back to the chariots of ancient Egypt, but also horse carriages in the western world often had pinstriping (called, at the time, coach lining).  What is commonly considered pinstriping today is the art form that surfaced in the 1930’s-1940’s hot rod culture, where cars were decorated with patterns of thin lines.  When I discovered it was done with a brush, and it didn’t look like you needed that much equipment to learn, I had to find out how to get started.

What was the inspiration for starting your business?
The software company I worked for got hit hard by the financial crisis and had to let people go, which for me was the kick in the butt I needed to start my own automotive graphics business.  Though I loved drawing motorcycles and freaky monsters since I was a kid, I was told that there wasn’t any future in that. Apparently it had to take me some 15+ years to gather the guts to prove “them” wrong.

Was it a big switch to go from a corporate environment to working on peoples’ cars in a garage?
It is two completely different worlds: I’m happy as a clam and wish I did it years ago.  The only thing I miss sometimes is having colleagues.  As I’m currently the only professional pinstriper in Denmark, it does get a bit lonely.  But I’m in contact with colleagues around the world almost daily, and meet with plenty of people at shows during the summer.

You recently got invited to join the Arctic Pinheads, who are they?
Arctic Pinheads was originally a group of Finnish pinstripers who arranged meetings for stripers and Kustom Kulture artists at large.  The official annual meetings is Stripe-O-Rama at the Hot Rod Rock Show, Tampere, and the annual American Cars Show in Helsinki.  They welcome all artists with a common interest in Kustom Kulture arts.

What’s the process, before the client drives off with their newly pinstriped motorcycle?
Usually people call or email me about an idea for a project and ask for a price, and I ask them question to narrow down what they want.  When a price is agreed upon, on larger projects I often draw up a design and combine it with a photo of the object to show the customer, to make sure the customer and I are on the same page.  On smaller projects and at shows, I draw it up directly on the object with a Stabilo pencil and have the client approve it.  Then I do my thing, leave it to dry and customer picks up their stuff.  I also create designs for helmets, t-shirts, and posters related to the Kustom Kulture scene.

Why do you track time, and how do you use Harvest?
Because of the experience I have as graphic designer, I’m pretty good at estimating how much time a job demands, and people usually want a fixed quote.  Time tracking with Harvest is important for me to keep track of the actual time I spend on a project, to make sure my estimates stick.  Harvest also helps me stay focused on the project I’m working on, because when I’m on a customers time, I can’t let myself be sidetracked without stopping the clock.

How do people hear about you, if you’re the only one doing this kind of work in Denmark?
Most people don’t yet know that there’s a guy doing pinstriping professionally in Denmark, but I have met a handful of Danish guys who just started pinstriping as a hobby, so it’s catching on.  I get most of my work through networking and word of mouth, and a small but steady stream of people who contact me after visiting my website.  I spread the word by meeting people in the custom scene and  working on as many motorcycle and car shows as possible all summer.

Which magazines have your designs been featured in?
So far I’ve had my work shown in Pinstriping and Kustom Graphics Magazine (UK), Nordic Tattoo Mag (Scandinavia), and I was also in the latest issue of Kinkats (German), with more to come!  I’ve also had some blog features, like the one at Kustomrama.

What do you like most about running your own business? And what’s the hardest thing?
The best thing is the freedom.  I can work day and night, or not at all, if I like.  I can go to car shows all over the world whenever I’m invited (no vacation schedule needed!).  The hardest thing is not having any colleagues on a daily basis.  I have plenty of friends I can call if I need to discuss things, but I can miss, you know, shits and giggles at lunch break, and stuff like that.

In what ways do you envision growing your business?
My vision is to get into all kinds of vehicle decoration, specialized towards custom vehicles of all types, and I’m taking courses in making vinyl signs and foil wrapping cars this spring.  I have some pretty wild ideas where I’ll combine foil and traditional handmade work, I can’t wait to get started on it!

We’re excited to welcome J. Bram Kustom Graphics to our elite group of Harvest New Founders, and are happy to support this one man pinstriping machine, and his quest to make the world a more beautiful place, one detail at a time.

To help companies get on their feet, The Harvest New Founders Program gives one year’s subscription of Harvest time tracking service to a new company each month. Think you might be a good fit for our New Founders Program? Learn more and apply.

How did you guys come together as Design Vetica?

We have all either worked as freelance web designers/developers, or have built websites on our own, and we’ve all been tinkering with the web since we were around 12- and 13-years-old. We’ve been involved in web design about 2 years before we started the company, and most of the projects we received were referrals from friends. William and I started talking about building a company for web design and media production in a shared IT class, and we pulled in Alex as he had worked on previous projects with William. In February of 2009, Design Vetica was born.

What’s it like to run a business with a team that is all in high school?

Working with a team that is still attending high school definitely has its pros and cons. Our most challenging aspect of being young entrepreneurs is that we are STILL in high school!  This means we have many obligations: we have to juggle school work and getting good marks, while keeping up with deadlines from multiple projects with clients. Recently, we had to decline potential clients during final exams, to keep up with the combined workload. Being a young entrepreneur also has its benefits, as many companies are looking for young talent, on the cutting edge of the industry. The experience we have gained is invaluable, and we often feel it’s the best course we ever took in high school!

Have you found that the Vancouver community has embraced supporting a company with such a young team?

The Vancouver community has been very supportive. For example, when we rented our office, the owner of space, Minna Van, gave us a discount because we started our business while in high school, and she has also helped us network with many other influential people. People like Jon Chui, curator of the Startup Digest for Vancouver, and Brian Wong, founder of Follow Formation, also inspired us with their ideas and have made themselves available to us as mentors.

What does a typical day entail for you?

In the early morning, we get up, put on our backpacks, and go to school. We occasionally receive clients emails and calls during classes. After school, we come back home to work on Design Vetica. Most of our client meetings are scheduled on weekends. Every two weeks, we also have a company meet-up, where we attend fun events together, like watching a movie or iceskating at Robson Square Ice Rink.   Sometimes, we feel like we live two different lives.

What programs and resources keep Design Vetica up and running?

We use the usual suspects, like Basecamp, and Google apps, but we still prefer to do the initial draft of any design work in our Moleskine and dotGrid notebooks. Nothing beats pen and paper!

What do you like most about running your own business? And what’s the hardest thing?

Everybody loves to run their own show, and we established this agency because we love what we do. Meeting new people, going to conferences, and working with clients every week really makes the experience enjoyable. The hardest thing right now is managing our money. Without any accounting background, we had trouble finding anything to track the status of our invoices, and manage our income. But with the help of Harvest, we hope to improve our finance management.

How do you use Harvest?

Coming from the stone ages, we actually never tracked time, as all of our projects have a fixed price. We would manually invoice and have to stay on top of the status of each invoice. Our accounting is very rudimentary, but with the help of Harvest, we hope to streamline this part of our business. Not only will we save time to do more creative stuff, but also we can finally rest assure that it’s done properly.

How do you see Design Vetica growing over the next 5 years?

Our goal has always been to establish a premium design agency, and we will be looking to expand and grow, with a new motion graphics team, and the development of web applications.  We are all considering going into either computer science or business for university, but whether we are all at the same school or working as a distributed team, we will definitely be working together in the future.

We’re proud to welcome Design Vetica to our ever growing stable of Harvest New Founders, and are happy to support this group of high school students establish their business at such a young age.

To help companies get on their feet, The Harvest New Founders Program gives one year’s subscription of Harvest time tracking service to a new company each month. Think you might be a good fit for our New Founders Program? Learn more and apply.

What was the inspiration for starting your company, and how is it different from the typical business model?

Deeplocal is a culture first, and a business second. I have always been very passionate about what I do in my life, and in building a company I decided that I didn’t want to be a traditional manager early on. I wanted to build a team of people like myself that were passionate, hard working, creative, and talented, so I had to build a culture that attracted great people. I am no different than my co-workers in that I want to be a part of something that has impact, and presence. Because of those needs I chose to build a business that splits it’s time between consulting work for clients looking for new ways of using technology, and developing our own consumer-facing products. We use our consulting work to generate IP that we either use internally or license, while earning real revenue.

In what ways are the arts an integral part of Deeplocal?

We believe that artists are very similar to entrepreneurs and that we can learn a lot from working with and for them.  We run an artist residency program that brings artists into our studios, and gives them access to our proprietary technology and engineering assistance. We play a lot of sports, and even started a site called Pickupalooza.com to get ourselves more involved with people outside of our normal scope. We challenge other start-ups locally to bowling nights, so we could create a peer-mentor network. We have an open studio called Waffle Wednesdays, where we invite the public to come for a visit and get free consultations. We work with a number of cultural institutions here in Pittsburgh, like the Mattress Factory. We do all of these things to cultivate our culture of innovation – it is our core asset.

At a recent Waffle Wednesday Open Studio

What does a typical day entail for you?

We are a small team, which means we require open and constant communication between one another. We begin each week with a 15 minute meeting where we use stickies on a white board to see what each of us has to do, is in progress, or is completed. We try to let each person here own a project or a task, and we have a very thin management layer.  We all handle multiple tasks, talk directly to clients, handle customer service, and do the dishes. Our development process is also very agile, and our designers and engineers share some level of comfort with each other’s skill set. This makes for very fast and effective design and development, and we usually have a few new ideas a day.  We try to vet those internally, and when possible, prototype ideas in a few days.  I think our approach has always been that things simply need to get done and if you can help… then help.

Why do you track time, and how do you guys use Harvest?

We had tried a few time tracking apps out in the past and really found them far too cumbersome for our environment. We wanted something that was simple and didn’t seem like a burden. Our CTO had read about Harvest, I took a look, and we were instantly hooked. It is clearly built by people that use it themselves, people like us. We use Harvest to track time for hourly consulting projects. The iPhone app helps a lot with that when we are working off site or can’t get to a connected laptop, and we also use it internally for part-time staff as a timesheet.  We plan to institute the invoicing shortly!

It seems you incorporate mobile phones in many of your projects, like TinyBlast, the RouteShout signs, and Urban Sweep.

We like to think of concepts first, and technology second.  Most of our products come from real client needs: RouteShout, our main product, came from work we had done while at Carnegie Mellon University. We had hacked a police scanner to pick up radio signals telling us where some of the local buses were located. Years later, we were invited by that agency’s CEO to build a pilot system for them that allows bus riders to find bus arrival times over SMS text message or smartphone.

What is Chalkbot, and how were you able to realize that project?

The Chalkbot was built for Nike’s ad agency, Wieden + Kennedy for last year’s Tour de France. We were asked to build a machine that would spray short messages of hope and inspiration on the actual Tour de France route. We worked with a friend’s company, Standard Robot, to go from design to shipment in just about 7 weeks.  Users would submit messages less than 40 characters through text message, Twitter, or the web, which would then be sent to the actual Chalkbot machine. The machine would then use 48 spray nozzles to spray an emulsified soy based chalk onto the roadways printing a user’s message. After each message was printed, the machine would snap a photo, grab the GPS coordinate, was then shared through Google Maps and Google Earth.

We welcome Deeplocal to our ever growing stable of Harvest New Founders, and are happy to support this DIY company bringing it’s own brand of artistic inspiration to the forefront of innovation in both work and play.

To help companies get on their feet, The Harvest New Founders Program gives one year’s subscription of Harvest time tracking service to a new company each month. Think you might be a good fit for our New Founders Program? Learn more and apply.

With a business model entirely dependent on total collaboration on the internet, we were intrigued at their process for working in multiple time zones, with projects around the globe, and how they use Harvest to stay on top of delivering the goods on time, and within budget.  And there’s also the cow: we really like the cow.

STALKR HQ in Connemara, Ireland

How long have you been in business, and what exactly does a creative research boutique do?

STALKR formed as a partnership at the beginning of 2009, after years of freelancing individually as creative researchers. Our work consists of hunting down images and film footage for ad agencies under insane time pressure. When a brief comes in, our researchers trawl through dozens of archive sites and documentary films to cut together a selection of clips and images that correspond to what the client has imagined.

You mention that you are the first research company to leverage the group-sourcing power of the internet. How did you create and connect to this network of specialized researchers?

STALKR is a group of documentary filmmakers who also work as creative researchers. We met in the context of various film projects prior to forming STALKR. We’ve executed jobs under one roof in London or Berlin or Los Angeles, but our ongoing film projects keep us shifting around the globe constantly. We work online from wherever we are in the world, and pipe our results to the client, whose experience is seamless.

STALKR HQ in Tokyo, Japan

What are the advantages of this style of working?

Speed and flexibility are the advantages to this style of working. With five of our researchers tackling a brief, we can deliver a week of research hours in a single day. Working in UK and LA time zones, we can accept a job in London in the evening and our LA team can deliver results by the time London wakes up the next morning.

Looking though the projects you have done thus far, the ideas and images seem to vary wildly in terms of when they were made in history, and what the end result of using the vintage film footage is. What is your thought process in determining which images and clips would work best, or does the production company contact you with specifics in mind?

We’re guns for hire. An agency approaches us with a script and we hunt down the footage. Since they can’t commit to a specific piece of footage until they see it in front of them, we can research for a day or keep going for three months, depending on the scale and needs of the project. Our end of the work empowers the client’s creativity throughout the process.

Have you ever had a scene or clip you really wanted to use, but couldn’t track down?

We can track down anything. It’s uncanny.

What does a typical day entail for you?

Everything changes depending on the brief. We don’t really have typical days. Central to our process is a daily Skype conference call in the LA morning and London evening. We make decisions in this call which set up the division of tasks for that day in LA and the following day in London.

STALKR HQ in Venice, California (USA)

What programs and resources power the engine behind Stalkr?

MacBook Pro, iPhone, Final Cut Pro, Elgato Turbo.264 HD, Skype, MobileMe, YouSendit, and Harvest.

Why do you track time, and how do you guys use Harvest?

We start and stop timers throughout the day as we shift from one project to another. Since our days are never the same and our team varies from job to job, we rely on Harvest to give us up-to-the-minute reports to keep us within budget. In the dark ages before we found Harvest, we scrawled cryptic notes in iCal that required collating in a Byzantine process. Now that we’re on Harvest, there’s no going back.  Ironically, STALKR distinguishes between two kinds of workers: Researchers who bring in footage and Harvesters who edit the footage down for the client.

Harvesters – really? Do your Harvesters use Harvest?

Absolutely. Since everyone at STALKR sets their own schedule, we use Harvest to allot a set number of hours to our Harvesters. They complete their hours when they like, so long as it’s before the delivery deadline.

What are your 5 most favorite films of all time?

STALKR has just one favorite film: BARAKA.

We welcome STALKR into the fold as our latest Harvest New Founder, and are happy to support this globally nomadic company deliver seamless research and archival footage to their clients through the group-sourcing power of the internet.

To help companies get on their feet, The Harvest New Founders Program gives one year’s subscription of Harvest time tracking service to a new company each month. Think you might be a good fit for our New Founders Program? Learn more and apply.

betahaus has been using Harvest as a dual purposed way to keep a finger on the pulse both of how they are spending their time expanding their business, and keeping their freelancers on track.  They recently talked with us about the power of the digital network, channeling BarCamp, and to be honest, they opened our eyes to the new rage in Berlin: the club mate!

What inspired the desire to start a collective co-working space?

When we finished university, we wanted to continue the Berlin-style of working as a freelancer in cafés and public spaces. We found that nothing came close to what we thought a coworking space should be, so we started playing around with our own ideas, until we finally started the ideal place on our own. After only 4 months of operation, we are fully booked, and we will move our focus in the next year from just one coworking space in Berlin, to the idea of a “network of coworking spaces” all over Europe.  We envision this digital network vertically integrating social media and real space.

What are the benefits of being a part of betahaus?

The benefit of being a part of betahaus is, first and foremost, having a place to go to work, that provides a good work environment and great people.  Once you are a part of betahaus, of course, synergies start to evolve, and you profit from the knowledge and the network of those around you.  Jobs are also distributed among betahaus users, and, last but not least, betahaus serves as a platform for crazy ideas.

When you say “jobs are distributed amongst betahaus users” – does this mean you really work/collaborate with the other betahaus co-workers on jobs?  Do you have to be in a specific industry to get these types of jobs?

One of the basic principles of betahaus is collaboration.  People are not renting desks at betahaus to acquire new jobs or contracts, but sometimes a collaboration can organically emerge, and lately, these collaborations have begun to arise more frequently.  Also, large companies and agencies have started to approach us, asking for manpower, since we have “so many interesting and creative people”.  In our vision of betahaus, we see our company as an intermediate between bigger players and individuals freelancers, providing infrastructure, and facilitating network and community.  We mostly host independents from creative industries like design, web development, architecture, and translation, but we also have NGOs, start up companies, and PhDs!  It is not the profession that makes one a coworker, but a shared set of values, like “openness”, “collaboration”, “cooperation”, “sustainability” and “transparency”.

Why do you need to track time, and how do you utilize Harvest?

A time tracking service is a necessary part of our infrastructure, and we use Harvest for two different purposes.  Right now, we use Harvest to track time for the core team of betahaus, and we use Basecamp for project management.  As we grow, and the more people that become involved, the more we need Harvest to have an overview of where we are, where we’re heading, and where we spend our time.  An example of a decision we made based on what we were able monitor in Harvest: we’d like to outsource all of the café space services for the third quarter to save resources.  We were able to clearly see how much time we actually spent in the café, fixing things, taking care of the accounting, etc, and adjust our expectations.

A second need for time tracking arose in the last few weeks.  Since we have a good collection of talented people co-working at betahaus, we have started aggregating external jobs, and decided to manage and distribute these jobs through Harvest.  The objective for aggregating external jobs is to have a couple of project managers overseeing the outside jobs that come in for betahaus.  Of course, the project managers will use Harvest time tracking and invoicing with all the freelancers they work with in betahaus, as well!

What are the top 5 things you have consumed recently?

Well, I just had a club mate, which is a very popular drink (instead of coffee) amongst web people here, and then a coffee and a small “schnitzel brötchen” from our café.  I also just bought a linksys wrt 54 gl wirel router for one of the meeting rooms of betahaus.

Can you share with us a bit about the lectures/films nights/events you will be organizing (like European Cultural Entrepreneurship, Atoms & Bits Festival, Architektur Forum Lübeck, betabier?). What was the inspiration for this?

Many people invite us to events, conferences, and lectures to talk about betahaus, and why/how/when we do/did what.  The events that we host grew out of another need: it seemed that the virtual activities in Berlin strongly needed a “real” place to materialize.  We host BarCamp-like events, we host meetings for the first Online German Party (that is poised to win seats in the Parliament during the next election), we host start-up launch parties that operate from betahaus, and we create our own core events.  For example, every first Thursday we host betabier, which is a meet and greet BBQ for betahaus co-workers, where we facilitate a small pecha kucha.  We also held the Yes Men underground launch party for their new movie during Berlinale, and the Hobo Filmfest is scheduled to come to betahaus in November.  Basically, we look to facilitate online culture entering the mainstream by providing a real place for it to actually exist.

We’re happy to welcome betahaus to the Harvest New Founders Program’s expanding collective of movers and shakers, and to support their quest for a global collaborative digital network of social media and real spaces.

To help companies get on their feet, The Harvest New Founders Program gives one year’s subscription of Harvest time tracking service to a new company each month. Think you might be a good fit for our New Founders Program? Learn more and apply.

Installation of Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia, Image courtesy of Houston Museum of Natural Science

What’s a typical day like for you “at the office”? How different is running your own show from your days of working for the Boston Museum of Science?

We are a highly distributed company, primarily in Massachusetts and Vermont, but with associates, colleagues, consultants and contractors around the country and the globe so our days are spent working on our computers – researching writing and designing.  In addition to using Harvest for time and billing, we use a variety of other web based systems for managing our research, proposals, contacts and marketing campaigns, our telephone and fax systems, and for both internal and client teleconferencing.  We meet at least once a week, face to face, at the centrally located home of one of the members.

Compared with working within a large organization, the differences in having our own company are enormous.  We have had the pleasure of working together to decide who we are as a company, our philosophy, our identity, and our values.  We maximize our decisions as a group, deciding what is best for us as a company both short and long term – always keeping our clients’ needs at the center of our work.

A face-to-face work session, showing from left to right: Jan Crocker, Larry Koolkin, Lynn Baum, and Maureen McConnell

What upcoming exhibitions do you have on deck?

LAKE CHAMPLAIN MARITIME MUSEUM:

At present, we are completing a project with the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vermont.  We created a fully developed template and technology platform for a series of webcasts that they want to develop to introduce the exploration of the underwater shipwrecks of Lake Champlain to school groups. The tour for children involves going out on the lake in a boat, and exploring the shipwreck below, via a real-time, maneuverable video camera.

The project was initially that the museum wanted to produce webcasts to draw kids in to the experience of finding these historically significant shipwrecks, but this didn’t quite turn out the way we planned.  No one anticipated the conditions for filming live under the surface would be as murky as they were.  So, we decided, instead of just filming below the ship, the most cost effective and interesting way to do the web broadcast was to create a story line and a template, that can be used by the Museum immediately, with capabilities to grow further down the line.  We loved working on this project, the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum is such a gem.  Did you know that Benedict Arnold’s ship is sunk in those waters?!

A view from the boat Sarah Elizabeth, on Lake Champlain

LUCY’S LEGACY: THE HIDDEN TREASURES OF ETHIOPIA:

In addition to designing and developing museum exhibitions and educational programs, we have extensive experience in creating, managing, and touring traveling exhibitions.  We are managing the tour of “Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia” – a traveling exhibition created by the government of Ethiopia and Houston Museum of Natural Science, and are currently in negotiations over managing the tours of a handful of other traveling exhibitions.

I have had the new Discovery Times Square Exposition facility in NYC on my radar for a while, and though it wasn’t yet open, I pushed to get the “Lucy’s Legacy” exhibition a premiere booking as one of the two opening exhibits there.  I wanted to get a lot of people to see the show, to ensure good distribution in the future, and what could be busier than Times Square?  The exhibition has been a major success so far, and the most amazing thing about the experience for me was to see the Lucy Fossil: the one and only Lucy!  It’s something so significant and unique, and here it is, right in front of your eyes!

What powers Jan Crocker LLC, and how do you use Harvest and time tracking with such a varied group of contractors in different locations?

At this point, we use Harvest internally – for capturing the time and expenses, across multiple projects, for a group of geographically disbursed people – which feeds our QuickBooks accounting system.  For us, it was a great addition to the suite of off-the-shelf web systems we already had in use – and was a both a timely and welcome replacement for a custom web-based database system in QuickBase that we had created before discovering Harvest.

We also utilize a variety of web based systems and systems to support our work, collaboration, and allow simple remote management of most of our business services, like BaseCamp for project and data collaboration, Skype for video teleconferencing, Constant Contact for email marketing, RingCentral for VOIP voice and fax services,  PowWowNow for telephone conferencing, and RFP-Leads as one source of potential business we might not hear about otherwise.

Despite the power of technology and its leverage in our business, there is still no substitute for personal connections and networking – that will remain the key to our success!

We’re thrilled to have Jan Crocker LLC join The Harvest New Founders Program, and to support their efforts to enrich our lives, one museum exhibition at a time.

To help companies get on their feet, The Harvest New Founders Program gives one year’s subscription of Harvest time tracking service to a new company each month. Think you might be a good fit for our New Founders Program? Learn more and apply.

What was the inspiration for starting your company?

All four of us previously worked for graphic design and advertising companies.  We were faced with a repeating pattern, where we were doing too much of everything, and nothing thoroughly. The problem often lies in the belief that all problems can be fixed with promotion.  In reality, people buy goods and services, not promotion, and marketing cannot address every problem.  Brand Manual was created to provide a link back to the company, to make better products and services, and a meaningful framework that ad agencies can work with later on.

What is it like working in Tallinn, Estonia? Has the market changed in Estonia? And how has that impacted and shaped your goals, designs and working relationships?

There is no market, to begin with. Estonia has a population of 1,3 m people and the majority of companies cannot even be classified as SME’s (Small and Medium Enterprises, by EU standards), because they are too small. Until recently, over half of our GDP was “produced” in real estate, construction and banking.  Now the situation is somewhat different.

Starting our company at the height of the economic downturn has proven to be a good idea.  Change is apparent everywhere, with many people in real estate and construction starting new companies focused a bit more on longevity.  Also, many companies that previously made money easily are now making plans for development.  Since Estonia has essentially only recently experienced growth since breaking free of the Soviet Union, many companies did not know what their competitive advantage was, or if they even had any.  Doing business post-Soviet occupation became too easy, until the irrational spending abruptly stopped due to the global downturn. During the boom time, everyone and their mother were thinking that “this business thing is a cinch”.  All one had to do was buy something and sell it on for a profit, adding zero value to atmosphere and culture.  Countries that were growing at 10% per year forgot that doing business successfully and productively is actually hard.

We have also clearly defined our business interest. With only a few notable exceptions, we are focused on working with Estonian companies looking to export their goods or services and with international clients, mainly from the EU.

What does a typical day entail for you?

The beauty of having a small partner run company is that there are no typical days.  The projects we work on are varied.  Clients turn to us for in-depth input into the challenges they are facing.  A lot of time is spent researching the relevant industry and looking for benchmarks.  We have several discussions amongst ourselves about the projects, looking for new angles and inspiration.  Client meetings make frequent appearances on our calendar.  And of course, sitting down and doing design.

Our company policy is generosity.  We share what we know, or develop, on our blog.  We have a standing offer of free lunch for prospective clients, and we give advice for free.  This makes our company appear to be a bit like a social club, rather than a business, but we are creating real value for our clients, and the casual atmosphere makes it more enjoyable for everyone.

What branding/marketing strategies might you offer to small business without a big budget?

Make your product so good that you would buy it yourself.  Beat your competitors, who rely on marketing, with a simply great product. When it comes to marketing, think of it as throwing a good party: it doesn’t have to be big or fancy, it just has to be worth remembering.  Only take advice from customers, not people on the street.  Never do anything because others do: they may not know what they’re doing, so why copy them?

What do you like most about running your own business? And what is the hardest thing?

The best part of running this business is that we can, and do, say “no”.  The hardest part is living with the short-term consequences of saying “no”.

What programs and resources power the engine behind Brand Manual? Why do you track time and how do you guys use Harvest?

Brainpower is the main engine behind Brand Manual.  Even on our website we say “Thinking. Branding. Design.” Helping to visualize our thinking is the trusty Mac, Adobe Creative Suite and iWork.

We track time because we need to understand how we spend it, as it’s our most important resource.  It helps to improve our efficiency, as well as budgeting for future projects.  We create and define every project in Harvest, and we track time either on our computers, or through the iPhone app when meeting with a client offsite.  And, of course, we do all of our invoicing through Harvest as well.

What are 5 things that Brand Manual has consumed lately?

A small office printer, a MacBook Pro, a T-shirt for a client presentation, the latest issue of Monocle, and a case of beer from our beer client.

We’re excited to have Brand Manual join The Harvest New Founders Program, and to throw our support behind their efforts to focus on quality products, and the real people who buy them.

To help companies get on their feet, The Harvest New Founders Program gives one year’s subscription of Harvest time tracking service to a new company each month. Think you might be a good fit for our New Founders Program? Learn more and apply.