History

Lightbulb was founded in 1986 by Nicolas Cianca as a software consultancy. During the late 80's, Lightbulb was involved in the development of "client-server" applications for a variety of Finance and Auditing Firms. From Currency Swaps systems for Morgan Stanley or Mitsui Trust, to Practice Management Systems for Big Eight firm KPMG Peat Marwick. Our expertise also crossed over into consumer products companies, such as Atlantic Records, Philip Morris and Scholastic Publishing where we developed and deployed market analysis tools.

Much of the original development that Lightbulb did, was made with a revolutionary (at the time) product known as 4th Dimension. By quickly adopting this technology to deploy applications custom built for clients, we where able to produce very usable software that met the needs and requirements of the client. One of the unique features of 4D, was it's visual nature - a huge contrast to other text based environments. The ability to create applications that were more then just software but had a visual appeal as well was a huge thing at the time. Of course, today we take such applications for granted, and certainly the web is a highly visual medium.

This period also allowed the company to develop it's core strategies at developing custom software, gathering the requirements, planning the solution, determining the costs, developing fixed price bids, the software construction process, the installation & training and finally, the ongoing maintenance.

Publishing became part of the Lightbulb mission as we created editorial work flow models for firms such as Forbes. As the web was coming to life, we immediately saw the potential of these technologies as a means of expanding the reach of solutions in platform neutral ways and we embraced the development of web deployed software solutions and interactive database enabled web sites.

More firms saw the light of solutions powered by Lightbulb and the strength of our people. Our diverse talents merge the disciplines of solution architecture, visual design and technical engineering with a deep understanding of the needs of our clients. Our solutions expanded to accommodate a growing roster of clients in aerospace, arts, entertainment, fashion, publishing and more.

The growing internet presented new opportunities for businesses to expand their reach. The idea of conducting commerce online was new and exciting and developed the name we know it by today: eCommerce. Lightbulb created some of the very first online commerce sites for firms such as Surfing Lobster and Digital Stock. Digital Stock became the leading provider of stock photography online and was acquired by giant Corbis to provide their own entry into the online stock photo marketplace. Our Filament software started to take shape and was utilized in the deployment of these interactive commerce sites and applications.

Lightbulb got involved at an early stage with Apple Computer on the Newton device. This was the first PDA that could recognize handwriting (even though the first generation of Newton's had some difficulty in this area). It was an exciting time and our program Elegance™ was hugely popular with Newton users. Elegance was installed on 60 percent of the Newton's sold. While the Newton was way ahead of it's time, Apple was forced to discontinue the technology to concentrate on it's own survival.

Our success with the Newton, led to other collaborations with Apple Computer. We explored interesting ways to navigate the internet and worked with Apple on some exciting technologies. The most significant of these was Project-X, which allowed the user to "fly-through" the internet. Project-X was later branded as "Hotsauce" and existed as browser plugins and a standalone application of MacOS 9 and Windows. It was based on a specification that we collaborated on called MCF. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, parts of this technology where transfered to Netscape and become known as RDF, Resource Description Framework, which today is an integral part of XML and RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

Demand for our online applications & solutions continued to grow and Lightbulb was awarded a 5 year contract with NASA to provide STS (Space Shuttle) flight certification and management software to handle the certification scientific payloads. This was a grueling paper intensive task that involved dozens of signatures in dozens of locations, from Cape Kennedy, to Ames in Mountain View to Space City in Russia and points in between. The ability to deploy parts of our system utilizing the web was significant factor in Lightbulb being selected for this contract. These systems resulted in significant savings for NASA, and contributed to the Paperwork Reduction Act.

Lightbulb started offering professional hosting operations for clients, providing fully configured & and managed dedicated web and database servers. Our boutique hosting operations handled dozens of sites.

More entertainment firms also approached us to deliver systems for talent management, entertainment finance and extranet capabilities to enhance and streamline their own operations. Utilizing the infrastructure provided by the WWW, we enabled companies such as ICM to reduce their costs and increase the speed with which they could communicate with their customers, providing entertainment contracts, scheduling information and other data to their talent and customers. Soon we where deploying similar systems with online portfolios and extranets to agencies such as Stockland-Martel and Garren. The savings alone of not having to send expensive portfolios where significant for these firms.

Most of our clients have come to us "by word-of-mouth", referred by other clients in most cases. This process has led us to develop many relationships over the years. we started to work with fashion giants to provide solutions to showcase their collections. All of our installations had content management tools that allowed the site webmaster, or administrator, to manage the content and control the presentation of their data using the back-end. By empowering the customer to control their own content in an easy to administer manner, the customer had complete control without having to rely on html knowledge. The presentation of their content could be in HTML or in Flash, but they controlled what appeared and when by using a simple web browser. And they could do this from anywhere in the world. Content Management Systems (CMS) wasn't yet a buzzword, but we where providing those solutions and more with our Filament software.

By 1996, Lightbulb was at the forefront of doing really innovative web applications. By creating web applications that where written in C we could achieve incredible results for our clients. We controlled the entire web application process and designed our software to handle the web based applications as if they were a more traditional "client-server" application.

Our interest in the visual presentation of information led us to create software that would allow us to dynamically generate Flash content. This was significant at the time because Flash only supported bringing in static images that where embeded into other Flash files. We overcame that limitation so that Filament could now render images in a very flexible manner, allowing the user to specify the images they wanted to use in the administrative back-end.

The late 1990's and early 2000's saw an explosion installations and Filament was now being used on many sites, including DeltaThree, eMe, Farm-To-Table, iRumba, Lockstream, Maazel-Villar, Mixer Magazine and QVI. Many start-ups came looking for websites to showcase their wonderful ideas. The DOT-COM revolution was a completely crazy time, with heavily funded start-ups operating on nothing more then an idea that might or might not work.

We got involved with more art related projects as well. Many of these where done on a pro-bono basis. We worked with artists such as Futura2000, Gamil GS and Toby. We participated and assisted non-profit endeavors, such as PhotoART, where we handled online auctions for benefits such as Coley's Anemia with contributions from major photographic talent.

Our interest in music also led us to start an internet radio station known as 60 Watts. Unfortunately the RIAA had become a hostile enemy of music lovers and turned against their best customers wrongly believing that they where losing money to piracy.

Then came 9/11... Lightbulb took a direct hit as our digital infrastructure was based out of 5 World Trade Center. The impact was immediate and swift. Our ability to service our customers was severely impacted and many of the customer sites we hosted had to be moved to other providers in order to keep them up and running. A huge learning experience in Disaster Recovery. The power, phones and network might have gone out, but the Lightbulb still had some glow.

The pace slowed down as recovery was underway. But, new clients still came to our door asking for CMS, Portal, and Publishing Solutions. We have provided solutions for firms such as Parade Publications, CCN, Inc. and Atkins Nutritionals. During the ups and downs we have never stopped developing and improving our software and solutions.

Over the course of the past several years we have also developed a methodology (and software) which we call Sandbox. It's a way to provide integrated development environments for our developers, QA and management. The sandbox methodology allows us to develop better solutions, manage the software lifecycle in ways that are very effective. It's based on the knowledge that we have accumulated in over 20 years of developing leading edge software solutions.

At Lightbulb we have always been passionate about creating superior technological solutions. However, technology alone doesn't make a superior solution. The usability of software, the user interface, plays a key role in that process. Applications need to be well designed from the users perspective. They need to be functional and attractive, with well thought out visual design. It's the marriage of the disciplines of technology and art that makes the best solutions in the end. During the lifetime of the company, extensive R&D has been undertaken to learn new and interesting ways to solve problems. It's a never ending process that involves lot's of sweat and frustration which ends with that incredible feeling of achieving the desired results, both technically and visually.

We continue to power our clients needs with bright, attractive and well designed solutions. It's the only way we know how.