Ecko-It History

[rsquared256]

I have a bit of a history of recording and tagging audio. To
understand where Ecko-it is now, I will give a small glimpse of it's
history.

A Green Bridge
It really started out with my roots as a software developer. I was
involved in long meetings trying to understand what people wanted
their software to do. In Agile development, this is called story
elaboration. These meetings were long and full of passionate people.
It was hard to take down notes fast enough. So I thought a great idea
was to record the audio. The problem was that the audio tended to be
sparse. The important information was hard to find. So I thought if I
could have a button to press that simply was an index into the audio
so I know it would be easy to get back to. That idea was really the
genesis for what is now Ecko-it. You can see more of the tools that I
built at the time here:

http://greenbridge-bdd.blogspot.com/2010/03/greenbridge-bdd-pitch.html

(I worked with Toolman in the group at the same company in Auckland)

General Meetings.
As I soon found value in recording the audio, I found many people
found the idea fascinating, and could be used for general purpose
meetings. So one direction that Ecko-It was to go in was to record and
annotate meeting minutes.

One Step Further
As I was recording meetings, I soon was thinking that I would love to
have a attached recorder with one button that I could click as a
'remember that' action. If I was recording all the time, I would have
the perfect context to go back to that idea or event. I soon found the
rockbox project which I could leverage to build a custom audio
recorder for what I would need to make it a liferecorder.

A Leap
At this time we had just moved back to our home in Canada, and I was
looking for some work. In the back of my mind I thought it would be a
good opportunity to take a leap and try these ideas as a startup. I
received lots of support from family and friends. Richard (Rico in the
group) as a father in law provided startup support and guidance. It
meant working in the basement for a bit, but soon found some shared
office space with Randy (in the group) who also provided some legal
advice.

On my own I was able to write most of what I saw in Ecko-It in a few
months. The first release got out the door in Feb.2011. But money got
a little tight, so I had to take on a fulltime job again. So things
slowed down a bit. But I have been working on it evenings and weekends
(as much as I can with a young family).

Anyway, thats the story of Ecko-It to this point. I hope it gives you
some context! (Next long post is the Vision).