This is a guest post by Pasion Mura, HCI researcher, UX Designer, and founder and current CEO of pmworks.

September 26, 2011 marks the initial public changes after our announced refocus of the company. After more then 2 years of evolution the new brand for pmworks is ready to hit the public grounds.

The old pmworks logo to be used till the end of this month (Sept 2011). We will later resuscitate the P symbol.

Started as a Digital Agency in 2007, and incorporated in 2008, pmworks has become a leading force in our home country, but we want more: we want a flexible startup to tackle advanced problems in technology. Unfortunately the agency model was an impediment to the nature of flexible startup we needed.

We want now to test a novel business model we call Evolutionary Vision (EV or EVM). As a company to achieve this we opened a skunk works division, pmworks research, the incubator which is pmworks itself, and pmworks creative, which will develop projects targeted at the state of the art (this is where the core of the Digital Agency has moved).

The new identity for pmworks

The same thing happened to our corporate identity. pmworks has now only the essence of the past company, and is now ready for “evolutionary design”. You’ll understand why this choice of a “blank” canvas later, when we publish about Kudite and the related research.

The fundamental changes includes a sharper vision of the future we want to build. pmworks has the right experiences necessary to accomplish our goals (it somewhat resembles world domination). The only company that seems to share this type of vision seems Palantir (see his conclusions as to why it is a different type of company).

We iterated through various models, and even though many of them were viable enough, they all appear to limit innovation at later stages (at least earlier than the EV).

The product/service business model

While it can be very short-time profitable, it often sucks when you start or get at the end of sprint. Once a market for a product has been validated, more and more competitors will join the run. Sometimes this can result in the most successful experiences of the whole life. The energy of early competition is incredible, though.

It starts to be painful when you realize your product isn’t viable anymore. After time passes you find yourself barricaded in the same market, you can’t think out of the box anymore. It is very difficult to adopt the product to new markets. This is where young startups shine. They’re like the special forces of market disruption.

The infrastructure business model

Infrastructure is in my opinion one of the most powerful models out there. When done right it brings to incredible events happening (see Evolutionary Vision model below). The main pitfall is that most of the time, eg. hardware, this model is truly constrained by physical limitations.

Evolutionary Vision Model

When you build infrastructure, and you do it right, you open the doors to new incredible possibilities, and I want to emphasize possibilities not opportunities. I believe opportunities exists, because they’re made possible.

Look at NASA on SpaceX, DARPA on our beloved Internet, the incredible research done at Bell Labs, or the developments research at Stanford and Xerox PARC led to today profits for companies like Apple. They all opened the eyes of people, and made it possible so that today we have the opportunity to build on those resources, on that knowledge.

Hence the Evolutionary Vision Model: an hybrid infrastructure/product/service model driven purely by innovation. Let’s say this is the reason of our shift and the birth of pmworks research.

This leads to sometimes involuntary inspiration and makes it possible to advance in cross-disciplinary fields easier, since no direct leadership or resource-hogging model exists. You don’t want a division funded enough to give it power to block others who may be able to innovate in new grounds, and shape and evolve continuously the company throughout eternity.

Stay tuned for the shortly upcoming post about the pmworks change!

Pasion Mura: Logo for Kuse Vision, a dynamic multitasked GUI layer:
http://www.pmura.com/blog/2010/03/kuse-vision-logo

On the right you have a screenshot. The service is not on alpha stage even, and is a screenshot as seen from inside pmworks.

Kudite - Screenshot

While all startups focus only on small parts of technology to develop and then sell it to the big companies, Kudite was built to revolutionize this scheme and compete, and also integrate, with the current large companies. Those tech startups don’t just have enough nuts to be a threat to companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or Yahoo!. Kudite (in this case pmworks) aims to be an open and transparent company.

We are now in stealth mode, and currently we don’t have a fund company to finance our work. A bit of the strength of Kudite is in the fact that we are reducing expensive parts of the project, making it highly cost reliable.

At the moment we cannot share other details but you can easily imagine what it could be. We will share other information as soon as we can.

The service will follow some changes in pmworks, and a refocus of the company’s values.

Remember to follow us on Twitter (@pmworks) and here on our official blog.

Investors and Press can email us on kuditeNOSPAM@NOSPAMpmworks-corp.com, you’ll be contacted back as soon as possible.

Note: Ah. Today also is the April Fools’ Day, and this post could be seen like a joke from us. But we’re telling the truth, even it’s April Fools’ Day joke.

We announce today that PM Works, from the end of the month to the next, will get a major rebrand. As such the pmworks website and this blog will be redesigned to match the new brand strategy. During this period the website may go down from time to time, to allow us make the necessary changes.

The website will be rebuilded and developed from scratch. The changes will affect the redesign and the development of the website, followed by the move on a new platform.

All this is due to the arrival of a new product and service from us on the market. We will update about this soon.

During this time you may want to follow us via email (infoNOSPAM@NOSPAMpmworks-corp.com) or via Twitter.

Our apologieses for every inconvenience this may provide.

As you can see there is no more than a Oh No! We couldn’t find anything text. Anything to just a simple “Go Back” link in case of 404, on every modern website is a requirement. But instead you have to manually type in the address bar flickr.com.

From a service like Flickr, a simple search form, the logo (with a link to the homepage), or anything else would be appreciated.

Now it can’t be a serious problem, or can? We all know the importance of Flickr, and the years of experience on UI design and user-friendly development it has. Citing Wikipedia: It was one of the earliest Web 2.0 applications. I hope I’m the only one who experienced this problem.

So what’s the point of all this? It’s clear to me that Web applications will replace applications as we know: as you may know AMD is working on a new supercomputer to pre-render the 3d games and HD videos on the server, enabling people on mobile to play complex and HD games and videos.

In the image there is also the Adobe Fireworks icon which I was working on a new project: with a technology like this (AMD’s supercomputer), Adobe can host the software (eg. Fireworks or Photoshop) and users can access and work with such software online on your mobile or “netbook”. It’s clear now that cracking will be much difficult to obtain.

SPM Ind. Records - Ironik Al released the new album: The Promise (also Sweet Land). You can listen the track on the official Ironik Al’s MySpace page.