Iain Lovatt joins Rook

As I briefly mentioned in a previous post, Iain Lovatt has joined our team. Located in Toronto, Iain is heading up our East Coast office as Director of Business Development.

Our history with Iain actually goes back about 9 years. In 1999 Rook's 3 founders all worked for Rencom Inc., a technology company that was well positioned to help usher in web 2.0 but failed to survive the .com bubble burst. Iain was Rencom's COO.

Since then, Iain has spent the past seven years as Marketing Quarterback for Muskoka Woods, an amazing sports resort located in Ontario's cottage country. This year, Iain's marketing savvy helped push enrollment to record levels.

We're really excited to have Iain with us. He brings fresh vision, a wealth of experience and a whole lot of gumption (I stole that last word from my wife's blog). Iain's already pushing Rook into new territory and making some very exciting connections. I can't wait to share what's currently going on behind closed doors.

Red Velvet makes it's first appearance in Wired

My thanks to Hypebot for making us aware that our presentation at DMFW got on Wired's blog network.

When big things happen quietly

Looking back, it's been a pretty significant couple of weeks for us at Rook. We re-launched ionworship.org on the Red Velvet platform, signed a contract with Darla Records, welcomed Iain Lovatt to the team as our new Director of business development and I gave my first presentation to a crowd of 250+ attendees at Digital Music Forum West in Hollywood. Most miraculously, I finally made an update to my blog.

I'll get in to the other stuff in another post, but the re-launch of ION is probably the most significant. It marks a major milestone in a journey we started almost 18 months ago. In the spring of 2007, we set out to re-write our e-commerce platform from the ground up. E4, as the platform was known back then, was a great system. However, when we engaged Nettwerk Music as a client, they brought a globalized vision to the table.

The re-write enabled us to meet Nettwerk's requirements of going multi-currency and multi-lingual as well as facilitating multiple geographic distribution points. But probably the biggest advance we made during the re-write was to create the integrated schema system. This system enables our clients to pop out multiple e-commerce enabled music sites from an existing central database. Meaning, they can quickly launch micro sites for all of their artists without having to start from scratch. They can pull products and content out of their existing catalog and plug them into an existing site template. Over the next few weeks we'll be launching several of these micros sites for ION's artists. I'll keep you posted as they come online.

So Red Velvet is officially out of the gate. To quote the traffic controller on the planet Hoth, "The first transport is away!" Somebody write down Sept. 29th. I think we're going to have to make it an annual birthday bash.