Nicholas Batik

My next project was the formation of Pleiades Publishing Services with my business partner. After the initial enthusiasm over in-house and desktop publishing subsided, many companies realized their corporate communications now looked un-professional, because their staff had the tools to do publishing, but not the design knowledge to make it look good. Pleiades was a design agency that helped both with staff training and the actual design and production of more critical pieces.

Initial clients included US WEST, Bureau of Land Management, US Geological Survey (USGS), NCR, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Coor Brewing Company and a host of small and medium sized businesses, with work dedicated to print publication design with a specialty in the visual information design of highly technical data. This included a mathematical and technical book published by CRC Press.

Starting in 1994 our clients expressed interest in the internet. Our first major online project was for BLM where we converted the printed publications we designed and illustrated into a 2,500 page website between 1994 to 1996.

At Coors Brewing Company I worked under contract with Vice President of New Product Development Ed LeMieux. There I produced both technical and competitive research reports with visual information design for graphical presentations. In addition I worked with the IT department at Coors to produce an intranet specifically for the New Products Division.

In 1995 they opened Coors Field in Denver, and New Products Division showcased the Sandlot microbrewery at the stadium. To commemorate the opening, Coors produced 1,995 custom signature baseballs. Ed gifted me with baseball Serial Number 1.

In 1996 we began a multi-year contract with Refinery Terminal Fire Company in Corpus Christi, TX. There I helped construct the datacenter operations. In that same year RTFC launched their Training Academy which provided classroom and live-fire training for firefighters in refineries and chemical plants from around the world. I built the Firefighter Training Database to maintain training logs, certifications, and instructor reviews for every trainee at the Academy.

At RTFC Headquarters I built the database and publishing system to enter the technical data of the different response hazards at the refineries and chemical plants that RTFC protected, and developed the visual information design for the RTFC Emergency Response Pre-plans that were printed from the database.

I also designed and developed the joint website for RTFC and the Fire Training Academy.

Over the next several years, interest in web design replaced print design as the dominant client request.

My first e-commerce site was for a funded startup during the .com era in 1999. Internet commerce was still quite new, so when Digital Camera Company requested an e-commerce site for a full line of digital cameras and camcorders, with multiple images of each camera, product reviews, side-by-side comparisons and a help facility for decision making, there was no software on the market that would fill their need. This project involved almost a year of custom coding to create. Unfortunately the venture lost its funding before the site ever launched.

One of my largest projects at the time was with Kare Products, an ergonomic furniture company in Bolder, Colorado. Kare Products had a Macintosh network with FileMaker Pro Server hosting their product database internally. From 2000-2004 I modified and programmed the database to assemble product names, descriptions, detailed specifications, images, related products and cross-sell information, and to serve the constructed catalog pages to our remote e-commerce web server running a Lasso interface. The system also included an integrated Ergo-Fit system which allowed the user to set a variety of parameters to help identify specific products and options to fit their needs.

Throughout this project I worked with their design agency to convert the design Photoshop PSDs into website templates and implement the dynamic page generation from the Filemaker database.

In June of 2004 I accepted an extended contact for series of special projects from one of our oldest and best clients. I was tasked with designing, and installing the Information Infrastructure – network, servers, storage, personal computers, communications, and cyber-security – for Industrial Emergency Services to improve operations and communication between their Corpus Christi Headquarters and their Baton Rouge field office. The next year this expanded to their facilities on the refinery island of Equatorial Guinea.

Operating in the dual role of Chief Information Officer and Chief Security Officer, I designed and developed the specialized software and databases to manage, disseminate and protect all the proprietary information about the petro-chemicals at the facilities they protected. This period was only three years following 9/11, so security requirements were significant.

Printed materials, HR documents, hazardous material processes, and other information was converted to be accessible online for both officers and firefighters. In addition, under the direction of the Chief and Training Officer we published the IES firefighter recruit training standards.

During that same deployment, I was dispatched to Louisiana for Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana Power & Light announced to the refineries and chemical plants that they were taking their power plants offline, consequently, all the plants would have to shut down as well.

All the critical information our firefighters relied on, including the contents of every tank, storage vessel, and processing unit, the Materials Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for those contents, the required Personal Protective Equipment and firefighting pre-plans, accidental spill or release dispersion modeling software, and the related evacuation plans were in each of the data centers of the plants and refineries that were turning off their power.

In less that 24 hours we set up an emergency data center, transferred all the necessary data, and I installed, configured and operated the HGSYSTEM and HYSPLIT chemical dispersion modeling software for area evacuations in the event of tank ruptures and spills during the storm and for the rescue deployments following.

In 2007 my long-term contract with IES ended, and I was considering what I wanted to do, and the direction I wanted to take my company. I had relocated my business from Denver to Austin, since by this time nearly all my clients were in Texas.

I gave serious consideration to dropping website design and development. Handcoded HTML was a nightmare, and the automated tools of the day, such as Adobe’s Golive, lacked database connectivity to make them useful for larger sites. A new acquaintance, Chris Sherrod, suggested I try something called “WordPress”. I was dubious.

I had tried lots of software tools. It seems if you are in the computer industry you have to learn two or three new programs or techniques every year. Most don’t live up to the hype, often adding more work than they solve. WordPress was different.

Admittedly I screwed up my first site. Because I didn’t understand how themes and plugins worked, and documentation was very scant, I got my site to do exactly what I wanted by re-writing WordPress core. The next revision of WordPress obliterated my code. I sought help, and found it in the form of the Austin WordPress Meetup and its organizer, Pat Ramsey.

Over the next couple of years I built my skills in WordPress. When Pat mentioned he needed help with the Meetup in 2010, my partner Sandi and I became co-organizers. In January of 2012 Pat stepped down to focus on his business. Sandi and I have now grown the Austin WordPress Meetup to the forth largest WordPress Meetup in the world, and the single most active – with a meeting every week, including on focussed on WooCommerce.

During the course of Genesis Graphics Group, I amassed a great deal of research on the state of the digital publishing industry, the companies and products, the evolution of the marketplace, and the changes to job titles and responsibilities as a result. After closing Genesis, I formed Serendal Research Institute with a partner and began producing and publishing industry intelligence reports. At that time we were approached by Management Development Foundation, a company based in Colorado Springs who specialized in corporate and executive technology training.

We produced a broad series of courses and seminars related to the use of computers in publishing and media, promoted by MDF which we taught throughout the U.S. and Canada. We were later recruited and promoted by Popular Kommunications AG in Scandinavia and UK. This business continued until 1992 when we sold it.

Over the next four years we taught our courses to clients who were mostly among the Fortune 1000 companies, including the various printer-products engineering departments of IBM, HP, and NCR. In all, our teaching took us to nearly 180 cities each year.

In addition, we amassed the largest single database of desktop publishing related hardware, software and services in the industry, which we published as the DTP Source and sold through our affiliates including Popular Kommunications in Europe.

Serendal was acquired by another company in 1992.

In those early days of personal computers, too many critical pieces needed to be developed. As a result, joint ventures and mergers were a common way to combine resources with other entrepreneurs to build a brand. That is what happened with Gambit Group in the mid-1980s. Genesis Computers, based in Golden, Colorado manufactured PC clones, and was looking to partner with a software company to grow market share, so they approached me. I, in turn, found Unidot. They were an electronics engineering company that had created a digital phototypesetter for Siemens that could connect to PCs through an RS-232 port. Because they had the North American distribution rights to the Laserset Phototypesetter, a 3-way venture was formed which we called Genesis Graphics Group. We packaged our software on the Genesis PC, acquired distribution rights to TyXset, which was a PC-based version of the same TEX publishing software I had worked with at IHS, and with the phototypesetter, we had a full in-house desktop publishing solution.

We operated Ad-Venture Design, a graphics and typesetting service bureau, as a profit-generating business unit to demonstrate our systems. As part of our community outreach, we relocated Ad-Venture Design into the Peña Plaza in Denver, where we provided complementary design and graphics services for the clients of the Minority Business Development Center (MBDC) which was run by Sarah Fuentes. We continued to operate Ad-Venture Design as an independent operation until 1991.

We debuted our publishing system at the National Composition Association Convention in McCormick Place in 1985. At the same convention a different 3-way joint venture also debuted – this one between Apple Computer, Aldus Corporation, and Allied Linotype.

Our response at the convention was very favorable, and we had a great profit margin. But the Laserset was manufactured by Siemens in Germany and Imported into the US. When Reagan deflated the dollar later that year, it effectively doubled our import cost and placed our cost of goods higher than Allied Linotype’s retail price, thus pricing us out of the market. The assets were sold off, and the venture was closed.

Gerry and I formed Gambit from the ashes of BRI, and began to sell Molecular Computer Company’s multi-user computer. In its day this way an extremely innovative machine, having one 16-bit 8086 CPU and a dedicated 240MB hard drive, and an integrated rack that could hold up to 64 individual 8086 processors. We would install a Televideo terminal and keyboard on the desk of each user in an office, and connect it with an RS-232 cable to one of the cards in the rack. The database and applications lived on the shared drive. I installed and configured the hardware, did the custom programming, and trained the customer and their employees on how to use it all.

My primary job was to automate and develop the databases for our corporate clients, and train their employees how to enter and retrieve information through on-screen displays and reports.

At this point the computer industry took an interesting turn. A former colleague from Pierce Data Systems called me up an invited me to dinner at his house. There he showed me this big metal and plastic box, almost the size of an end-table that he said was something called a “personal computer”. In the space of an evening, using this personal computer, we successfully prototypes something I had been working on for months on the mainframe. I quit IHS, and Gerry and I started a company selling and programming PCs.

Our first system used the Altos computer and the Oasis multi-user operating system. There were very few applications at that time. We partnered with Uveon Computer Systems who had creates the Optimum Database, which itself was a spin-off of the database and query language from the PICK Operating System. To that we programmed Opticalc – a database driven spreadsheet with enormous capacity – a maximum spreadsheet size of A-ZZZ columns, and up to 999 rows. Cells of different sheet could be linked together through formulas, and both source and results could be read from and written to the database. We launched in 1983, the same year that Lotus 1-2-3 came out with VisiCalc.

We never got the market penetration we wanted. The combination of the closing of Uveon and the launch of Microsoft Excel spelled the end of our spreadsheet.