A presciently-timed vote of confidence

I'm still processing the incredible honor Stikkit received last week: the 2007 SXSW Web Award for Best Technical Achievement. Needless to say, we were thrilled beyond belief.

But not for quite the reasons you'd think.

The award validated what we feel we've accomplished with Stikkit: truly interesting, subtly powerful, supremely flexible technology that suggests new ways to think about organization and collaboration.

Indirectly, it also reflected how we and our users have felt about Stikkit: excellent tech, tricky metaphor.

So why then were we so pleased?

Back in January, having reached the same conclusion, we returned to the fundamental promise of Stikkit: that it makes organizing your daily details as simple a jotting down a note or firing off email.

And it dawned on us that the core product had been there all along.

We noticed that active Stikkiteers — ourselves included — tended to interact with Stikkit from the comfort of an already-familiar interface: email. We already know how to use email to collaborate and share; and with the addition of Stikkit's "thinking," our email had become more useful.

We've spent every moment since building something that accentuates all of those qualities of Stikkit that drew people in in the first place, while, at the same time, keeping it simple by baking it right into your inbox.

So the recognition of what we'd achieved technically came at just the right time: as I sat in our office in Portland, Oregon, 2000-odd miles from SXSW, contemplating just how we had come to create our new product.

I'll post more details in the next few days. For right now, though, I just want to thank the SXSW judges for the presciently-timed vote of confidence.