A fast-growing company has to adjust to new conditions quickly, and we at Stream57 have generally been keeping our heads above water.  We’ve opened record numbers of new accounts, and to keep up we’ve been developing new processes, streamlining our bureaucracy, expanding at both the productive and administrative levels, and keeping our personnel information up-to-date.  We’re all set in all but one area.

We don’t have enough chairs.

We’re not picky.  It doesn’t have to be gold-plated… it just has to have something to keep our butts company.  Our office is flexible, and I think we’re getting a new one anyway, so we’ll give your office chair a great place to retire.  Have a surplus of chairs?  Recliners and stools bursting out your windows?

Here are a few reasons to let Stream57 adopt your seating apparatus.

1. We’ll give it a good home.

Your chair will be greatly appreciated by its new owners.  It will be assigned to a new sales-person or developer, and they will attend to it carefully and protect it from molestation by upper-management.  It will probably be traded from owner to owner, and late at night, event staffers will give your chair extra attention.  Our floors are firm carpet, ideal for rolling without slippage, but not so soft that the chair will be frustrated.  The lighting is excellent, and our employees know how to adjust your baby without hurting her.

2. Our chairs are friendly.

We DO have chairs… we just don’t have enough of them.  Our family is currently made up of Steel Cases and Herman Millers, with a smattering of Kmart chairs, all well-socialized and housebroken.  Even when its sitter has left the office and the maintenance crew closes the doors for the night, your chair won’t be lonely at Stream57.  Perhaps it’ll find a new best friend, or even a mate, and maybe one day you can visit us and find that your chair has spawned a brood of young.  Just think – the adorable hybrid of one of our Herman Millers and your La-Z-Boy, complete with red upholstery and adjustable arms.

3. Your chair will lead an active lifestyle

At Stream57, we don’t just coddle our furniture… we put it to good use, being productive and developing healthy habits.  Chairs often move around the office, serving at event stations, visiting the development box, and occasionally joining other chairs for meetings in the offices.  A developer may depend on your chair to be there, steadfast and stable, to provide the kind of environment necessary for coding a webcasting application.  We’ll find a way to turn even saddest little cafeteria stool into a capable, well-bred coding chair.

So please, help us find seats for our growing staff of developers and sales-people.  Your chair may even be assigned to a stressed-out Project Manager or a shoulder-rubbing Managing Partner.  Do it for us… but more importantly, do it for a neglected chair in your own life.  Give us a call today.

Stream57 has built team spirit in myriad questionable ways... through gambling (Poker night), substance abuse (beer and wine tasting), and rock and roll (guitar hero). A couple weekends ago, we moved to a fresh, untested sin: wrath and violence.  The vehicle for this depraved team-building exercise was the infamous New Jersey outpost "Paintball Depot."

This place is in West Milford, New Jersey, a bothersome forty-five minute creepy van ride from the midtown office. We all loaded up, bright and early… earlier than many of us get up for real work, in fact.  The town is an empty sprawl of "flora" (whoever thought there were so many trees?) and "fauna" (we saw turkeys, but restrained ourselves from shooting them), as well as awesome hick-y bars where people wear lots of denim.

Once upon a time, this game might have been a scrimmage, but with our recent growth, it was nothing short of a war in the wilderness, the meeting of vast forces laying waste to the landscape. The designated teams were the noble "Phelanators" and the evil "Geiger Counters," captained by two of your dedicated bloggers, and there were around thirteen people under each standard. We were identifiable by red and white armbands, respectively, that were bright enough to inspire comraderie but subtle enough that you had to squint for a few seconds to figure out who you were shooting at. As far as stand-out players, the Geiger Counters had Jeremy, their Achilles, a seasoned paintball veteran with his very own equipment; the Phelanators had little but our warriors’ spirit.

Oh, and Kat, our well-kept secret weapon, a lithe, non-threatening graphic designer who turned out to be the physical embodiment of total destruction.

It was a cold day... a damn cold day. Luckily, we were all outfitted with baggy camo jumpsuits and goggles, which were essential, because those paintballs could definitely take out an eye. Even as it was, a few people got mouthfuls of paint, which, according to Jim, is "kind of sweet, but not in a good way." People will tell you it really hurts when you get hit with a paintball, and they do indeed travel at high speeds, but I assure you – it’s a good kind of pain.

  There were some truly brilliant key moments – Angelo’s execution and Aaron and Matt’s standoffs in the trenches, Jeremy and Steve’s elaborate approaches and Bruce’s pitched defenses. The Geiger Counters were formidable, winning their fair share of confrontations, although the Phelanators’ victorious assault on the hill before lunch will echo in history, like the Alamo or the battle of Thermopylae. The final, epic game of capture the flag, a battle of attrition and desperation, will be remembered forever, as well... it is inscribed in the marble of our corporate memory.

After the matches, and the pizza, we went to one of those bars we were talking about. "Jiggs," I think it was. Nachos and celebratory brews were shared, and the rivals reconvened as brothers and sisters to reminisce on the day’s events. We made it back by early evening, tired and satisfied.

Make no mistake... teams were built. Morale was bolstered. Great webcasting innovations were tossed around and field-tested. Pictures were taken. Lunch was eaten. Good times were had by all. 

Ladies and gentlemen, we needed a blog.

I know you’re skeptical… you know all the ridiculous stuff we do every day, all the big jobs and innovative ideas we’re turning over in our little design aquarium… but there are reasons we have a blog.  There are reasons we needed it.  This isn’t just to keep up with the crest of the 2.0 wave… this is a matter of survival.  It’s right at the base of Maslow’s Heirarchy, chillin’ with food and shelter.

You’d know if you spent some time back here in this glass case, this four-walled Tupperware container of talent.  You see a lot of great ideas from us – interfaces, web sites, conversion utilities, production plans, and project strategies – but you’re really only seeing the rainbow on the surface of the gasoline.  There’s so much more energy down here, circulating through our brains, and I think it needed a place to go.

You know, we used to have a ping-pong table.  Naturally, the developers and the project managers were the most intense, vicious, talented Paddlers.  After all, they had the rage, the pent-up energy of unexpressed ideas, to drive their engines.  The company has grown a lot, though, and unfortunately, the space hasn’t kept up.  We don’t have space for ping-pong any more, and even if we did, we have too much work to let ourselves be distracted.

 All that accumulating energy has started charring the walls and making the glass buckle.  I hear the people downstairs have been feeling tremors in the ceiling… it’s becoming a dangerous situation.  Until now, we haven’t known what to do with all the surplus.

I think we’ve found our solution, though.  A blog will take care of this problem from a number of angles: first, we’ll have a critical outlet to ventilate all the great ideas that are burning holes in our brains.  And as long as we’re writing those ideas, passing them around to one another and to our larger development community, we can rest assured that we’re being productive.  This is way better than the distraction of ping-pong – when we write about conceptual interface design and the new possibilities in streaming technology, we’ll be developing our own potential, even as we release the insane pressure it’s building up in our heads.

Finally, we like the idea of communicating with our associates and making our process a little more transparent.  The people who work closely with us… they know they can trust us, though they may not understand the arcane paths that we follow to our destinations.  Still, there are a lot of people who could use a look at what we’re doing, and who we might want to hear from in turn.  We urge you all to use this blog to keep in touch with us and oil the razorblade runners of our fast-paced community.

In short, thank the gods we’ve got this thing going.  We’re going to enjoy it.  We hope you will, too.