It’s more of a challenge that I’m placing on myself than anything from an external source…  But I’m picking up a new hobby and spending some time snapping photos.  I bought a Canon EOS 450D DSLR (Rebel XSi) off Amazon (who is offering 6 mos. free financing to all who use/have the Amazon.com Store Card), and I absolutely love it.  I don’t have any fancy lenses yet, but I will be getting a telephoto lens in the next couple of months or so…  I may also spring for a fish-eye lens (or whatever the real name for it is), but that will certainly come later.

I haven’t posted any pictures yet, though I certainly will in the next day or so, check out www.rosenbaugh.com/photography for some of my work.  I’ll eventually be learning Photoshop to compliment whatever photography skills I’ve accumulated, but for right now I will be trying to do all I can to master the camera itself.

Jason, Travis and I are looking at starting a company. We have a pretty sweet idea and we’ve got a lot of skills, but this whole starting a business thing isn’t an easy undertaking. More than anything, I’m intimidated as hell at the proposition of doing all of the stuff we’ve outlined as key steps to developing the business.

Basically, without giving a whole lot away, we’re trying to carve ourselves into an internet marketing niche that can serve a huge community with content that is interesting and fun while yet providing a great forum for coporations to get their propoganda to the masses.

This is something that I can definitely see as a success down the road, but the basic implementation needed to get us started and into everyone’s bookmarks is a little daunting to think about. Not only do we need to develop a great looking site, but there is some functionality that we’ll need implemented right away (such as a database and dynamic pages) that I’ve definitely never developed before or had to work with. Aside from that you have the constant issue of defining a revenue model, setting goals and acquiring enough content from corporate marketing departments to make your site sufficiently sticky. Needless to say, this is all incredibly new to me.

I’ll be searching through some internet documentation to see what I can find in regards to starting an internet only business. Hopefully I will find enough quality information specific to our online marketing idea to help smooth out some of the wrinkles I already see in our business plan that could potentially become problems. I mean, what’s the best way to develop something that needs a scalable infrastructure in terms of bandwidth, processing power, and storage? There are options like Amazon’s web services, but those can tend to be somewhat expensive – especially when you’re in beta!

Anyway, if anyone is seriously interested in joining our little team, let me know. The three of us would really like to dive through the first few steps in the development of our plan by ourselves, but I have a feeling we’ll need some quality web developers and the like once we get the ball rolling. Hopefully we’ll be successful and can walk away with some serious money in the future, but I am sure it will be a great learning experience no matter what happens.