And we are moving on!

During my last weekend (12 & 13 December) – before getting off to Belgium for Christmas – everything came nicely together. I founded my own Limited Liability Corporation, scored a job and found a new place to live in Capitol Hill! All that in just one weekend!

It all started about a month ago when I found out there was a launch event of a new iPhone application, just two hours before the party was taking off. There were no tickets left but I decided to talk me in. I wrote an e-mail to the organizers proposing them to take pictures at the event. Taking pictures at an event is a fun and effective way to meet new people. They responded positively so I went to Ballard (north of Seattle), took pictures of the event and met some interesting people including Justin, Aaron and Terry from Fotozio, the company behind the iPhone app. The iPhone application they’ve build is called PicTranslator and it allows you to take a picture of a piece of text and then return the translation.

At that same event I talked with Mason working for a start-up called Zendorse. He told me they were looking for a designer so we exchanged business cards. A few weeks later I had coffee with Tom (ex-Microsoft) – the founder – and some time later we met again but this time at their office ‘Indie Ballard‘ with the two developers. I got an introduction into their product and they asked me to join their team. Over the weekend we negotiated a salary and on Monday December 15th I starting working for Zendorse as interface designer and front-end developer.

Zendorse is a Seattle start-up in stealth mode, meaning that I cannot say what it is all about. To give a hint, it’s a web application and it has something to do with music. The developers have been working on the back-end past six months. My role is to design the user interface and to develop the front-end (XHTML, CSS & jQuery). An alpha version is planned for January 2010. If you are on Twitter, be sure to follow twitter.com/zendorse so you can score an invite to check out our first release!

That same weekend I started Barclaey LLC, a limited liability corporation. Starting your own business in the States is less cumbersome than in Belgium. I first registered the company at Seattle for $15, then registered it at the State of Washington for $200. All this could easily be done online. A few days later the business certification was dropped in the mailbox. Now I only have to visit the bank to get an additional account and that’s it. At the end of January I have to file my first taxes which means I’ll have to do some book keeping very soon. I’m using outright.com for bookkeeping and freshbooks.com for managing invoices and time sheets. Both web services work nicely together.

Because Ballard (north of Seattle) is pretty far from Columbia City (south of Seattle) I was looking against a long commute. People who know me well know that I’m not a big fan of commuting By coincidence, my friend Amy told me her friend was looking for a new roommate. I immediately took action and went to Capitol Hill to check out the place. I always planned to move to Capitol Hill. It is much closer to Ballard where I work and Belltown and Downtown where all the events take place. I met with my roommate Amy (yes, two Amy’s to make it confusing) and checked out the apartment. All was well so within minutes I decided to go for it. Unfortunately it’s not that easy to move into a new place. The landlord needs to do a full background check first so there is yet again paperwork involved. It’s pretty common here for landlords to check its renters for their credit score and getting references from previous leases.

I don’t have to tell you January will be a busy month. Besides Zendorse I also signed with Fotozio to help them rolling out another iPhone app (which I again cannot tell you more about at this moment). There are also some smaller freelance projects I will start working on, not only for Seattle but also for some new Belgium clients. Oh, and there is Creativeskills.be version 2 that’s coming up. Eventough the current site is almost five years old the site still breaks visitor records every week and the number of registrations surpassed 8.000!

I feel 2010 will be an exciting year!