Author Description

ColoradoUSA.Co: Author of Colorado Business Plan: The most talented Creative Directors in Silicon Valley met in a conference room next to my office to create the first advertisements for Adobe Illustrators version for Windows known as Illustrator 7.0. The slogan we picked after a night of North Beach pizza with Molson's beer was "I Do Windows." The Creative Directors began to call their collaboration KR8V (Creative). Before Illustrator 7.0, Adobe software was Mac based for Apple computers. Our team was going to change all that. Not only with online banner ads, standup cutouts made of thick cardboard, but a rebate ad. Online banners in 1997 were selling for $1200 to $1800 per ad to create with Adobe Photoshop. The rebate program would be Adobe System's first. This project opened up the doors to other Adobe Departments. KR8V Creative Directors were asked to design the first websites, Internet advertisement as well as print ads for PageMaker, PageMill, and soon eSchwab. Winners of the rebate campaign won a trip to Paris, France, because the promotion went beyond the high tech technology of San Francisco Bay Area connected to Adobe's headquarters in San Jose, California. The advertising campaign was going to be worldwide. By the end of the week, we were receiving orders from Charles Schwab International Electronic Brokerage. The calls came from eSchwab to make tutorial CDs that would be mailed out to investors so as to teach the investors to barter online instead of with a broker. The languages evolved from English only to Mandarin Chinese and Spanish for the Latin American investors. Seventy percent of the staff was let go in some brokerage firms. Brokers didn't have to engage in conversations with clients if the investors were invited online. Investing over the Internet was the web portal to the future. The portal was nicknamed vertical, because of the emphasis on financial news, monetary policy, and stock market events. By being a gateway to money, the firm focused w