A lucid start

It’s an historic day today as Americans head to the polls to elect a new president. At the time of this writing, CNN has just announced that President Obama has been re-elected, which is great. But that’s not what this post is about.

Many who know me personally are aware that I have been working on yet another Internet startup. My company — Lucidly Inc. — has a vision of making the web a more lucid, beautiful and engaging place. My partner in this is my co-founder David Lim. How are we going to do this? By creating a platform where anybody, without any design or technical skills, can create beautiful, interactive content visualizations. We call these “infoactives” and you can think of our platform as YouTube, but instead of uploading videos, you can take some pictures and text, drop them into a visualization you like and in minutes you have a beautiful infoactive that you can embed in your blog or website just like a YouTube video. While we are not ready to launch yet, we have been working closely with a few companies who have graciously agreed to give our scrappy startup a chance.

Today, I am super excited to report, our first customer infoactive went live on the web. Coupons, Inc. runs Coupons.com, the 42nd largest website in the U.S. The company is the worldwide leader in digital coupons and issued some 305 billion coupons last year. You can see the infoactive here: Holiday Savings Calendar … it’s a simple (but cool) calendar that helps you learn some key shopping dates for the upcoming holiday season. Check it out and if you like it, please do embed it on your blog (click embed on the bottom right of the infoactive to get the embed code).

Also, if you are a marketer or blogger, or know someone who is, please tell them to visit our website at www.lucidly.com and sign-up for our beta.

Startups are hard. I know, I have been down this familiar road before, three times. One of those didn’t end so well, one was OK and one is doing quite well. Given the punishing journey, I think you have to be a fool to even try to create a startup. But foolish I am, so here I go again. Thanks to the support of friends and family, I am confident that Lucidly is going to be big, very very big.

Keep watching this movie…it’s going to be fun. And wish me luck.