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In 1895, during the era of Horatio Alger, an obscure poet named Sam Walter Foss published Calf-Path. It's about men following the road of least resistance and what we call today "thinking outside the box."
"For men are prone to go it blind/Along the calf-paths of the mind," Foss wrote. "And work away from sun to sun/To do what other men have done."
More than 100 years after Foss penned his poem, a pair of young software writers have taken his advice to heart. They've left the calf path and started their own company in Outlook, Wash., named, in homage to Foss, Calf Trail Software.
Not the Best of Times
Barely a year old, Calf Trail was founded by Nathan Vander Wilt, 24, and Jon Hjelle, 25. Its products include Geotagalog, a program for geotagging images as they're imported into iPhoto, and Resistulator, an iPhone app for calculating resistance values.
Vander Wilt admitted that the pair didn't pick the best of times to start a new company.
"The economy has tanked," he told MacNewsWorld, "but on the other hand, the iPhone is creating quite a buzz."
"Our company has been off to a slow start, but I wouldn't blame that on the economy," he continued. "We're only a year old, so I think people are finally starting to hear about us."
Babes in Businessland
Vander Wilt also acknowledged that he was a bit naive about starting a business.
"You always hear about, 'Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,' and you work hard and you make lots of money," he explained, "but we're finding that it takes time and a lot patience."
While starting a company in a sagging economy may not appear savvy, that hasn't historically discouraged many an entrepreneur from rolling the dice during tough times, according to Vivek Wadhwa, a student at the Harvard Law School and a senior research associate at the Kaufman Foundation in Kansas City, Mo., where he has been studying the makeup of entrepreneurs.
"One of the strongest factors that prevent people from starting companies is fear of failure or the inability to take risks," he told MacNewsWorld.
"What happens in a downturn," he continued, "is that people are laid off. They're under-utilized. In other words, they have nothing to lose. That leads to more entrepreneurship."
Exception to Garage-to-Riches Rule
Young entrepreneurs like Vander Wilt and Hjelle, though, tend to be the exception to the rule, Wadhwa asserted.
Just as Horatio Alger became an archetype for success in a bygone era, the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates "garage-to-riches" archetype has captured the public imagination today. In reality, though, most entrepreneurs aren't cut from rich kid, prestigious college dropout cloth.
"They're typically middle-aged," Wadhwa observed. "They have experience. They have knowledge. They have savings. They have a family. They want to do something before they retire."
Pre-empted by Apple
What Vander Wilt and Hjelle lack in age, they more than make up for resilience. Right out of the starter's gate, they were confronted with a problem that has plagued many Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) developers through the years.
"Our first product ended up competing directly with iPhoto Places," Vander Wilt noted.
When he started working on his product, there weren't any photo viewers for geotagging photos. By the time Calf Trail's software was ready for market, Apple had desiccated its value by releasing a new version of iPhoto that included geotagging features.
Humbled but undaunted, Vander Wilt cooked up another geotagging offering, Geotagalog, that actually takes advantage of iPhoto's new features.
One drawsback with Places is it requires each photo brought into it to be tagged manually, Vander Wilt explained.
Geotagalog combines location history data from a GPS logger with date and time information of photos as they're imported into iPhoto. In that way it allows pictures to be automatically tagged in batches.
More Resilience Testing?
With Geotagalog, Calf Trail hopes to take advantage of the growing interest among shutterbugs to peg their photos to a time and place.
"Until recently, [geotagging] has been difficult at best," Patrick Connolly, an analyst with IMS Research told MacNewsWorld.
"Flickr and Locr are two online services that enable GPS information to be displayed graphically alongside photos via an online portal," he continued. "These Web sites have continued to grow over the last two years despite these difficulties."
"This suggests," he added, "that there is already a demand for a camera that offers a good geotagging user experience."
If that demand turns into widespread adoption by camera makers, Calf Trail's resilience will be tested again.
"If a camera has GPS built into it, you wouldn't need Geotagalog," Vander Wilt conceded.
