We call ourselves an innovation studio and for us, that is as packaged as we would like to be. What we really are is a team of smart, creative, tech-savvy, sociable, nice people. As one investor put it, Deeplocal is a culture more than anything else. My goal has always been to build a company that someone like me would want to work at– for a long time.

We don’t hire people to burn them out.

We don’t have A and B grade teams.

We don’t sell technology.

The company was spun out of Carnegie Mellon University in the hopes of commercializing some mapping software I had been working on since 2000. That didn’t pan out (it was 2006, the year Google Maps launched), and we had to start figuring out how to make money by providing some value to local companies. We began doing technology consulting and development, with a bit of design thrown in. We helped to launch Gigapan.org with CMU, then the new Post-Gazette.com with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper, then just started to organically take on work that excited us: the Pittsburgh Bike Map, Children’s Museum Mobile Scavenger Hunt, etc.

We grow our clients organically.

We have a background in mobile (I was a mobile device specialist at MetaDesign in 2000, worked for Palm computing, Matthew worked for Handspring, and we operated a bunch of hacked SMS gateways from CMU when I was a researcher there). That background often gets us lumped into the mobile technology company category because we can do things like mobile marketing services.

Mobile is a type of media we can provide; it is not what we are.

We actually hate getting lumped into that category and we make no money off of small transactions. We built an application called TinyBlast not to get rich but to provide these marketing services to companies that just want mobile alerts, etc.

We build our own products that have recurring revenue.

Our leading product is called RouteShout and it is pretty simple. We take real-time or schedule time data (depending on what a transit agency has…in Pittsburgh, for example, it’s just the schedule) and deliver transit arrival times to users who are standing at stops. The information is delivered over SMS text message, iPhone, and soon- Android. It’s a simple concept and we run it on our own short code, 25252. We have a saleperson who is dedicated to the transit industry and we have customers across the country. It’s going well!

We help advertising agencies implement their ideas.

Last summer we helped to implement the Nike Chalkbot for ad agency Wieden + Kennedy. The Chalkbot is a machine that spray painted text messages and tweets on the roads of the Tour de France. The project wasn’t just big… it was huge. We took the entire company over to France to experience the event and had a fantastic time. The project allowed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide to get their messages of hope and remembrance on the streets of the world’s largest sporting event. The entire project was built and delivered in about seven weeks.

We work directly with advertisers to develop and implement experience-based advertising campaigns.

While we can’t talk a lot about who we are working with now, we have developed a process for engaging with new and potential clients called FEED. Through this process we leverage our unique backgrounds, access to technology, and prototyping skills to develop an idea book for clients. From there we can go on to implement a concept or an idea with a client and involve outside help if necessary. Right now, many large brands are beginning to look more diligently at their advertising spend to make sure that each dollar is generating new revenue for the company and strengthening the brand. Increasingly, brands are coming to realize that what customers really want are compelling experiences that they can’t get otherwise. We help brands to leverage their current assets, relationships, and networks to identify an opportunity for a compelling user experience. In the age of too much information, too many websites, and too many emails, you have to think beyond media to really stand out in a crowd, grab attention, and ideally- devotion. We help clients spend less and get more by focusing exclusively on the experience and ignoring technology (we use whatever makes sense, no technology for technology’s sake).

We have fun.

We are deeply engaged with Pittsburgh and support the cyclist community, the arts community, the start-up community, and the non-profit community. We do all kinds of fun projects to bring these worlds together and help to build cool experiences in Pittsburgh. We have an artist residency program, we commission artists to design t shirts, we offer discounted services to non-profits, we bowl against other local start-ups we like, and we just launched Waffle Wednesdays to give away free consulting. We do these projects because they are fun for us, they add to our culture, and they help us to learn about what a compelling experience is (tech or non-tech). Consider all of these projects and programs small exercises in what big brands could or should be doing on a much larger scale. We do a lot with a very small amount of time, money and people.

So what do you do?

I wrote a book here trying to explain what we do but I hope you can understand that we live innovation. While the phrase “innovation studio” may seem generic, in our case it is not. We live and breathe innovation and try to help our clients learn through us. If you look at each of the projects we have done, on their own they may seem small but putting them in perspective, we are a seven person company (the largest size we have ever been) from Pittsburgh that has built one of 2009’s top advertising campaigns (Nike Chalkbot), has a rapidly expanding application that has seen 1000% growth in the past month (RouteShout), has had design work recognized internationally (Print Magazine award for the Pittsburgh Bike Map), and is helping to build experience-based campaigns for national and international brands (Nike, and others that cannot be named). I am very proud of what we have been able to accomplish so far. All of this has been done in total disregard to conventional wisdom. What we are, a hybrid product/services company, is not supposed to work. We are not supposed to be alive after three years. We should have learned our lesson years ago. Oh well…

We operate more like a punk band or art group than a company.

- nathan