Blacklight gets up and running SIMON WILKINSON started what was then Chameleon Technologies (CT) Digital in 1999 soon after leaving school. "I didn`t have any funding. Like any other guy who finished school 10 years ago and who was looking to get a job in the industry, I got stuck in that catch-22 where I didn`t have the experience, but I couldn`t get experience until I got a job. You get stuck in this purgatory, and there is no way of getting out besides doing something yourself."

SHAKY START

Wilkinson says his age counted against him in the beginning. "I started working like this when I was 19. At the time you couldn`t buy domain names if you didn`t own a credit card. You needed to buy them online." Banks would not issue him with a card, so he had to wait until he was 21 before being able to get a card and buy his first domain "the right way".

He recalls travelling to Nelspruit in a borrowed car with an old laptop that had no battery and a broken CD-ROM, with a presentation for a potential client loaded onto 11 floppy disks, worrying about how to load the data onto the laptop before the meeting.

"We stopped off at a petrol station just outside Nelspruit and we actually plugged the laptop into the shaving plug and sat on the bathroom floor to load the floppy disks," he says.

GETTING REAL

Wilkinson says the company was turned into a "real business" in 2001, beginning as a small design agency focusing on small to medium enterprises. "We completely diversified our skills, so we became a Jack-of-all-trades, king of none."

In the early days, CT Digital worked mainly for agencies as a subcontractor. "The reason is that we were cheap, we would work through the night because we were passionate, and we`d come the next day, or the third day, without sleeping and we`d still have smiles on our faces," Wilkinson says.

As the business grew, it became focused on designing companies` interactive Web sites and multimedia presentations using Macromedia Flash.

Wilkinson says friend and i5 Group CEO Glen Ansell talked to him on one occasion about Silverlight - Microsoft`s new competitor to Flash.

Although Wilkinson came from an open source and Flash background, he looked into the product concluded that Silverlight went beyond what Flash could do. Silverlight could not only be used to design customisable Web 2.0 sites, but also on intranets and in customer relationship management (CRM) to personalise the desktop environment.

An acquisition agreement was reached and on being brought into the i5 Group, CT Digital was renamed Blacklight.

GOING COMMERCIAL

For now, the company will focus on intranets and CRM, and soon add commercial applications and business solutions such as responsive dashboards.

"Our first client, and our only internal client, is i5, and we service them when it comes to their ads, all of their corporate stationery, anything creative that they`re doing - their Web sites, Web sites for their products. The next step is then going outside, and this is where we align ourselves with i5 very nicely.

"They`ve got the customer base already. They`ve got all the expertise and in the marketplace they are spoken of very highly and they win awards because they get things done. With us aligning with them, by default now we`re credible, which means that our marketplace has changed from SMEs to anything."

Wilkinson says the Internet is changing rapidly. Previously, a Web site with a logo, contact details and some content was sufficient. But now, with multimedia and the Web convergence because of Web 2.0, that is no longer the case. The question now is one of expectations and business goals. Blacklight`s aim is to use Silverlight to deliver on those objectives using the power of Web 2.0.

"At the moment we`re still a garage band, but stay tuned - we`re going to be the rock stars of the Internet."