Last month Khris Loux our CEO was interviewed for the NUBLUE blog. His answers provide a great insight into the way he, and the rest of the Echo team, think about product development and the future of the web.

Here are some highlights

Do your customers buy from you in part because of the synaptic web or is it purely because of features?

Different customers buy for different reasons but at the end of the day they all buy because of the synaptic web. If they are purely looking at our features, those features are a derivative of that synaptic thinking. If they buy our service because of the synaptic web it is because they know where we are going and what our features will look like in the future.

By definition when you buy a product you have bought the past. A lot of people spend time comparing, does this product have this feature does that product have that feature, whoever has the most check marks wins. I would say that at best that is short sighted because a feature or 5 can always be added, the question is where is the partner going, are they going in the same direction as you’re going? When we put out discussions, interviews, video and blog posts on the synaptic web, it is to share our vision of the future with our potential partners. If they look at that vision of the future and completely disagree, even if we have more features they shouldn’t buy Echo.

What does the future hold for Echo and Real-time story telling?

We know what we are building now and we hope to ship in the coming weeks. But we do not know what we will ship next year, not because we can’t come up with an array of novel ideas, we could come up with 20 widgets that we build and lay them on the calendar, announce them and go build them. But that would only be relevant in a world that doesn’t change. So as real-time story telling is unfolding now, we will watch it as much as we will guide it. We feel we have not done anymore than plant a seed and that seed will be watered and grown by the community at large, it will be the guys at CNN and the girls at the Washington post and a blogger in Australia. This will be something that we watch.

There was an amazing article in the Washington Post yesterday. It was Twitter breaks story on discovery channel, when you read that post this is an instance in the world, this author did not need Echo to create real-time storytelling, it was going to happen without us, and we merely are obsevering what’s here. I want to be careful to differentiate between create and observe, we do not believe that we were the creators of the synaptic web although we put a name on it or real-time story telling. These things were already there. If you care to read the story it matches the essay that we put out. It is the living example of real-time storytelling and I don’t even know if the author knows there is an essay out there on real time story telling. But its beautiful to the extent that we now extract from the story tools to enable real-time storytelling, that will be the business and the product side of it.

There is much, much more over on the NUBLUE blog so be sure to read the whole interview over there.