Like one of my previous airplane coding sessions, I accidentally stumbled upon a potential project.
For my consultancy, I’m trying to solve these relatively simple problems:

* I need to send an invoice to my customers every month.
* Right now, I have to make a backlog of 10.
* I want some tool that gives me a list of customers with invoices.
* I don’t want to manually change any Word documents every time or learn how to use automated Excel generation with Word templates and all that stuff.

Ok, here we go. First you open MS Word and make a one time document:

You save the file as .rtf and upload it to your Invoid account. In your Invoid account you can manage a list of customers and invoices. When creating a new invoice, most fields will be auto-filled-in, making it a very quick process. When clicking on ‘download PDF’ or ‘download RTF’ the fields DELIVERABLES, DATE and CUSTOMER etc. will be replaced with the data of that invoice.

Here’s a little layout mockup (trying to use avocado colors :p):

Most of this is already working in a Rails mockup I couldn’t resist coding. So once I’ve solved this problem for myself I will add a user model on top of the functionality and roll it out :]
Still todo: support a Open-DOC and Mac format too, RTF2PDF conversion can be done with tool called ted, making some forms, lists and logins, finalizing layout and domain, roll out, drink beer.

I know there are numerous other tools to do this, like the horrible (not working on MAC!) tool: [reeleezee.nl](http://reeleezee.nl) or just doing MS Office magic. But I don’t care! HAHA!

It’s been a few days since the Seedcamp results came back and I have good and bad news:

Unfortunately, due to an unfortunate timing of events I have to relocate back to Japan next week, which makes me unable to make the three month commitment. Also, I have to tell you that we had a mayor flaw in our application: our team was fabricated together just 2 days before the application (after Seedcamp sent [this notice](http://blog.seedcamp.com/2007/07/finding-fellow-travellers-for-your.html)). I really believe that the success of a project is determined by the power of the team. In other words, Confabio wasn’t ready yet.

But hey, I’m pretty sure we didn’t really need that 50k. Also, this once more proves: confabio.com is a great prototype. The thing which is great about Seedcamp is the business guidance you get. How to make a business out of a cool prototype is still a mystery for us geeks. Guess we will have to figure that out by ourselves.

Stay tuned: [http://topoints.com/blog/feed](http://topoints.com/blog/feed)

Until now, I haven’t seen any [Confabio](http://confabio.com/) like websites. There is a project called [stickam.com](http://stickam.com) but my experience with using it is that it’s just a big maze of teenage chatrooms.

Last week [aczid](http://aczid.digigen.nl/) notified me of a project called [TokBox.com](http://tokbox.com/) which is pretty similar to Confabio. ToxBox can be summarized as follows:

* free video chat
* no downloads
* create your video-profile (a tokbox?)
* embed your tokbox into your blog, myspace, facebook etc

Also, it allows you to do easy video mailing. To solve the same notification issues Confabio is facing they use IM triggers. Unfortunately they only have AIM notifications so far. Confabio is trying to solve this problem with a downloadable tray icon (like [wakoopa.com](http://wakoopa.com)) and by providing open API’s / easy accessible URL’s.

tokbox pros:

* looking good, especially the flash parts
* embedding makes it good to share
* your video-profile is a simple url: tokbox.com/dominiek for example

tokbox cons:

* another site to register for, don’t know if you need to do it to chat with someone too (I assume not)
* not very clear how you can actually chat with someone
* IM alerts only through AIM

I think it’s quite obvious that Confabio will go a different direction then sites as Stickam and TokBox. We aim to provide:

* a free means of personal communication (without downloads or signup)
* an easy accessible way of having a meeting with a team of coworkers

I’ve applied [confabio.com](htttp://confabio.com/) for the SeedCamp competition. SeedCamp is a European startup incubate competition funded by several European companies (including Skype’s investors).

One of the 20 winning teams will get:

* 50K in funding (in exchange for 10% ownership)
* 3 months business drilling in London

I figured confabio.com would make a nice application and I’m quite confident they will like it after looking at some of the other applications. The only weakness is not having a team. At the moment I’m urgently searching for a commercially strong partner and I’m considering enrolling more developers in the team:

[http://forum.seedcamp.com/forums/3/topics/36](http://forum.seedcamp.com/forums/3/topics/36)

Yeah right, corporate blog.
No this blog will be for all ToPoints related projects and interests.

In a non-twitter fashion we will keep you up to date on what’s happening to our babies like Confabio.com

Totally Naked.

_note: I will make sure that all high-res graphic files will be made available through a creative commons license on one of our future promotional pages._

This weekend some of the first Confabio icons were delivered! When designing the logo I asked a question to [Aram](http://aczid.digigen.nl/): ‘How do you symbolize the user experience of our service?’ It sounded a lot less smooth in Dutch :]. But he correctly responded: ‘All you ever see is people in a square’.

As you might have noticed, my own design skills could not cope with anything beyond that square :]

But now - thanks to our designer friend Hyo Kwon ([hyokwon.nl](http://hyokwon.nl/)) - we have some really cool things going on in that square!

_(these will be (randomly) used in the logo and some parts of the website)_

Also, in case we start targeting the porno markets:

_(yes, if you have a [black background and dim the light](http://digigen.nl/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/picture-40.png), you will see it and can’t stop seeing it)_