Joe Davis, an Englishman who has worked in management and as an IT consultant, was an avowed PC user until he went into business with professional musician James Doy, whose other skills included sales, marketing and a knowledge of HTML, CSS, Flash and graphic design. Now they're responsible for the sensational web success of the Together Collection. Mark Webster listened to their story.

Joe was a long-term IT consultant until he and his flatmate, James Doy, came up with the Digital Fishbowl concept. James was already an affirmed Mac guy who had started out learning the Mac Plus his dad, well-known pianist Carl Doy, bought for his music business.

The concept the pair came up with for Digital Fishbowl was a high-end web development and digital media company - however, an important part of the concept hinged on which platform the company was to be founded upon: James was one hundred per cent for Apple, and Joe virtually one hundred per cent against. The debate eventually came down to one main issue - James was using Photoshop on the Mac, and Joe was running Corel on the PC; "We just had to standardise." The Macintosh won hands down, producing a far superior graphics experience and performance. As Joe relates, "I couldn't go back to Windows! I've become a real Mac evangelist!" James: "We have this one PC in the corner, and we sit things on it so people won't see!

James' advocacy for the Mac platform comes from a very solid footing. Back in 1988, with his dad's take-up of Macintosh technology for music production, James was the one tasked with figuring out the machine's complexities - and all this at the tender age of 13.

For his own music, James started out with the software packages Performer and Professional Composer, which were purchased for Carl's original Piano by Candlelight album. While he still uses Performer (now Digital Performer) extensively, he's become a confirmed user of Sibelius.

In addition to web development James is currently using Macs for sequencing at Digital Fishbowl, where Taste NZ's soundtrack was done - Digital Fishbowl also uses its Mac suite for mastering DVDs, TVC Soundtracks and multimedia productions.

The Together Collection

Perhaps the biggest project the pair has been involved with in the three years since DFB began is the Together Collection, essentially a beautifully made book containing black and white photographs from the MILK Collection and ten CDs.

The MILK Collection came about after a search by NZer Geoff Blackwell for 300 extraordinary and geographically diverse photographs portraying family life, friendship and love, inspired in part by Edward Steichen's fantastic Family of Man collection - also published as a book - of the '50s. MILK took the form of a competition judged by photographer Elliot Erwitt as chief judge, and features many of the world's top snappers, the pics culled from 40,000 images from 164 countries.

The music is from the Piano by Candlelight Collection performed by Carl Doy and members of the NZ Symphony Orchestra - the CDs encompass the music of Barbara Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, the Beatles, Burt Bacharach, discs called The Classics, Quiet Nights and The Music of Christmas, plus Espresso Guitar (performed by Martin Winch. The books are printed and hand put-together in Hong Kong, then shipped back here; Sony Music International handles the CDs.

Entrepreneur Murray Thom - formerly of Personalised Plates - came up with the concept, a cornerstone of which was completely web-based marketing. Murray, also now a Mac user thanks to DFB, has worked with Carl Doy for many years, and Digital Fishbowl had created the web site for the original Piano by Candlelight Collection.

Preparations for launching the Together Collection were ticking along nicely when Murray ingeniously brought it to the attention of Oprah Winfrey. The DFB development team had anticipated a nice, slow roll-out, but the Oprah connection pushed everything into extreme overdrive. The TC site's interface, custom-built by Digital Fishbowl in its Waiake office on Auckland's North Shore, integrates fully with the warehouse in Avondale - compiling orders, verifying credit card transactions, shipping and tracking goods right the way through to full multi-currency reconciliation in the client's accounting systems. The whole set-up had been tested and retested to handle 200 transactions per second - even Unisys had been enrolled to stress-test the Fishbowl system.

Designers and additional developers are contracted as required by Digital Fishbowl for different projects. For the Together project, ten people were regularly around the table - James and Joe described the whole thing as an "outstanding collaborative effort." In Auckland late in 2002, Joe, James and the team were up as Oprah went to air live at 4am our time - all Oprah had to do was hold the collection aloft for 15 seconds and name it as her "favourite of the favourites, and the website immediately started taking heavy traffic.

Joe: "The whole team - designers, programmers, accountants, you name it - were all at the warehouse in Avondale from three in the morning, waiting for the first broadcast (the show goes out in Chicago first, then NY and follows US time zones, etc). We had Sony staff in the US holding the phone to the TV speaker so we could hear it live. Absolutely incredible.

"The traffic monitor went wild - literally as she talked we were taking thousands of hits, and most importantly orders. The team was buzzing."

Once the show aired in New York two hours later, the system was really tested - the Fishbowl system in Auckland handled the load perfectly but, for a while, Oprah's server in Chicago actually buckled under the strain. Over one million dollars NZ was cleared on that day in November 2002.

Macs through and through

This is a true Mac project. The Fishbowl system for the Collection sales and marketing site was all built on Macs, and is hosted on dual-processor G4s running OS X. The interfaces between the warehouse's PC/AS400 systems and the Mac servers were hand-coded by the DFB guys and contractors, and work brilliantly. Musician Carl Doy himself still has a Mac-based studio, and records everything into an old Quadra "because it just works", using his G4 PowerBook for notation and sequencing. Since DFB introduced Murray Thom to the Mac Digital Hub, iTunes has become a way of life for him - even the track orders for the Collection were compiled this way. The whole team bought the new 30GB iPods, and can't imagine life without them - although they're still not big enough to hold Murray's collection!

Swimming strongly

Digital Fishbowl has had a unbelievable three years with high end web development its primary focus, but the DFB pair goes into research, online surveying and result collation, working closely with leading research firm Conversa Global on projects for many companies - Microsoft, Xtra, Caltex and Carter Holt Harvey, to name a few. Flexible, the guys have even launched hair products in road shows (Redken and l'Oreal), made DVDs, television soundtracks and multimedia CD ROM presentations - and now they're looking for new challenges.

They both mostly hand-code in BBEdit, and use Macromedia software and Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator for graphics and animation. Joe: "We're really hot on standards-based design and development where possible, making extensive use of CSS. We're really proud of our own site in that regard." Musician James took naturally to coding, and he's also a big fan of Konfabulator, which he's been using to make widgets to bring added value for Mac-based clients: "It's brilliant - combining Javascript and XML, it's so powerful".

'Dream Macs!'

Joe : 17-inch PowerBook with iSight

James : G5 with a cinema display.

James and Joe both reckon the iPod is a sensational device, and can't imagine life without it