FAQ about Katherine's company

It's not there. That's certainly a popular application of CD-ROM technology, but a bit beyond the scope of my site, which is intended as an introduction to the technology & industry (and the potential for applications.) That kind of application development can't very well be "price listed" since each one would have to be individually designed, and requires a consultation to determine the requirements, costs, etc. They are generally done on a bid/quote basis, although it could be useful to someone new to the field to have a 3rd party consultant to help find a good designer and work through the requirements phase if one isn't sure about appropriate costs or what is possible to do with the technology. A lot more than just CD technology goes into an electronic catalog -- there's a lot of multimedia design issues, platform-specific questions, search & retrieval or database things, distribution and marketing decisions, and so on.

If you're interested for your own business, I can refer you to someone with a lot of experience in creating CD-ROM based catalogs, but I don't have much experience with it myself. Compact Disc is ultimately just a storage & delivery medium for many, many kinds of applications, of which electronic catalogs are just one -- certainly one of the most popular and useful, though. I'm primarily a technologist, and only secondarily a disc publisher. (Kind of different from what I'd originally planned, but life is like that sometimes, especially in a field that is so new that nobody really knew what to expect going in.)

Is there a newbie hand-holding type of tutorial anywhere on your site? We looked, but much of what we found seems industry-specific as opposed to client-oriented.

Well, not really. It just depends on what kind of newbie you are. There's a subsite called "Newbies' Corner" that discusses multimedia applications, particularly presentation and graphics development, written by a contributor. It's not really CD-specific, but it is interesting to lots of people and I've had fun working with the author. One of the problems with CD-ROM and CD-R especially is that there are so many possibile applications and technical issues, it's difficult to know where to start. I've been somewhat industry-specific, and to a large degree address engineering problems since that's my area of specialty. CD-R media is a particular interest of mine -- I've got articles about everything from pricing and availability to testing and test methods, and I work on an ANSI committee to help write testing procedures, etc. It may not seem very pertinent to an application developer, until she tries to find info about why a specific CD-R disc doesn't work. Then my site is one of the few places in the world that addresses this rather fundamental question. There are lots of other people who write about how to develop software applications, but I'm in a niche that's pretty thinly populated.

I appreciate your taking the time to go through my site, and for your interest and comments. If there's something I can do to help you in this area, I'd be very happy to try. It's quite interesting to see what other women are doing on the Web & in business, and I enjoyed looking through the rest of your site.

Warm regards,
Kathy