College of Engineering Magazine- Fall 2000

The COLOR of the Web

By Taylor McNeill

Fluffy. It's not a word often used to describe engineers. Just ask computer engineering major Peter Bernard ('88), now vice president for products and marketing at E-Color, a San Francisco dot-com. When the company was going for venture capital financing, Bernard reports, "an investor said, 'You have this technical background, how are you going to build brand and all this other marketing stuff? You don't seem very fluffy.' I told him I'd hired some very fluffy people."

True to that investor's suspicion, Bernard is anything but fluffy, despite his marketing duties. When he talks about his time at Phoenix Technologies in the nineties, working in Asia with notebook manufacturers to get the firm's chips integrated into the computers, he doesn't mince words. "I came to the conclusion that our products were really crappy. So I kept saying we should have this feature, it should do that, and so on," he says. Eventually he took over responsibility for managing development of the firm's products.

And take his attitude toward rivals: "When I was at Phoenix, we had some severe competitors. We always tried to out-innovate the competition, and get them to chase us. Being chased is a good thing."

After eventually heading up an embedded-technology group at Phoenix that he thought didn't get enough support from headquarters, he joined friends at E-Color, then called Sonontech. The company sold color software to monitor manufacturers, "to get screen-to-printer color matching." The growth of the Web sparked another idea: color matching for the Web. "Getting the Web viewer to see what the Web author was trying to have them see was the goal," he says. "The color science part was really interesting, because it combined software engineering with math, plus a lot of psycho-perceptual issues." Now Bernard is responsible for project management, everything from product definition and features to the schedules and pricing-not to mention marketing, which he also oversaw at Phoenix Technologies.

E-Color helps businesses have Web screen colors closely match their product colors. For now the firm is focusing on the apparel, home, and beauty markets, with customers such as Bloomingdale's. To get "True Internet Color," as the firm touts its service, Web viewers go through a short, one-time set-up to calibrate their computers for E-Color's system. Then, anytime they visit a Web site using E-Color's service, color-corrected images are sent directly from E-Color's servers, while the rest of the Web page comes direct from the merchant. "All the heavy lifting-image serving and color correcting-is done on our servers," Bernard says. E-Color customers pay based on monthly traffic.

Bernard's training as an engineer clearly helps these days-even if he isn't exactly writing code anymore. "I still use the engineering a lot, in product roadmap and review meetings, and sometimes when talking with customers. When we get into really technical discussions, I can pretty much handle it myself, which is very helpful." And that fluffy marketing stuff that his engineering degree didn't prepare him for? The lesson is simple: engineers don't need to be fluffy, as long as they have the right people working for them.