I remember the day we came up with the name for our new application.  It was after quite a few rounds of me asking our developer “Well, what exactly does it do?  Can you sum it up in 20 words or less?”.  He would shake his head slowly and suggest that summarizing such things lived in the land of marketing, my land.

After a particularly jargon-esque day of writing legalese type documents and official notifications, I was faced with the imminent need to begin calling it something.  It wasn’t quite a flyer builder, because along with sales flyers we’d seen uses for realtors who wanted to do dynamic floorplans, uses for bands or musicians that wanted interactive gig posters and for developers who wanted interactive lot maps.  In a moment of clarity, I said “well, it’s a Dynamic Content Generator for Displaying Multimedia Content”.

But, that’s much too long, and probably wouldn’t fit on the business cards.  Several moments later, Erik (our senior developer who maintains he’s not a marketing prodigy, I have my suspicions…) comes out and says “Let’s call it Adam”.

Adam stands for Advanced Dynamic Application for creating Multimedia content.  You can check him out in glorious action at www.adamsapp.com (the domain was Erik’s idea too. When he’s on a roll, he’s on a roll).

Adam converts PDF documents into dynamic web pages.  You’ll start by uploading a PDF or image file (Adam is a hosted solution) to a personalized workspace.  There’s a drag and drop feature to add hotspots to your document, which you can reshape to fit specific areas.  Each hotspot is associated with a content field where you can add text, images, HTML and a fair sized buffet of flash objects.

Adam comes with three basic stylesheets by default so you can change the look and feel of your web document.  If you’re a CSS practitioner, you can add as many new stylesheets as you want – so the styles are virtually limitless.

It’s important to us that Adam plays well with others in the sandbox, so we’ve worked hard to make sure he could be used for all sorts of purposes (like band posters online, sales flyers, even real estate walkthroughs.)

Supported Content Providers in Action

And the best thing (we feel) about Adam is that he’s a do it yourself option.  You have complete creative control over your materials – and it’s simple enough that almost anyone can use it.

Peep the official Adam Forum for a full feature list and check out the blog for announcements as well for upcoming features and communication from the creators of Adam.  You can also follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/HostingNation

Adam is still quite young and has a lot of growing to do.  That’s why we’ve made a free, ad-supported version to play around with while Adam is in early stages of development.  Wanna see?  That’s cool, sign up for an account with Adam now.

Epilogue: Ever since we named Adam, I haven’t been able to get the theme song for the 60’s cartoon Atom Ant out of my head – which is where the title of this post comes from.  Following the strange path in my head, it started as Adam, then Adam’s App, then Adam Ant (new wave singer from the late 70’s and early 80’s), then Atom Ant.  If you happen to be (like me) someone who appreciates a bit of nostalgia with their morning coffee, here’s the intro for the Atom Ant show.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIk11Qu_jtk