Shelf Luv, inspired by Google Instant is an application created for the love of books where one can instantly search Amazon's bookstore. It is a beautifully presented simple instant search application that can pleasantly surprise you with its suggestions.

Pek Pongpaet, developer behind ShelfLuv has won himself an award at Hackathon Contest for creating the best application in the contest which was held in Sync TechCenter, Chicago. He has been very kind to spare some time to answers some of our curious questions. Read further to learn more about this talented designer and developer.




Tell us all about yourself.

My name is Pek Pongpaet, and I'm a designer/developer in Chicago. Currently I serve as the VP of Technology and Product for SpotOn Inc, a social media software as a service company. I love to blog and speak, mainly sharing my experiences as an entrepreneur/product designer/developer at various conferences and universities.

By training I was a programmer, but I was introduced to the wonderful world of user experience and it really opened my eyes. The impact of the design of the product can have a profound effect on people. I started learning more about that field and shifted my focus from pure development to more front facing work. I used to work in the research division at Accenture Technology Labs in the Human Computer Interaction group. After that I went to Roundarch, a strategy/technology consulting company headquartered in Chicago. There we had a really big focus on design and user experience which appealed to me. Some of the clients that I got to work on include US Air Force, Nokia, Tesla Motors, Herff Jones, and Alinea.

Idolize is a strong word, but my heroes include Richard Branson from Virgin, Sam Walton from Walmart, Steve Jobs from Apple, Markus Frind from Plenty Of Fish, Tony Hsieh from Zappos, Max Levchin from Paypal, Jason Fried from 37signals, Steve Huffman from Reddit, the list goes on and on. Basically the people I look up to are self made entrepreneurs who started something and became successful at it because they created something of immense value. They also had a very strong focus on the design of their products and valued customer experience.

I came up with ShelfLuv because I really wanted a beautiful, simple, clean way to search for books. I've had the idea for a book search interface in the form of a bookshelf for a while now, but never got around to it. The inspiration of the design has come from apps that had a strong physical look to it. These include Delicious Library, Shelfari, the Classics iPod app, and more recently iBooks. When Google came out with Google instant, and shortly after, a Stanford student released Youtube instant, I immediately had the idea of marrying my bookshelf search with instant to capitalize on the instant craze.

My experience while developing ShelfLuv was a bit frantic since the app was developed for the midVentures Hackathon. I was the only person on my team. Usually the best way to do hackathons is to have at least 2 team members, one to focus on the building and the other to focus on the design. I tried to limit what the app did because of the time frame and tried to focus on really good visuals and user experience. The app itself is quite simple. You can do instant search and view a book you click on in slightly more detail. However there's a lot of little things going on. Each book had a visual indicator whether it was a paperback, hardcover or Kindle edition. You could sort the books and they would fly to the new locations. It's the little things that count sometimes.

My favorite books are generally biographies or autobiographies of successful entrepreneurs. Some of my favorite are: The Dream by Gurbaksh Chahal, Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston, and Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson.

My favorite websites include Dribbble, Fast Company, WebResources Depot, Inc.com, American Express Open Forum, Harvard Business, Mixergy, and This Week In Startups.

My favorite destinations include Vancouver, Italy, and Thailand. As for food, I pretty much like everything: Thai, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian and Greek.

BizTome is an iPad app of inspiring business quotes presented in a beautiful leather journal look. You can search for quotes by topic or author. It won Best Entertainment App for the Chicago iPadDevCamp Hackathon. I know, I'm a bit of a hackathon junkie. I love inspiring quotes that relate to entrepreneurship or business and have been collecting them for a while. This app is really the embodiment of those quotes that I have been collecting over the years.

We would love to know your favorite quotation.

I have so many favorite quotes, so this is a tough one. However if I had to pick one, one that resonates with me and reflects my work ethic:

"The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I've been doing wushu which is a style of Chinese martial arts for over 12 years now. It's something that I was very passionate about. During the peak of my wushu days I was training 3 hours a day 7 days a week. In 2003, I competed in Beijing at an international tournament and won silver and bronze for my 2 events. I got selected to perform motion capture for the Mortal Kombat video games which I did for 6 titles. I've also done various modeling and photo shoots that involve me doing flying kicks and other martial arts moves.

If you wouldn't become product designer and developer, what do you reckon you would have been doing?

If I was independently wealthy I would probably be doing wushu and picking up other martial arts. Actually I would divide my time between that and coming up with more products and apps because it's so fun. I really enjoy the process of creating a product from just the idea and seeing it come to life and having people use it.

This advice and quote comes from Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari.

"The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer."

Thank you for the wonderful interview Pek, we wish you all the success in the future.