Rik Logtenburg has been an Internet software developer since 1995, primarily as a designer and e-business consultant. Rik started Yellowseed in 2003 to meet the growing demand for web development services from small businesses and social entrepreneurs. When the chief is not working, he's listening to political podcasts, rock-climbing or swimming in the lake.
Here is Yellowseed’s story in pointform as told by founder Rik Logtenburg:

In 1995, while still at the University of Western Ontario, I started one of Canada's first web design companies. A few years later I cofounded MyTravelGuide.com, an Internet travel portal, that was later acquired by Priceline.com. I also cofounded Gyos.ca, an online classified system for small cities and towns.

I started Yellowseed in Vancouver in 2001 with the goal of offering high-quality services to small businesses and entrepreneurs. After working in Vancouver I visited Nelson, fell in love with the area, and decided to move to here

Yellowseed specializes in 3 areas: branding and design, programming and development, and social media consulting.

To help us keep up with growing demand for our programming services and to deal with a shortage of skilled programmers, I went to India to set up a development office. After advertising in the Times of India, I received hundreds of resumes, interviewed scores of engineers and then found my ideal programmer, Balakrishnan Sumasundaram. I encouraged Bala to move from Bangalore back to his hometown of Tiruvanamalai, in the southern province of Tamil Nadu, where we set up our office.

Bala and I became close friends and together we set up our office near the holy mountain of Arunchala. We hired the rest of our team and set up our systems and procedures for daily communication between Nelson and India. After coming back to Nelson, Bala and I are as close as ever. We work in close collaboration and through chat, video conferencing, project management tools, automated help desk system, and voice conferencing we work on software development projects and website development. 

Our team in India is now 6 people. In Nelson, there are two of us fulltime and we have a few contractors who work with us on overflow projects.

In addition to web design, my speciality is in social media strategies and web marketing. 

For the last 3 years, I have been teaching entrepreneurs how to harness the Internet to grow their business and have been giving speeches to businesses and non-profits about how to adapt to the changing online environment.