What's better than a basket full of kittens? One puppy. That's right; just one. Not a litter. No, that's too much love and awesomeness for anyone to contain. Just one cute, adorable, fuzzy puppy.

*cough* cats suck *cough*

Fabric recently finished designing and developing a new beta site for Dogasaur, a social site aimed at helping dog lovers improve their dogs' lives.

We started with a few simple goals: create a site that placed the best, most pertinent information on dog products, services and health at dog lovers fingertips; give dog owners a place to rate and review these things; and develop a home for canine experts to get their information out and available.

But, we quickly found in our discovery phase that ratings and reviews just weren't enough. Dogasaur needed a place for dog lovers to express themselves, to add their own personality (and their dogs' personalities) to their profiles. And, not only just dog lovers but the businesses serving them. We discussed options with the client and out new profile layouts were born.

We've had a ton of fun creating Dogasaur with our client and we're not finished yet. On the horizon: bigger and better tools for businesses to reach (and help) the Dogasaur audience; videos, pictures and dog breed information; more robust interaction tools with dog shelters, rescues and charity organizations; and other social tools to engage our user base.

One puppy!

Well, not entirely. But we built this web app that makes it easy to identify interactions between drugs and supplements you are taking. It's pretty cool. This is one of many small companies with good ideas we've worked with over the past few years.

Yesterday, someone asked me why we enjoy working with small companies and startups like this. “They have no money” he said. “Big brands have cash - why don't you work with them?”

Of course, we do work with big brands. They are nice. Sometimes. The problem is that they seldom dare to innovate. You bring them ideas. They have meetings. You bring them more ideas. More meetings. Eventually, they decide that they want to water-down the best idea - making it a shitty one. Not very innovative. Just playing it safe.

If you work in interactive, web, or mobile and you want to do something cool and innovative - you have to work with startups. The only way to get better is to break old models apart, innovate, and lead. Who does that better than startups?