When air force officer Joel Halse was sitting in the back seat of a fighter jet speeding straight toward the Atlantic Ocean faster than the speed of sound, he wasn’t thinking of opening up his own website development company.

Ian Miller, a combat-systems engineer stationed in Halifax, had already been contemplating the idea when he could spare a moment from his naval duties.

It wasn’t until they were both home on leave and were attending the same social functions that conversations turned toward a possible business partnership.

During a Christmas gathering in 2003, the two military men sat at a kitchen table pondering the future.

“He mentioned ‘someday I’m going to be really rich and I’m going to do it by creating something on the Internet,’” Halse recalls. “That’s where the action started. I’m a doer. From there we started talking about a plan.”

OpenEdit had been conceived.

Halse was intrigued by the idea, but acknowledged millions of people with the same idea but without the desire result. He wanted to know could they make their dreams a reality. So they kept talking it out.

Although they’d known each other since the first challenging days at the Royal Military College in Kingston and were members of the same squadron throughout university, they hadn’t kept in close contact.

“We went different ways,” says Halse. “We’re very different people. But we kept in touch and were there together at important life events like marriages and kids.”

Their lives have since converged. The partners now live less than two kilometres apart. They got married at similar times and their kids are about the same age. But in those early days, they worked on their business long distance.

“Good ideas move fast,” says Halse.

Within three years, he was ready to give up the relative security of his first career.

“The worst-case scenario was I’ll get a good-paying job,” he smiles. “I’ll have to be like everyone else and have to go get a job. Worse: I’ll have to leave my house and go to work. Two years later, I still don’t.”

Instead, he relishes his home office and the flexibility in his lifestyle.

“I chose freedom,” he says seriously of leaving the military.

In the high-tech venture that is OpenEdit, Halse’s role is sales. He does this by developing relationships and caring about his clients.

“People like to deal with people and I like people,” he says simply. “Everything else takes care of itself. If I didn’t really think we are able to help people with really frustrating problems, I would do something else.”

Miller is the computer whiz of the operation.

OpenEdit is a company and a software program. The program which “does more than any one client would ever use,” is available free by clicking the link provided.

The site the company developed for the 2008 Ontario Winter Games, for example, included online athlete registration, bilingual, multiple site administrators and event calendars.

“It was the real time updating of information throughout the games that I found really interesting. In addition to posting competition results in real time, we also had a team of 13-plus photographers taking photos everyday and uploading them into an image gallery at night (10,000 photos in four days). Each day, these photos were made available for viewing and purchase from the website.

"The trick is not getting the photos online, but getting each photo properly catalogued and indexed so you don’t have to surf through 10,000 photos to find the ones you are looking for. As well, the photographers know relatively little about the web so the interface needs to be usable by both the end user (athlete’s parent for example) as well as the person inputting the pictures each day.”

The tools to create such a site, which were six or seven years in the making, are free for the taking from OpenEdit’s website.

“You can download the software, but it’s the people,” Halse says. “We provide a full support system to your technology. Our six developers are intimately aware of every minute detail of the software.

Now, each client’s unique installation is customized for its own individual use.

An unusual feature is the ability to edit the content online from any browser anywhere. The company recognizes the growing need to update and change websites frequently, and the growing desire to make at least some of those changes in-house.

“Reducing the costs associated with site maintenance while increasing the accuracy and relevancy of their information, is a significant advantage,” according to company literature.

Consequently, the content-management system is very user-friendly, Halse explains. With the OpenEdit structure, databases become obsolete in favour of systems already familiar to users.

“There is no need for a database, because it’s all file driven,” he adds. “Managing massive amounts of digital assets (photos, files, pdfs, etc.) and making them available via the web (internal or external) to an organization is OpenEdit’s real strength. We have clients such as StateFarm, Pindar, and World Wrestling Entertainment that are managing hundreds of thousands of assets across multiple continents.”

Failure to provide service is not an option.

“It’s not just the quantity of assets but the critical nature of the systems that make these projects complex,” he explains. “One day of downtime leaves hundreds of designers unable to create the media that produces millions in revenue. Simply put, we can not have these production systems not working during working hours. Ever.”