The Vook team completed the move to its new Chelsea digs last week – and had a morning meet and greet for the team. It was great to have the whole Vook team together in one space, and a pretty cool space at that. (Who dreamed up the Vook-blue pillars?) New faces in our creative, production and engineering teams. Vook has some big goals for Q3 and Q4 2011, and some really, really cool new eBooks and Apps in the pipe.

Vook’s “mission” in life is to light up the content of the world’s best storytellers.

For us, the concept of a “storyteller” is broad.

The “storytellers” we work with include some of the world’s best authors, publishers, and media companies — where storytelling is at the heart of what they do. We’ve produced new and innovative reading experiences with them, for their diverse audiences. From compelling ideas and philosophies to step-by-step cooking instructions and in-depth analysis of news events, we’ve tried to combine video, images, and a great story, to be something greater than the sum of these parts.

Most recently, we partnered with a major company wanting to tell a different kind of story. As noted in The New York Times today,  Google is offering marketing ideas, in the form of an eBook that we created. Google’s Managing Director of U.S. Sales, Jim Lecinski, wrote Winning the Zero Moment of Truth, which aims to convince marketers — those who might benefit from the tools that Google offers — that consumers will make purchase decisions long before seeing a product on the shelves of the store. We were pleased that Google chose Vook to help tell this story.

In a similar vein, the brands that consumers love have done so because they have consistently and convincingly told the story behind their products. And they’ve done so through various media.

Brands like Coca-Cola have created museums to share their history.

Brands like Moleskine have included an inspirational cards with every product they sell, transforming a notebook into a writing experience.

Brands like Starbucks, whose CEO Howard Schultz’s recent book, Onward, was distributed in every Starbucks store, as a way to recapture Starbucks’ founding spirit.

In the case of Starbucks, what better way to foster a one-on-one, intimate experience that connects consumers with the product they’ve purchased, than through a book all about that company’s values?

It’s not too far a stretch to imagine that other brands could use eBooks as a way to document and tell their story – be it how to make a perfect espresso or the compelling life trajectory of the athletes who use their products, or even simply how other consumers have come to love their products. Whether offered for free or as a paid eBook, there are hundreds of thousands of devotees of these brands – Starbucks, Patagonia, Levi’s – whose fans can’t get enough of the stories these companies tell. The Vooks that we create, as it turns out, are a powerful medium for just that.

Welcome to Vook, Rob Guttman!

Prior to joining Vook, Rob was CTO at Juju, which experienced 10X traffic growth under his leadership.

As vice president of Engineering at Daylife, an online news aggregation and publishing platform, Rob led a team that shipped four products, powering over seventy news and media publisher sites. At the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Rob led a worldwide R&D initiative arming IBM’s business consultants with modeling tools and methods.

In 1998, Rob co-founded Frictionless Commerce, a consumer online comparison shopping platform, based on software agent technologies he invented at MIT’s Media Laboratory — earning him a 2002 MIT Technology Review Top 100 Young Innovators Award (TR100).

Prior to MIT, he developed natural language processing software at Motorola and participated in U.S. Army war games to demonstrate and harden Motorola’s battlefield intelligence technologies.

Rob received a MS in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT in 1998 and a BSE in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1992.

Over the last month, our product and engineering staff have worked an ungodly number of hours on MotherVook 2.0, the next generation of our digital printing press. Bravo to the Vook tech team for delivering MotherVook on time with only a few bugs. We have business requirements for MotherVook 3.0 and the specs are being written. Our goal with 3.0 is the Wordpress of ebooks.

But first, what does MotherVook 2.0 offer? This cloud-based platform offers several important features including file conversion, simple drag-and-drop authoring tools, a quick-and-easy epub and android app creator, a straightforward method for publishing to multiple platforms and a content management system.

The internal Vook creation team will be trained on the new platform on Tuesday and it is being rolled out to partners later this summer.

We have considered renaming the platform, but we all love MotherVook too much.