Aug. 30--Jason Vazzano and Kurt Steckling took more than a passing interest in last fall's presidential election, but politics wasn't the draw.

The two founding partners of Vectorform, a Royal Oak technology company, had designed the interactive touch-screen electoral map of the United States used by NBC News political reporter Chuck Todd. That interactive touch screen and similar ones used on other networks became a staple of political coverage last year.

"We were actually on set within feet the first time this went live," Vazzano said. "All the hard work, we were just praying that it doesn't crash or the power doesn't go out or something."

Todd "had about three minutes of training on this application" before he first used it on the air, Vazzano added. "Which I guess is a testament to our usability and his on-air experience."

Founded in November 1999, Vectorform has grown from just the two partners to almost 100 employees. The firm operates offices in Seattle, New York, Berlin and Hyderabad, India. Clients include Microsoft, Chrysler, BMW and Tata Motors. Vectorform also designs popular applications for Apple's iPhone.

One of those iPhone apps, Surface DJ, allows users to mix their own music from a variety of supplied sounds. Vectorform also just released an iPhone app called MeetMe, which allows two people to set up a meeting at a mutually convenient site.

Meanwhile, an interactive fan site for the Indian Premier League cricket association has been downloaded nearly half a million times.

"It's something that really shows you how, watching sports, the Web could really supplant television," Steckling said. "You can do instant replays on your own time, do a deep zoom into a portion of a play to see if the person was out or safe. It was designed to be rich, almost TV-like, but with the power of the Internet."

Vectorform specializes in creating multi-touch interfaces that become the first in their industry. On a normal desktop computer, the user clicks a mouse one task at a time. In a multi-touch interface, one or more users can touch the screen at the same time to send multiple commands simultaneously.

Multi-touch is essential for certain gaming applications and for equipment like the iPhone and Microsoft's tabletop Surface display.

The company has earned a reputation for delivering solutions under what Vazzano calls "extreme deadline, can't-be-done type scenarios." Last summer, Chrysler ordered an interactive dashboard display for the company's electric vehicle concept car to be shown at the 2009 North American International Auto Show. The job normally would take a year, but Chrysler gave Vectorform two months.

"The criteria was, 'Reporters are going to be in this vehicle,' " Steckling said. "It can't just be a fake simulation of a dashboard. It actually has to be a full-functioning system. You turn the heat on, the heat's got to work. The GPS has got to work. ... It was really quite a challenge."

Now 32, the partners met at Brother Rice High School and got together after attending different colleges. They started the business in a loft unit in a downtown Detroit office building on Woodward Avenue before moving to Royal Oak.

Those current offices are anything but plush, featuring bare walls and the most basic office furniture.

"We invest a lot of our money in our technology and our people," Vazzano said. "Granite countertops that you see in some other agencies, that's really of no interest to us."

Contact JOHN GALLAGHER: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com

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