But the confetti that floated down at the 2004 the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Gardens didn't go in the garbage. It became a collector's item as soon as it hit the floor. That confetti wasn't the unusual usual bits of red, white and blue paper.

Created by Confoti—a local business on De Anza Boulevard—the confetti included nickel-sized, paper disks printed with 11 unique, high-resolution photos of President George W. Bush, the First Lady and the Dick Cheneys.

The morning after their confetti was dropped at the convention, CEO Corrine Wayshak and her staff at Confoti were amazed to discover 7 pieces for sale for $40 on eBay.

"And we got a lot of press from the Republican Party because we were a dot.com company that had survived the economy's down-turn," she says.

It was just four years ago when Geoff Mitchell, one of the cofounders of Confoti, was planning a birthday party for his wife.

Instead of isolating a display of photos on a board, Mitchell thought of using tiny photos of his wife as decoration.

"The guests went crazy," Wayshak says.

Mitchell had worked as a project manager at Muse, Wayshak's successful design and marketing company. Their clients were Fortune 500 firms like Hewlett Packard and Apple.

Mitchel called Wayshak with the business idea while she was on maternity leave. "I agreed that it sounded good, and I also saw way beyond confetti to other applications," Wayshak says.

Financially, the product was doable both to manufacture and to sell at a reasonable price in the retail market.

She says, with people using digital cameras, no one is getting the traditional 4 by 5 pictures these days.

"We can print pictures with our software that enables consumers and commercial businesses to personalize products at a fraction of the cost of traditional print methods."

Lisa Luban, a program producer for the local ABC television station in Chicago used Confoti confetti at her grandmother's birthday party with pictures spanning the woman's 90 years.

Luban is a photographer, too, and was impressed with the idea when she saw the Confoti confetti used at a friend's 40th birthday party. "They do a great job, and it's so simple to order online," Luban says. "As soon as people see it, they want to order some, too."

Chris Shipley, columnist for DEMOLetter, a popular high-tech newsletter, says custom printing, with its standard setup fees, is traditionally very expensive for short run jobs. "In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find a printer to produce custom, die-cut confetti for under $120," she says. "Confoti can do it for less than $17. And they can do it on lower mid-range color printers."

In addition to customized bags of confetti using digital images for New Year's Eve, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and baby showers, Confoti makes stickers and labels of up to 30 different photos, which can be produced in small numbers. When the pictures are made into stickers, they can be attached anywhere.

And customers can process the entire order online.

Wayshak says, the process is fairly simple. Using digital photos that are scanned onto a CD or into a computer, customers go www.confoti.com and follow the steps to load the photos, crop them and pick colors for the confetti. Out of that operation, the customer gets 3,200 pieces of confetti—800 of them are the 1-inch photos. "You can share up to 30 unique photos, though the average order is seven or eight pictures," Wayshak says.

Customers can mix our high resolution photos with their own in our pre-themed bags." Prices start at $16.95. And some 20 percent of Confoti customers make repeat purchases within 12 months.

Wayshak says businesses are recognizing Confoti's software as a revolutionary way to promote products and brand awareness—a new kind of billboard.

Linda T. Alepin, a partner in the consulting and executive education firm Center For New Futures, used Confoti confetti at USA Today's national Make a Difference Day at Santa Clara University last year to illustrate the conference's purpose of creating innovative projects to benefit communities around the world.

"We had Confoti pictures of people from the communities we were planning to help as a way to help [participants at the conference to] connect with our 'neighbors' from around the world," Alepin says.

And besides also using some of Confoti's generic confetti for Thanksgivings, Alepin made confetti of "new and old" friends for her daughter who is attending law school.

In 2002 San Jose's soccer team, the Earthquakes, began using Confoti confetti to celebrate each goal scored.

Confoti has established partnerships with Kodak's Easy Share system, 1800Flowers and The Wedding Channel. Commercial customers include Anheuser-Busch, HBO, Veuve Clicquot, NBC, Disney and Stanford University.

Corporate promotional and gifting represents a $30 billion market

Countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, France, Japan, and Australia have plans to enable tourists to create postage stamps that include their vacation photos. Confoti's technology, Wayshak says, is the perfect solution for what is estimated to be at least a $20 billion market annually.

Behind the simple computer interface that customers use is a series of processes that Shipley says, "effectively normalize customer-driven product specifications and utilizes a printing process that calibrates and corrects for specific printer variances at the time of output."

"We are doing a lot of prototyping, so it's great to be able to look first hand," says Wayshak. "Otherwise our production is very efficient, and human hands don't touch the product until the end of the process."

Confoti has been awarded four patents for this engineering and has patents pending on what the company calls Massive Virtual Dynamic Adaptive Printing (MV-DAP) and Precision Inversion Raster Image Correction (PIRIC).

Shipley says, "these processes eliminate the work involved in specifying and setting up a print run—work that contains most of the cost in custom printing. The real-time correction also dramatically reduces waste on die-cut paper," says Shipley.

Wayshak has a degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she also studied information design at the Media Lab. From there, she went to Apple Computer and led a product design project.

From Apple, Wayshak formed her own engineering design firm, Muse, Inc., where she provided consumer product design and development.

When Confoti was selected to supply the Bush/Cheney Photo confetti for the final drop at the Republican National Convention in New York, news networks across the nation and world picked up the story. The Office of Vice President Cheney requested additional samples and sent an official letter thanking Confoti for its quality work.

"Being bipartisan, we also printed John Kerry for President confetti that was sold on www.kerrygear.com," Wayshak says. But she says the Bush confetti was more popular.

Papers including the Washington Post, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times have run stories about Confoti. And their products have been ordered from all 50 states, as well as England, France and Australia. CollegeBound Teen Magazine featured Confoti in its spring issue as a great prom idea.

This personalized confetti can leave a lasting impression for some.

When antique appraiser and writer Stephen Yvaska, a San Jose resident, walked into his 50th birthday party, last year, he says, "I noticed the decorations, candles, and after a little while I looked down at the table and said, 'That's my face!' There I was scattered across the tables."

Months before the party, a friend who knew about Confoti had asked Yvaska for pictures of himself that he liked. "I never guessed what they wanted the pictures for. But there I was on those wonderful little disks. It was the last thing I expected to see—my face looking back smiling," he says.

"I wanted to remember the night as a special occasion, so I've scooped up a handful and saved them. But I don't think any have made it to eBay, yet," he says.

For more information about Confoti, call 408.524.8822 or log on to http://www.confoti.com.