Last night I met with Kris Krüg at The Irish Heather Pub, where, over a few beers and burgers dressed with Guinness cheese, I picked his brain. Kris is a well-known Vancouver-based fashion photographer, author and technologist. In 2004 he co-founded Bryght, a company that specializes in online community building and uses Drupal, a free and highly customizable open-source content management platform used for building websites.

Long-time partner Raincity Studios acquired Bryght in a deal that was announced this November. Together, the companies offer custom websites and applications, community development and hosting, as well as infrastructure services. With a new agency in Shanghai and clients like Warner Bros. and Spin Magazine, Raincity/Bryght are a web 2.0 force to be reckoned with.

Business, open-source technology and life; here are some of the key points from our discussion.

How does the merger of Raincity and Bryght change what you guys are capable of offering your customers?

Raincity and Bryght have been close partners for three years, working both together and independently from one another on a wide variety of projects. By joining forces and sharing resources, we now have the ability to take on much larger jobs for more demanding clients. Together, Raincity and Bryght form the first end-to-end open-source/Drupal consultancy. From ideas and strategy to architecture, design and development, we can now manage projects every step of the way.

You guys are involved in lots of community-oriented activities such as lectures, developer meet-ups and conferences. How has giving back to the community benefited your business?

Hosting events has helped us raise our profile and establish ourselves as thought leaders and open-source experts both locally and globally. Our events expose new ideas and improved ways of doing things from within the open-source community, benefiting not only us, but also everyone in attendance. Through facilitating community-oriented experiences where like-minded people can exchange and share ideas, we have learned new ways to better our processes, improve employee-hiring practices and have discovered new contractors to work with. Our new agency in Shanghai, led by Robert Scales, also operates the same way. In fact, tonight is the first Raincity/Bryght developers’ meet-up in our new location.

So why is expanding into Asia beneficial to you guys?

Well, Asia has lots of PHP developers but very few people that are working with Drupal and open-source technologies. By expanding into Asia, we have the ability to educate a booming global economy on open-source products, and harvest new talent. The more developers we can get using Drupal, the more code becomes available for the community as a whole to utilize and further develop upon.

Tell us a little bit more about Bryght’s Free The Net initiative.

Free The Net is a grassroots and somewhat philanthropic movement aimed at providing people with free wireless Internet access one neighborhood at a time. It uses mesh Meraki routers to free-up unused bandwidth from those that are participating in the project to create a Wi-Fi signal that anyone in the neighborhood can utilize. It’s about making the Internet accessible the same way any other public utility, like water would be.

What are some web-based trends that companies may not be aware of, but should be?

Open-source technologies; separation of the internet from the computer and its integration with the hand-held device; Google’s new open-social development platform; and Google’s Andromeda, their answer to the iPhone.