Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Web/Tech (Page 16 of 21)

MindTouch Wants to Wow With Wikibox at DEMOfall

September 15, 2006 / / 2 Comments

St. Paul-based MindTouch…no, wait, it’s headquartered in San Diego….no, wait, most of its people are in Minnesota. Oh, who cares — they have a whiz-band new wiki box Mindtouchlogo I’d heard they’d be debuting at DEMOfall week after next. Picked that up at the “MinneDemo” event last week, and I blogged at least a mention of them and Aaron Fulkerson in my recap the next day. Gee, going from “Minne” to the full-on Monty demo at the biggest of all demo venues in the universe — all inside of three weeks! These guys have it goin’ on for a little outfit from Minnesota (or is it San Diego?). Here’s an article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press today that kinda lays it all out — or should I say, lays it on thick? [Example: “the next must-have office machine for small to medium-sized businesses — as common as a fax machine”] I’ll be following up on MindTouch soon, pre or during DEMOfall. Now if we can only get ’em to stop calling their wiki box a “managed office server.” [Can you tell these guys are former Microsofties? Not for the use of the second word, but for the lack of any name cachet. End of editorializing…]

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Austrians to Attack DEMOfall!

September 15, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Hey, maybe The Governator will drop by, too? [Becky, could you work on that?] SystemOne, headquartered in Vienna, will be launching its enterprise collaboration platform at the upcoming DEMOfall event. Here’s their one-sentence company description [read with Ahh-nold accent]: “System One helps businesses to ensure lasting success by making optimal use of the knowledge production factor.” Got that? I can hardly wait till their six minutes of fame. Techcrunch reported that SystemOne’s product is a wiki “that gathers your resources as you write.” The writer, Marshall Kirkpatrick, goes on to say: “The real power here is the semantic analysis, the relevance.” Who could not like that, especially any blogger? Trouble is, it’ll be mid-’07 till a version for the little guy is available. They’re starting at the top and dumbing down. Here’s a screencast so you can see how it works. Stand by — I’ll definitely be reporting more on this one from San Diego…

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Kicking Off My DEMOfall Coverage

September 12, 2006 / / 0 Comments

You say the event hasn’t started yet? You’re right, it’s September 25-27. But that doesn’t stop me. I blog pre, during, and after such major conferences that I attend as a press registrant. [See my coverage of DEMO ’06 in February in Phoenix here.] Demofalllogo This is just my first post of what will be many for DEMOfall, and I’m looking forward to it.

So, what’s the buzz on this one as I sit here in Minneapolis, less than two weeks from my flight to San Diego? Well, not much that’s hit my radar so far. The DEMO folks like to keep a lid on things till it’s closer to showtime. [And why would they compete with all the Apple media hype going on right now, anyway (peaking today)?] These folks do know how to build the buzz quite well as they approach their conference dates, however, to hype both attendance and media coverage — which is considerable.

Coolest thing I’ve heard so far is the Widgetbox Competition, sponsored by one of the presenting companies at DEMOfall, one of about 70 chosen from hundreds of hopefuls. Demo06widephoto Haven’t seen the official list of all the presenting companies yet from the DEMO PR folks (and it may actually still be getting finalized). But if you search on “DEMOfall 2006,” you’ll see some companies are already promoting their selection to pitch at this event — names such as 4INFO, Simple Star, Add Me, MyPW, Headplay, Koral, Scrapblog, Mvox, and SiteKreator, to name a few.

How does DEMO select companies? Check out this recent series of podcasts from the show’s producer.

Watch this space for much more soon…

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MinneDemo Rocked, But Format Needs Help

September 6, 2006 / / 1 Comment

The first one last night was a big success turnout.pngse. The registration list was close to a hundred. Heck, even a couple girls signed on towards the end! It maxed out the room, basically shoulder-to shoulder. No room for chairs. The schmoozing was great, as was the food (thanks to the sponsors), and it was fun running into old friends — like Dan Grigsby (one of the event organizers), Justin Chapweske and Kim Garretson of SwarmCast [watch for news soon on that one], serial entrepreneur Tom Kieffer [insert multiple company names here], Derek Peterson of very stealthy college-demographic site Younison.com, crack startup attorneys John Roberts and Harold Slawik….and meeting some new friends, like our local indefatigable Garrick Van Buren of the great MNteractive blog…Jeff Pester, founder of Urban Radar [interesting dude!]…Aaron Fulkerson, co-founder of Mindtouch.com [and “VP of encouragement”], and Tom O’Neill, who manages development at a very interesting, fast-growing web apps firm called SierraBravo in Bloomington [and he surfs, too! yeah, with a name like O’Neill, I guess I coulda figured.. 🙂 ]

But the format of the meeting, quite frankly, sucked. Not for socializing, but for demos — seeing them or giving them. Way too noisy, and a bad sound system to boot. Nice room, trendy Uptown location [hey, no one got shot!], but not a room for this. That’s right, MinneDemo was such a success, it’s already outgrown the place after one meeting! Unless you were way up in front, it was very difficult to hear — especially for us older, hearing-challenged guys — let alone see. Too many heads and backs in the way. Even an eight-inch stage woulda helped… Lucky for Robert Metcalf of Flyspy that he was first, because the noise only increased in direct proportion to the brewskis being consumed…

But, hey, it was a good time! And a great way to get the local IT and Internet startup community together. We all benefit from stuff like this. Many thanks to the co-organizers, Dan Grigsby and Luke Franci, and everyone who contributed. I predict the next one will be even bigger…

p.s. I woulda taken some pix, but I washed my RAZR in my jeans over the weekend. Damn things, so small you forget you have ’em! A new battery and she worked fine, but the camera screen was still foggy (better today). My pix woulda looked like underwater shots, so I skipped it. 🙂

‘How to Make a Furby Stop Buzzing’

September 3, 2006 / / 2 Comments

This is the flat-out funniest search term I’ve seen to date that brings up my blog in Google’s search results — actually, I’m fourth on the list (out of 14,700), which was complete news to me. Goes to show you search algorithms still have a long way to go, I guess. How do I find such things, you ask? (I don’t even own a Furby, or know anyone who does.) Here’s how: in the traffic stats provided by my blog hoster, Typepad, I can see referring sites that bring people to my blog page — and that includes searches people do at Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, and other such sites. But the interesting thing is that I get to see the search term they used. These terms have been all over the map, but I think this is the first one that actually made me laugh out loud… So, how in the world does my blog come up on such a strange search request? I certainly don’t have a “Toys” category. Well, let me explain. First, here’s a screen-grab of part of the search-results page. Furbysearchpage

I attended a technology conference early this year called Demo, and I blogged a lot about that event. Some 70 new companies and products were debuted there, one of which was the “Pleo,” which was from the same guy who invented the “Furby.” In the particular post where I mentioned the Pleo and the Furby, I also had used the term “buzz” — meaning the media and blog coverage that Demo creates. All that must have really been confusing to this little kid (I assume) who was dutifully slogging through all these search results trying to get the damn toy to shut up! 🙂

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