Okay, I’m an Aussie, and a Samba fan, too…what can I say? Catch this geeky piece from ZDNet Australia. You have to love this part: “The hall was packed for one of Australia’s homegrown heroes,” wrote Brisbane-based Joshua Wulf. “The Vampire migration tool (employed to shift users from Windows to Samba) now has ‘longer fangs’ and can take over an Active Directory domain.” Hey, there’s a lot happening down there in Oz….
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Or what comes *after* search? Will there be a next big thing soon, or will we just have to settle for incremental improvements in what we have? With all the new wrinkles of Web 2.0 and social networking, like tagging, are we getting anywhere in improving the online experience? In a Wall Street Journal piece today, I note that not enough people are tagging yet for it to be “worth their while” — because, they say, even the most popular tagging sites such as Del.icio.us and Wink.com and Shadows.com get less than 1% of Google’s monthly traffic. It’s mostly geeks so far. Then there’s the growing problem of people abusing the whole system with tag spamming.
How big a need is there for better search? According to Factiva (a Dow Jones and Reuters company), “the cost of not finding relevant information is staggering.” More than half of all web searches are not successful, they say. They even cite a study by Find/SVP that claims searching but not finding relevant information costs U.S. firms $31 billion in wasted time every year! (Granted, they’re in competition with free search, trying to sell you proprietary search technology.) Another figure comes from the Pew Internet & American Life Project: it says that only 17% of Internet users always get what they’re looking for from an online search engine — meaning 83% don’t! Whatever figure you care to believe, the need is huge. And many companies are at work on that “next big thing” in search (or beyond search) — including a lot of startups you haven’t even heard of yet. [See my previous post about some I’ll be reporting on soon.] There are companies focused on search as it relates to the entire, public world wide web, and others on coming up with better technology for searching private data bases, such as those owned by enterprises or governments. Take, for example, your company’s email store, or other types of massive, textual, unstructured databases. Text analysis or linguistics analysis technology is one interesting area I’m following. More soon.
Two weeks and counting till February 6 when I’ll be arriving in Phoenix to begin reporting on the Demo ’06 conference. Can’t wait. Suffice it to say any conference that first brought to the limelight such technologies as TiVo, Java, VMware, Salesforce.com, and Movable Type is worth your attention. And, as the countdown shortens, the anticipation grows… What new companies will we first learn about at this one? What technology will we look back on in, say, five years and think, “Oh, yeah, I was there at Demo in 2006, when they first debuted that one.”? Demo is the grand-daddy tech event of them all, as Shel Israel tells us in this Conferenza post. And they should know, having reported on more of them than anyone.
Demo producer Chris Shipley said in her New Year’s DEMOletter blog post that 2006 would be The Year of Collaboration. That is so right on in my book. What she means, the part that struck me the most, is this: “People working individually and collaboratively are the value-add in a network of intelligent machines and massive data stores.” And she goes on in a followup blog post to clarify: “People, not tools, will drive 2006.” With that in mind, all the more reason to get to an event like this — to experience the things you can only get face-to-face…
There will be close to 70 company presentations. The ones I’m especially looking forward to will be in these sessions (with descriptions from the Demo site):
> The Search Is On – “With Google stock marching toward $500 per share, there’s no question that search technology is at the heart of big business. It’s no wonder, then, that “dozens of startups are wading into the waters of search. . . in search of more relevant, computationally-derived results across a range of data types.”
> It’s All Relevant – “As information proliferates – in databases, in email inboxes, on giant local and networked data stores – identifying, retrieving, analyzing and using that data becomes exponentially more difficult. Whether tackling gargantuan data stores or the every-day parade of messages, these companies are finding relevance in the haystacks of information that threaten to overwhelm us.”
I’m especially liking that last one, since I’ve been researching and writing about that topic lately…
Watch for more from me as Demo approaches, as I’m sure you’ll see from other bloggers who’ll also be reporting live from the event. Some have already started to post. Press attendance will be awesome: how’s WSJ’s Walt Mossberg and Forbes’ Quentin Hardy for starters?
Time again, friends, to get away from tech for a while. Too much tech makes Jack a dull boy… And I can’t think of a better way to do it than to help spread the word about a great new web site Jim Moriarty and crew just launched at The Surfrider Foundation. Talk about setting a new bar for the .org world! But, then, I knew Jim would make good things happen when he took the helm as Executive Director several months ago, with his background as a tech and Internet startup exec, combined with his love of surfing. The man found his dream job, and ya gotta love that — one that could benefit greatly from both his leadership skills and his tech 
experience. This is no small organization Jim heads: 50,000 members and 63 chapters worldwide. More about the organization is here (including a photo of Jim with board). Not only is the new site a visual delight, but so much more excellent content and functionality was added, including the new wrinkle Jim immediately added when he came on board (so to speak): a blog! And he describes more about the all-new web site in this blog post. I’m impressed! As a long-standing, card-carrying member, I say this new site takes the lead in bringing non-profit, volunteer activism into the 21st Century. Congrats and mega-kudos to you, Jim, and everyone at the Surfrider Foundation (located in my favorite coastal town of San Clemente, CA).
And if this isn’t enough to prove that surfing and tech really do mix…
Here’s more! Check out this great story from the LA Times: The Suits Are All Wet at These Board Meetings (requires free registration). You have to love the subhead, too: “Forget golf, biotech executives and scientists go surfing to network and strike deals.”
Caught a great panel on January 12 on the topic of Retail Innovation. Especially wanted to hear Kal Patel, Best Buy’s EVP of strategy, a guy I’d heard great things about. Those folks were right, and I’m happy I got a chance to chat with Kal afterwards. Here’s a look at what he’s about, from a conference called Unlocking Innovation held last September in Minneapolis. In his presentation last week, Kal said ” ‘One-Minute Innovation’ is a book a lot of our employees are writing.” Though a survey found 80% of BBY’s employees think they’re innovating enough, the other 20% think not. My sense is Kal’s focusing on the latter (but probably trying simultaneously to change the thinking of the former). He said constant disruption is the goal at Best Buy, “always playing, experimenting.” Here’s another blogger’s take at what they call “bottom-up innovation” at Best Buy. Kal is definitely driving a lot of energy at this retail powerhouse, and one his favorite things to talk about these days is the Wiki they set up for their employees — one of the first major companies to do so. Any employee can set up a web page. Turns out the guy who championed it was Robert Stephens, the founder of Best Buy’s Geek Squad unit. It’s still in the early, experimental stage, another BBY manager told me, but employees are getting into it. One set up an online “Best Buy Acronym Dictionary,” which will surely help new employees get up to speed! (What big company couldn’t use that?) The entire panel discussion was fascinating. I also met the moderator, Mary Meehan, a co-founder of locally based trend-watcher Iconoculture, and Chuck Mooty, the CEO of one of the better known brand icons in these parts, Dairy Queen. Hey, now I’m only one apart from Warren Buffet!
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