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

Tag: collaboration (Page 3 of 4)

Defrag 2: Social Intelligence Panel

Jerry Michalski moderated a panel that was organized at the last minute when Clay Shirky couldn’t make it. He did an excellent job, as did the panelists. They were J.P. Rangaswami, CIO of BT Global Services; Joshua Schachter, founder of Del.icio.us (now Yahoo); and J.B. Holston, CEO of Newsgator. J.B. said an ‘aha’ moment for him was discovering that people interact with automated systems in much the same manner they interact with people, and the rules he found were much the same as editors use to figure out how to interact with their audience. He said a challenge for social apps in the enterprise is how to get people to open up. "How do we cache information from retiring employees, people who didn’t talk much?" The data in their online profiles is hardly enough.

J.P. said he’s learning a lot about online communities at BT. One thing is that people "will often gang up on those trying to game the system." But, he said, "you don’t want to try to stop the kind of collaboration that takes place in the real world" — whatever that may be — the implication being that there are no rules there.

Michalski chimed in that social networks are "really a different way of being in the world," and "what’s doing in the world of the enterprise?" J.P. says he wants his people to focus on the customer benefit, and be candid — "Make a video of what you’re doing and share it," noting that kids today are more comfortable with doing this, being candid and instantaneous.  Michalski suggested that the value now is exposing the assets.  Joshua Schachter said, yes, "Putting things out there is more valuable than the information itself. People are realizing that."  Still, said J.P., there are too many silos. There’s a great deal of social knowledge in corporations, studies show, said Schachter, "but it’s not in computers."  The challenge, said Newsgator’s Holston, is to "make it easy, like poking someone in Facebook, or people won’t do it."

Schachter said social apps all have two things in common: individual utility and network utility. "The notion of forwarding," he said, "is very powerful from a social standpoint."  He said he gets most of his news from his team’s Del.icio.us tags. It’s not just news stories that he’s interested in. Yes, said Michalski, there’s been so much emphasis on the flow of normal media — "but it’s different now."  How do we access the blogs that are most relevant?" asked Holston, rhetorically. He also suggested that we look to the real world for how virality works.

Michalski said he’s now teaching corporations how to help employees let go, be more open. An audience questioner said geeks seem to be more open and comfortable sharing, but how do we get the rest of the organization to do that?  Schachter said social activity "is keyed off tribal behavior."  He also said we need to build smaller, more effective organizations. J.P. said the covenant between employers and employees has changed. "The social relationship has a lot more power than information."  Holston said that corporations get that command-and-control is gone — that doesn’t slow down adoption.  He said ROI is needed — "It’s hard to get adoption till you do that."

As the audience questions continued, Schachter made the point that intelligence isn’t just about knowledge. "It’s also about decision making." He also said Wikipedia is good, but he questions how scalable it is. "Knowledge forces a redistribution of power, which is not necessarily bad."  J.P. made some closing points: "Social intelligence is not group think. What brings people together is common interest. Things come out of the network that aren’t associated with any one individual."  Moderator Michalski got the last word, saying that he thinks "group think is entirely possible with the new tools."

Defrag 1: The Rise of the Implicit

The whole idea of doing this event, said Eric Norlin in his opening remarks, began with an email from Brad Feld. He said he admitted he really didn’t understand it, but decided "maybe there’s a conference there." Big laughs. He later said that part of the thinking was also to "get the band back together" after Esther Dyson’s longstanding PC Forum conference was retired. He’s done a nice job — there’s an awesome collection of big thinkers here.  Ericn

David Weinberger, author and Fellow, Harvard’s Berkman Center, took the stage to deliver a new talk he called "The Rise of the Implicit."  Basically, we tend to focus too much on the eplicit. Computers do explicit stuff, whereas humans by nature are creatures of the implicit, which is the social stuff. Whereas computers have forced us to "infomationalize" everything, it’s links that are fully social. "Links are a type of writing," said Weinberger, "which is a lot different from the fundamental vioew of information."  Davidw
In fact, he said, "the Web itself is the counter to the traditional view of information." Links connect us, they’re "the joins in a world that’s overloaded with information … we’re together writing the world … they’re the gestures of what matters to us." In a lively question and answer  session following, Jerry Michalski spoke of how we’re headed from a world of nouns to one of verbs, and asked Weinberger if his views aren’t overly optimistic. "The Web is working very well. It’s about connectedness, it transcends language," he said. "It works because we’re fundamentally not information machines."  He’s very optimistic about this, though pessimistic about other aspects of the Internet. "We’re insanely social and insist on connecting," Weinberger said in closing. "Take Twitter, for example. It looked like a parody of the Web — 140 characters, are you kidding me? But now I love it — it’s fantastic!"

Overlapping Starfishes, Everything Is Miscellaneous, and Collaboration 2.0

Greetings from the Mile High City. I love the way my morning reading starts out before I head down the elevator for the kickoff of Defrag…talk about timing:  My colleague Ed Kohler’s post on Overlapping Starfishes … a reminder that Feedblitz’ book-of-the month is David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous (David’s our opening speaker at Defrag) … and a blog post from Defrag producer Eric Norlin that gets at why this conference is timed perfectly.  I love it.  Bring on Defrag! Defregconf

MindTouch Is Kicking Wiki Butt

In the wiki software space, there are many players, as you might expect — a lot of them open-source solutions, some with companies behind them, some not. But I learned recently that one company is experiencing a real growth tear in the adoption of its software. Mindtouch is a company I first met in 2006 in the Twin Cities, where they were then co-headquartered (they’ve since consolidated in San Diego, one of my other favorite places). Mindtouchlogo_2
Mindtouch launched at DEMOfall 2006, and I wrote about them in a few posts of my extensive coverage of that event here (or just type their name into my search box).

The company’s products include (1) Deki Wiki, which is a free open-source wiki and application
platform for communities and enterprises, and (2) Nexus, a wiki publishing system and social media integration platform aimed at online media applications. The latter allows blending of editorial staff-produced, syndicated, and community-generated content into one integrated page; an example of one customer using it is the San Diego Union-Tribune, for its AmplifySD community music site.  The company describes its products and services as "making collaboration easy in the enterprise and
harnessing the people’s voice in online wiki communities."

When I read an article recently in Information Week that compared various options for content management systems, including wikis, I thought it was strange Mindtouch wasn’t included. So, I asked cofounder Aaron Fulkerson, who was equally perplexed. "We’re seeing 500 too 600 installations of our software every single day, and yet many in the media don’t seem to know us," he said. Aaronfulkerson
"We’ve seen 2304%
growth in adoption in the last year. And a 1666% growth in just the
last three months." Similar open-source companies,
like SugarCRM and Zimbra, he told me, have had $20-30M in investment and drive
similar adoption rates to what MindTouch has achieved with just a $3.5M
investment to date. I say that’s a pretty powerful entrepreneurial story. "We’ve achieved the success we have so far by being open, honest, and
authentic. We listen to our tribe," said Fulkerson.

I decided, on Fulkerson’s suggestion, to compare MindTouch’s stats to Zimbra’s, using stats from SourceForge. MindTouch in the last two months has had 28,656 downloads and is trending up.
Zimbra in the last two months has had 30,431 downloads (after subtracting the 2,038 of these downloads that are Flash demos), and has been pretty
flat for the last year. "Zimbra is an open source industry darling," says Fulkerson.
"These guys have had mad press and many millions of dollars in
investment." [Note: More than $20M in VC.] "They’re
right up there with SugarCRM, Alfresco, and other newcomers in the open
source space that have had significant recognition of their success." he said.  Oh, another thing about Zimbra: the company was just acquired by Yahoo! for $350M.

So, MindTouch is close to matching Zimbra’s download numbers. And Fulkerson claims his firm is also matching the numbers of that other darling, SugarCRM. "I spoke to John Roberts,
CEO of SugarCRM, in person at the OSBC conf at the end of May
this year, and he said that SugarCRM was seeing about 500 downloads a day. Well, this is
equivalent to us. We’re now matching these companies with our
piddly $3.5M of angel investment and little marketing or PR
budget. These other companies have had way more investment."

I do find it strange that the media hasn’t discovered MindTouch to any great degree yet. But I guess that’s why we have bloggers like me?  🙂 Another example of a company in this space that has had tons of media coverage is Socialtext, which has had $9M
in investment. But look at their stats: a mere 1,351 downloads in the last two months and flatlined.

In a research report soon to be published, another wiki vendor, Twiki, is touted as now getting monthly downloads in the range of 10,000. MindTouch, however, with approximately 15,000 monthly, clearly trumps that figure. Fulkerson claims Mindtouch is winning
the race when it comes to downloads in the wiki software space, and leading the pack in overall numbers — except maybe for MediaWiki, he notes, which powers Wikipedia (and has no company behind it). [He makes a case, by the way, that Wikipedia is much harder for users than his software.]

Why are MindTouch’s numbers significant? First, says Fulkerson,it’s only had product since July 25, 2006. Other products (or projects, as some are better called) have been around longer, and many of these are now seeing flat growth. "We’ve had enormous growth, and we’re still
seeing it," said Fulkerson. I have to agree that essentially equaling Zimbra’s and SugarCRM’s
numbers is pretty darn impressive.

Fulkerson said Mindtouch will be issuing a press release next week about its momentum
and growth. Additional announcements regarding products and services will come before the end of the year, he said, and more media customers are going online with the company’s Nexus product, including Gazette Company. I learned that 90% of Mindtouch’s installs are for behind-the-firewall applications.
"We’ve seen such an explosion in growth in the
last three months, we still aren’t certain who everyone is that is using
our software. This will become more clear in the next couple months," he said.

UPDATE 3:00 pm:  To make a couple of editorial revisions.

Koral Brings Web 2.0 Content Mgmt to Businesses

Enterprise content management is big business — a $3B industry, as a matter of fact, says Koral CEO Mark Suster, but it’s only at a 5% penetration. Lately, he said, there’s been a big increase in sites to help consumers manage their content, as we all know. Korallogo But what about the majority of businesses who still have a hard time dealing with all their stuff? Koral is out fill that gaping hole with a web app that looks a lot like a consumer Web 2.0 app. The DEMO folks describe it as “a lightweight, document-capable, user-focused content management sytem.” It’s totally free for busineses now, in the consumer vein, but moving toward enterprise work group licensing. It’s hassle free to contribute to, says Suster, and “you can collaborate with any group — the others don’t have to be on your system.” The app is self-built AJAX, and is “super fast,” says UI designer Jon Levine, “which was our first priority.” The app lets you subscribe to documents, authors, or tags. The UI is very, very nice. It’s in limited beta now, and you can invite your friends if you’re lucky enough to get in…

Tags: ,

« Older posts Newer posts »