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: knowledge sharing

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.

PC Forum: Illumio Puts Social Networking to Work

I had a chance to sit down with David Gilmour, CEO of Tacit Software, Palo Alto, on Sunday afternoon, before PC Forum really got going, to learn a little about a new web service he would be debuting later at the event, called “Illumio.” I think it was the coolest stealth company to come out at PC Forum (actually, Illumio is not a company, but a project within an existing company). Tacit, founded in 1997, produces software to enable collaboration among employees in large enterprises. For a refresher on what the term “tacit knowledge” means, see this Wikipedia page. Customers include Lockheed Martin, Morgan Stanley, Northrop Grumman, and the U.S. Government, and its partners are IBM, SAIC, and Sun. Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Woodside Fund, RBC Technology Ventures, Alta Partners, Reuters Venture Capital, and In-Q-Tel. Gilmour described Illumio as “a Web 2.0 way to extend Tacit software” What it will do (a public beta starts soon, per the signup at www.illumio.com) is allow any individual to search their network of colleagues, and tap into their knowledge for “what they know, what they have, and who they know.” Tacit’s patented software technology continuously processes e-mail, documents, and other business communications and automatically discovers each employee’s work focus, expertise, and business relationships.

The Illumio project started, said Gilmour, as a way to get smaller companies to take advantage of Tacit’s software technology — that is, customers that couldn’t afford either the cost or the time for a full software deployment, which can takes months. The Illumio version of the software, a web service, will be free initially, Gimour said. “Tacit and Illumio are more about collaboration as opposed to knowledge management. It’s what we call ‘massively federated desktop search’,” Gilmour explained. “We enable you to search your colleagues, and interact in new ways.” Later, in the company presentations session 031306tacit on Monday afternoon, CEO Gilmour spoke of the ready market for Illumio: “There will be something like 50 million desktop search engines by the end of 2006, and there will be zero PCs without desktop search after the next OS generation.” He said his company’s Illumio technology now supports Google and MSN desktop search, and others will follow. It searches files, documents, email, contacts, favorites, browser cache, appointments, and more. He allowed, however, that a problem with desktop search is privacy. “The market is hyper-sensitive about that,” and he said his company works hard on it.

The Illumio web service “gets you information you can’t find anywhere else,” said Gilmour. He explained that, once the service is ready for public beta (still not as of today), it will be a 2.5 Mb download (Windows only at first), which then sits on top of your desktop search engine. “The service doesn’t know who matches a request until someone opts in to the request,” he said. Illumio has an IM-like feature, and no peer-to-peer connection. “Everything is done through SOAP on the server, with tiny XML documents.”

Gilmour gave some examples of how the Illumio service would work. The first was a “Document Request.” For example, “Who has the latest Gartner presentation on social networking”? A message would pop up on the desktop of your network connections as a small window, said Gilmour, and the receiver does not have to search through his disk. “There’s even a time estimate displayed for you on how long all the contacts’ computers will take to respond to the request,” he said.

Another example he gave was a request called “Get an Answer.” Gilmour said this is handled by the declining Dutch auction method, in which “the bar will be lowered if there’s no answer, till one comes in.” Another type of request, which uses the software’s “Personal Groups” feature, allows one to search for someone that knows a certain person. For example, he said — in the case of “Who knows Esther?” — the software would search for who did the most email with her.

The company’s vision with Illumio is “How can social networks be put to use for people,” said Gilmour. “It lets you search your friends and colleagues for what they alone can offer you. And, when you have something they want, it puts you in control of that and ensures your privacy.” The web service will also have a feature called “Shared Illumio Groups,” which a user will be able to set up at the Illumio site, and these can be either “Public” or “Managed.”

Audience questions afterwards (it was a well attended and attentive session) included the following. Q: How will you stop scurilous uses? A: We’re very concerned. We don’t know yet, and will write the rules as we need them. Q: Will you partner with commerce sites? A: There is the possibility of buying and selling things with this technology. Q: What about competitors? A: Others that have tried to do something similar have required the user to write their own profile, but that’s not a reliable technique.

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