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: software (Page 2 of 2)

Minnebar Rocked!

Excellent speakers and panels, and a great crowd yesterday at our local BarCamp event. More proof that we have a vibrant tech community here in Minnesota! Major expertise, lots of energized developers and entrepreneurs, and some exciting, budding startups in the works.
Also more proof that online and offline community can be mashed up successfully…. Minnebarlogo

It was great to see a top VC firm in state, Split Rock Partners, as one of seven sponsors of Minnebar. I told partner Michael Gorman he blended right in wearing a tee shirt and shorts — love that! 🙂 And I saw him in the Ruby on Rails session that I also attended. (We have an outstanding group of “RonR” developers here, by the way.)

The turnout for the GetGoMN session was fantastic, with Scott Littman and George Reese telling the story behind the recently launched site to support entrepreneurs. Getgologo175w Lots of great questions and input from several people. I’m convinced that promoting Minnebar on the GetGo site contributed to the record attendance. The biggest turnout yet for a BarCamp in this country! Yeeeee-haww!!!

Minnebarrooftop_2 Photo: Beers on the roof with event sponsors John Roberts (left) and Harold Slawik (right) of New Counsel plc, and Bill McLeslie of ipHouse. The event wi-fi was awesome — Bill hooked us up with 7 megabits of bandwidth. Gorgeous day in the Twin Cities — the high hit 83 F!

Minnebarintraining My favorite photo at the event: We start ’em young here in MN. Matt Bauer, ace developer just recruited to MotionBox in NYC (but he didn’t have to move!), shows a developer-in-training how it’s done. Matt had just finished his session on Adobe Flex.

Lots more photos on my Minnebar Flickr set. Other photo sets are linked on the Minnebar site. I suspect you’ll also be able to read some more about the event at the Star-Tribune’s Vita.MN site and in the Pioneer Press, because they both had people covering the event.

Coolest thing I learned at Minnebar? I met a former Google employee (an early employee), who moved back here from the Valley his wife, who was also a Google employee, and he’s about to launch a cool new web app online. Stay tuned….

Kudos again to the three hardest working event organizers on the planet (volunteers, yet!): Dan Grigsby, Ben Edwards, and Luke Francl…and, especially, a great big thank you to the sponsors. This all-day event is an annual thing, but evening events are held throughout the year, too. So, watch for the next “MinneDemo” and come learn and celebrate Minnesota innovation with us!

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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What I’m Looking Forward to at PC Forum

Well, I arrived in Southern California last night in preparation for the big event to kick off tomorrow in Carlsbad (North San Diego County). And I was just in time for a huge cold front and mega amounts of rain! They even had snow down to 1500 feet in the mountains. Not exactly what the San Diego tourism board had in mind! And here PC Forum just relocated from Scottsdale this year, too. Oh, well, no matter. I’d always rather be here, and by Monday things are due to improve. (Plus it’s raining bigtime in Scottsdale, too, from the same storm.)

Here’s a little rundown on the things I’m looking forward to with this trip:
1) Blogging for my readers about what the buzz is at this very highly regarded conference.
2) Learning about new technologies and business models.
3) Finding out who’s funding what.
4) Taking in a packed conference agenda, with some particularly good sessions being these, in my opinion:

• Esther Dyson’s interview of Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and now CEO of Omidyar Network, which is funding both for-profits and non-profits, but believes profitable enterprises and efficient markets are often the best way to achieve social good.
• “Behavioral Targeting 2.0”: how four marketing and ad technology vendors, Compete, Grassroots, mSpoke, and Tacoda, are moving beyond spyware to get users actively involved in controlling their own data.
• “New Business Models: Power to the Edges”: featuring the CEOs of Brightcove, Salesforce.com, Augmentum, and Microsoft’s SVP of technical strategy.
• “Search: What Are You Gonna Do for an Encore?”: a look at what comes after search reaches its natural limits, including the two trends of personalization and verticalization, and featuring the CEO of Zillow, Google’s SVP of sales and bus dev, the CEO of Efficient Frontier, and Yahoo’s SVP of search.
• And the closing panel, “New Forms of Life”: how online community is actually changing life — wherein it’s heading toward no longer being “virtual,” but part of life, just like work and play. The panel includes the CEOs of LinkedIn and Facebook, along with a producer from Seriosity, a still-in-stealth company that’s out to apply gaming culture to work.

5) And, of course, meeting lots of interesting people — including interviewing some of the speakers and attendees. So far, I have Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove, Bill Day of WhenU, Michael Tanne of Wink, and Greg Pierson of iovation on my list. And I’m also hoping to chat with J.J. Allaire of Onfolio (just acquired by Microsoft)…Adam Bosworth of Google Health…Michael Arrington of edgeio…Steve Marder of Eurekster…Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn…somebody from the Omidyar Network…David Gilmour of Tacit Software’s pre-launch (and very cool sounding) Illumio startup…Bruce Francis of Salesforce.com…and others yet to be determined.

Stay tuned. I’ll be blogging live from PC Forum, and during breaks, etc, as I can. And please do email me if you have any suggestions relating to my coverage of PC Forum, questions you’d like me to ask, or whatever…

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ETech News Aggregator

I was hoping to make O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference this week in San Diego — at least to be able to drop in on the last day — but my schedule is now uncertain. Meantime, the best place I’ve found to get up to speed on what’s happening out there — well, a summary, in close to real time — is O’Reilly’s own continuously updated page: ETech Conference News. It’s written by O’Reilly’s self-described “PR gal” Suzanne Axtell. Nice job, Suzanne!

And there’s always the Atom feed, too.

ETech is the de rigeur geek-place-to-be this week, it seems. And thus you could read blogs on it all day and all of the night. Tons of bloggers there. I was telling someone earlier today, let’s hope the big one doesn’t hit San Diego this week, or we’ll lose most of the a-list and half the b…. 🙂

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