Archives for October 2007

A Confluence of the Wiki and Document/Folder Worlds

Posted on October 17, 2007 ·

confluence

1: a coming or flowing together, meeting, or gathering at one point <a happy confluence of weather and scenery>

2 a: the flowing together of two or more streams

b: the place of meeting of two streams

c: the combined stream formed by conjunction

Today we’re seeing the confluence of two worlds: the flow-oriented thinking and collaboration, represented by Confluence, the market-leading enterprise wiki, and the more traditional approach of documents, lists, folders, represented by Microsoft SharePoint. Or perhaps it’s a right-brain / left-brain thing. I’ve talked about it at length, and since Jeremiah, Web Prophet says backlinking is OK, I’ll just do that, instead of repeating myself: Flow vs. Structure: Escaping From the Document & Directory Jungle.

Now, as important forward-looking visioning is, successful business leaders recognize what the market wants today, not where they’d like to lead them tomorrow. Recognizing that Microsoft Office is deeply entrenched in the corporate workplace, Atlassian first added Webdav capabilities to Confluence (drag-and-drop files into the wiki, single click on attachment to edit them in the original MS Office format and save back to the wiki). But customers wanted more, according to Jeffrey Walker, President:

..meeting with customers and analysts, SharePoint came up in every meeting. “We have growing groups who love the wiki, and long standing users of Microsoft and now SharePoint. Help!”, customers asked..

The result of today’s joint Microsoft and Atlassian announcement of the SharePoint Connector for Confluence. The initial features include:

Search: Users can search SharePoint and Confluence content together from one place.
Content sharing: From within SharePoint, users can embed Confluence page contents allowing users to blend content. This also includes Confluences numerous plugins.
Linking: Within Confluence, users can access SharePoint document facilities. By including SharePoint lists and content within Confluence, users, in a single click, can edit Microsoft Office documents.
Single Sign-On and Security: With one login, users can access both systems while seeing only what they have permission to view.

In short, access your information, whether you’re the wiki-flow type or the create-save-hide-in-folders type

The screenprint above shows a Confluence page (with the charting plugin) embedded within, and editable directly from SharePoint. For more, check out the feature tour.

Jevon MacDonald is pondering about the business realities behind this deal:

The question that weighs most heavily is: is there enough incentive for Microsoft to participate in this partnership in any significant way? The immediate economics aren’t obvious for Microsoft, which leaves us with two options:

– but I’m not giving those options away, you’ll have to read his post. (as an aside, he is the only one examining the business side, but his post is not on TechMeme – let’s see if we can push it there)

Speculation aside, some numbers: SharePoint has 80 million users while Atlassian Confluence has 4,100 customers – I don’t know how many users that translates to, but I’ve just written about SAP’s SDN/BPX communities which has about a million (!) users, and Confluence is a significant part of it. That said, Jeffrey said it right, David kisses Goliath in this deal.

There is no marketing agreement behind it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft’s huge reseller channel show interest in Confluence. And frankly, just removing the “we’re a SharePoint-shop” political obstacle in some major enterprise client is worth it alone.

Sour grapes? Competitor Socialtext announced their SharePoint integration a year ago, and CEO Ross Mayfield says SharePoint wiki was last year’s news. Well, I think Socialpoint, the Socialtext/SharePoint integration was last year’s news, this year’s news is Confluence.

Perhaps next year’s news will be which enterprise wiki vendor could translate their deals into real market gains.

Update: here’s a video interview with CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes and President Jeffrey Walker on ScobleShow.

HOT! EXCLUSIVE! Here’s the real price Mike had to pay for this deal… just compare his looks above with this video. What’s next? A suit and tie?

Update (10/19): Intriguing thoughts on wiki plug-ins, KM Web-services and Enterprise SOA on – surprise, suprise! – the SAP Community Network

Filed Under: Collaboration, Enterprise Software · Tagged: atlassian, Collaboration, confluence, enterprise wiki, microsoft, sharepoint, socialpoint, socialtext, wiki, wikis

Cisco’s PR Failure

Posted on October 17, 2007 ·

I certainly am not familiar with the circumstances of Brazilian authorities’ raid on Cisco’s local offices, and am not attempting to divulge in details. What I do know is that Cisco has a PR problem. GigaOM reports based on local media:

40 people were arrested, including the current president of Cisco Brazil, Pedro Rípero, ex-President Carlos Roberto Carnevali, and two other company executives.

Brazilian authorities are seeking help from the U.S. in arresting five executives who allegedly masterminded the scheme.

Excerpt from the Cisco Press release:

Brazilian authorities visited and temporarily closed Cisco’s offices in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janiero. We understand that a small number of employees have been detained.

Sorry, Cisco, but a raid by 650 policemen is not a “visit”, and when your President is arrested, you can’t hide it behind the generic reference to a “small number of employees”.

Whatever the investigation will turn out, this episode will go down the books as a failure by Cisco PR.

Filed Under: Marketing / PR, Misc · Tagged: Cisco, Cisco Brazil, PR Failures, PR fiasco, PR problem

Zonbu, a $99 Green PC that will Cost You $249

Posted on October 17, 2007 ·

Considering how many things did not work out-of-the box on my new Vista PC, HP’s slogan of : “the Computer is Personal Again” is really an insult. And don’t even get me started on Vista, it’s really for IT professionals, not mere mortals.

So of course I got excited reading Fake Steve Jobs (will Daniel Lyons ever be referred to by his own name?) article in Forbes:

“Personal computers were supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, these beasts have turned us all into part-time IT administrators, our lives given over to downloading upgrades, installing patches and updates and drivers and antispyware, decrypting error messages and screaming at stalled applications. Enough!”

He is blown away after a week’s use of Zonbu, a $99 Linux-based “green” PC alternative. From Zonbu’s specs:

Zonbu is a compact, ultra low power mini with all the bells and whistles:

Intel-compatible ultra-low power CPU
512 MB RAM + 4GB flash-based local storage
Graphics up to 2048 x 1536 (16 million colors, 75 Hz). Hardware graphics and MPEG2 acceleration
PC-compatible ports for keyboard and mouse
6 USB ports to plug-and-play all standard USB accessories
Broadband ready: 10/100 Mbps Ethernet built-in

It comes with a set of pre-loaded applications, all auto-updated with a subscription service. PC as a Service? Well, not quite. Although it’s heralded as a “cloud computing” device, it’s really a hybrid, with client-side apps for office productivity, personal finance management, multimedia, photo management..etc. And therein lies the rub – once you start using client applications, your needs will grow, you will hit the limits of the low-end hardware:

“I also found some videos that wouldn’t play on the system, and high-def videos (720p or larger) from Apple’s QuickTime HD Gallery don’t play acceptably because the Via processor in the Zonbu just isn’t fast enough.”

Of course with local apps your storage requirements will also grow, but you only have a 4G flash-drive, so you will likely upgrade to one of the premium storage/synchronization plans. The lowest plan gives you 25GB of storage at $12.95 a month, but it comes with a 2-year commitment. Let’s do the math, $99+ 24*$12.95= $409.80. Your $99 machine is now a $400 unit, payable upfront – and you still need a display and keyboard/mouse. You can get your device without the 2-year commitment (a’ la cell-phones), but then the base price is $249, and you will still likely pay for the monthly storage – what can you do with 2G of storage, after all?

Actually, a whole lot, if you really embrace cloud computing. There are good and mostly free online applications to match the capabilities of the pre-loaded Zonbu apps, and being online, they don’t even have to be updated. (They do, but it’s no longer the users’ problem which is the beauty of Software as a Service.)

Zonbu could have been a nice, inexpensive ~~cloud computing machine~~ Cloudbook – the problem is with the price point and the bundling of subscriptions that offers far less than what you already may have independently. A truly $99 web-computing device would be a major hit, but at current costs it does not seem to be feasible. Will the mobile industry’s service-plan subsidized model prevail here? After all, that’s what Zonbu attempts, it just does not have the right value/price mix.

I suspect cloud computing users will primarily want to select the applications they need, and what box gets them there will become secondary. But I don’t expect online app providers like Google or Zoho to bundle Zonbu-like devices with their business-level subscription plans anytime soon. This is where the analogy to the mobile industry ends: there is a huge installed base of older PC’s and as soon as you abandon the old model of desktop-based computing, these old machine became quite capable devices to handle your online computing needs.

Zonbu is a nice device without a business model for now.

Filed Under: SaaS, Technology · Tagged: cloud computing, Google, green pc, On-Demand, personal computing, SaaS, supbsricptions, thin client, unPC, zoho, zonbu

Jiglu: Smarter (?) Contextual Tagging

Posted on October 15, 2007 ·

Since I’ve just advocated context, context and context fro social networking, I figure I might as well try Jiglu, being launched today, which promises to auto-tag our blogs in context.

Blognation & CenterNetworks both warmly praise the new service, and Venturebeat provides detailed analysis:

Jiglu, by comparison, uses semantic search technology to take tagging a step further, crawling entire websites to tag and categorize according to the relative importance of subjects.

The technology works by first determining important keywords within specific blocks of text, then drawing correlations between keywords in other blocks, assigning scores to keywords or phrases that come up repeatedly to produce a list of important tags. The software works continuously, adjusting its scoring system when new content is introduced…

What I am missing from all these writeups is actual demonstration of Jiglu. Guys, I don’t see your Jiglu widget installed… OK, so I’ll be the guinea-pig: it’s installed right here on the sidebar(*), let’s wait and see the results it will soon (?) produce.

Update: further analysis of Jiglu’s business model on TechCrunch.

*Update #2: For now I removed the widget, but only temporarily. It grew a mile long, making it hard to read (too low level of granularity?). CEO Nigel (see comments below) says to check in a few days, so that’s what I’ll do.

Filed Under: SaaS, Startups · Tagged: contextual tagging, jiglu, smart tagging, tagging, tags

SVASE VC Breakfast with Gus Tai, General Partner @ Trinity Ventures

Posted on October 15, 2007 ·

After a long break (for me) I’ll be moderating another SVASE VC Breakfast Club meeting Thursday, October 18th in Palo Alto.

As usual, it’s an informal round-table where up to 10 entrepreneurs get to deliver a pitch, then answer questions and get critiqued by a VC Partner. We’ve had VC’s from Draper Fisher, Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Mohr Davidow, Emergence Capital …etc. This Thursday I”ll have the honor of welcoming a repeat guest, Gus Tai, General Partner at Trinity Ventures. Instead of introducing him, I suggest you take a look at his impressive portfolio.

These breakfast meetings are a valuable opportunity for early-stage Entrepreneurs, most of whom would probably have a hard time getting through the door to VC Partners. Since I’ve been through quite a few of these sessions, both as Entrepreneur and Moderator, let me share a few thoughts:

It’s a pressure-free environment, with no Powerpoint presentations, Business Plans…etc, just casual conversation; but it does not mean you should come unprepared!
Follow a structure, don’t just roam about what you would like to do, or even worse, spend all your time describing the problem, without addressing what your solution is.
Don’t forget “small things” like the Team, Product, Market..etc.
It would not hurt to mention how much you are looking for, and how you would use the funds…
Write down and practice your pitch, and prepare to deliver a compelling story in 3 minutes. You will have about 8-10 minutes, half of which is your pitch, but believe me, whatever your practice time was, when you are on the spot, you will likely take twice as long to deliver your story. The second half of your time-slot is for Q&A.
Bring an Executive Summary; some VC’s like it, others don’t.
Last, but not least, please be on time! I am not kidding… some of you know why I even have to bring this up.

For more information check out the SVASE event page, and ~~don’t forget to~~ ~~register~~ . See you in Palo Alto.

Update: I will also have a special guest: former entrepreneur-turned-into-VC, who got his fame as “the entrepreneur who won’t just take VC abuse.” That is of course before successfully selling his startup and becoming a VC Partner himself.

Update: This event is now SOLD OUT. Next Thursday I will moderate a VC Breakfast in San Francisco with Robert Troy, Managing Director of Geneva Venture Partners.

Filed Under: Bay Area, Software, Startups, Technology · Tagged: CleanTech, Digital Media, entrepreneurship, internet, mobility, On-Demand, SaaS, startup pitch, Startups, SVASE, vc Funding, venture Capital

Facebook Just Ain’t For Business, Get Over It (Business Needs Social Networking in Context)

Posted on October 14, 2007 ·

I’ve stolen the first part of the title: Sam Huleatt’s best contribution to the New York Times article is giving it a new title that says it all.

The Facebook vs LinkedIn debate heated up again today, for the millionth time. The Facebook Fanclub’s recurring theme in comparing LinkedIn to Facebook is just how resume- and jobsearch-oriented LinkedIn is: go there, get what you want, then there’s nothing else to do there.

I’m sorry, but since when is this a complaint? Isn’t business all about having an objective and efficiently reaching it with minimum the time and effort? I suspect most of the LinkedIn “deserters” who switched to Facebook are independent types who have the time to hang around in Facebook, and are striving to enhance their personal brand.

Jeremiah’s Web Strategy Group is thriving which certainly helps boost his own brand. Robert Scoble wants to have more than 5,000 friends:

I think it sucks because it isn’t scalable and falls apart at 5,000 contacts. It pisses me off more and more every day because of that scaling wall.

Robert is a celebrity, and this is his fan-club. For the rest of us, I still believe less is more, (update: Doc Searls feels the same) and our online network should reflect our real-life one, instead of being an inflated collection of data records. We already saw the initial “link-mongering” on LinkedIn, but after a while things settled down, and the majority of LinkedIn users max out with 2-300 contacts, which is about the number of people you really, truly can know well. Now, somehow with Facebook all the netiquette is thrown away: I’m sure I’m not the only one flooded with invitations by people whose name does not even remotely sound familiar, and frankly, it’s frustrating.

I also fail to see the usefulness of seeing when my contacts watch a movie, pack for a trip, make coffee, or go to pee. This is a lot of noise with the sole purpose of gluing us to the screen (it works!), and made sense for on-campus dating, Facebook’s heritage, but let’s be real: how is this relevant to business? I’m not saying Facebook can’t be used for business at all – Jeff Nolan quotes a few examples:

Victoria Secret has a group for their Pink product line, 380k members and great interactivity, downloads, user generated content.

Ernst & Young is recruiting through Facebook and experiencing great results as a result of being connected with their candidates where they live.

So, yes, Facebook can be used for business, but these examples are all about external outreach, marketing, communication, recruiting. The point I’m making is, let’s not, while bringing everything Web 2.0 into the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella try to push Facebook to the corporate market – is has no value there. Let’s not equate Facebook to Social Networking, which is, and will be important for the Enterprise, but it needs context.

To illustrate my point, I’ll bring an example originally not “labeled” as Social Networking – oh, and the story has a Facebook-y twist, too.

ConnectBeam started their life as del.icio.us for business, but arguably they have developed into a business-focused social networking tool: in context, with purpose. Ironically, it was Facebook that drove ConnectBeam into this market in the first place.

Founder Puneet Gupta launched CourseCafe in 2005, with the intention of becoming for students’ academic life what Facebook has become for their social Life – in fact I called it “The Other Facebook” for a reason: We thought that while Facebook dominated 80% of students’ life, the fun part, there was room for CourseCafe to help organize the remaining 20%, their studies. They had a good product, received good reviews and started to get traction, spreading through several colleges. Ultimately Puneet became worried about potentially clashing with FaceBook, and at the same time he received interest from the corporate world, so he reinvented his business, this time focusing on the Enterprise.

The new business, ConnectBeam is social bookmarking for the Enterprise – but soon they took a new spin, expanding towards social networking. But doing it in the right way, in context. The context is finding co-workers who are likely engaged in similar activities to yours, or at least have similar interests, since they execute similar searches and are using the same tags you do. Their product is tightly integrated with Google’s Enterprise search, showing a combined result of what Google finds, what is tagged by how many people, and the list of users sharing that item or tag.

Tight integration to Google has become their “secret sauce” in terms of sales success, too: just about any large organization has already a Google (or Fast ..etc) appliance, a dedicated person with a mission and budget to spend on Enterprise Search – so in fact what they sell is “search enhancement”. ConnectBeam has only launched recently, but they already have Honeywell, CSC, Booz Allen Hamilton and other big names as paying customers.

They’ve come full circle: driven away from the college market by Facebook, now offering context-specific social networking, beating Facebook to the Enterprise. They will not get 40 million users, and Puneet will not become a billionaire, like Mark Zuckerberg (likely) will. They follow the good old-fashioned model: deliver value to businesses, who pay for it. That’s pretty good in my book.

Update: Of course the “LinkedIn vs Facebook” and “Facebook Sucks” stories are all over TechMeme:

TechCrunch, All Facebook, vanderwal.net Off the Top, CenterNetworks, Workbench, bub.blicio.us, Scripting News, /Message, WinExtra, Insider Chatter, mathewingram.com/work, Thomas Hawk’s Digital …, even Mini-Microsoft (wow!), PDA/Guardian,

Update #2: The you-don’t-need-more-friends lobby by Robert Scoble. I still belive he does not have 5,000 “friends” but a 5,000 (or more) strong fan-club. When you have 5,000 contacts, it’s a Rolodex (a term Robert used, too), not “live” contacts. And I suggest you read the comments to my old less is more post – re. the same subject, even though it’s on LinkedIn.

Update #3: Pfizer teams with Sermo, the “doctors’ Facebook” – Nick Carr writes about another contextual social network.

Update (10/15): Getting (Anti-) Social, the Web 2.0 Way – @ Wired & TechCrunch.

Wow! I’ve became Doc Searls’ Quote du jour. I’m honored.

Update (10/26): Naughty “Business” on FaceBook

Update (10/28): Beginner’s 5 Step Guide to Using LinkedIn and Facebook

Facebook Isn’t A Social Network, LinkedIn Is

Aussies as Adults: an Enterprise Facebook Story

LinkedIn and The Future of Business Networking

The Facebook Fad

Filed Under: Collaboration, Social Networking, Startups · Tagged: Collaboration, ConnectBeam, coursecafe, del.icio.us, enterprise search, facebook, link-spam, LinkedIn, search, social bookmarking, Social Networking, Social Software, social tagging, tagging

Now We Have an Excuse for Chocolate Craving

Posted on October 13, 2007 ·

People who crave chocolate daily show signs of having a certain type of bacteria in their gut, researchers say.

OK, so we don’t have to feel guilty anymore.

Full story on AP.

Filed Under: Misc · Tagged: bacteria, chocolate, milka, science

Firefox Gone Mad

Posted on October 11, 2007 ·

Firefox has gone completely mad on one of my PC’s. The pic shows the lower left area: the status line has become a thick, dead area, I can’t reduce/resize it, and there is a funny little red ^ sign in the corner. At the same time all my book marks are gone.

My plugins appear to be working. Reinstalling Firefox did not help – any advice?

Thanks.

Update: I can find writeups of the same problem, but no solution… here, here, here… oh, there’s a whole lot of them, no conclusive answer.

Update #2: Wow, I can’t believe how fast help came! Thanks, Craig and Paul. 🙂 In the meantime I also suspected plugins, so disabled them all, and the problem was gone. Then it was a matter of playing around with restoring them one by one and in different order. The culprit appears to be the Diigo plugin. It’s a cool tool, but for now I had to kill it. They are a good team, I bet they’ll be here soon 😉

Filed Under: Software · Tagged: browsers, diigo, firefox, firefox bug

Angry Mom Spanking Ballmer Over Useless Vista

Posted on October 10, 2007 ·

Well, it’s not the Microsoft CEO’s mother – it’s analyst Yvonne Genovese who interviewed Ballmer at the Gartner Symposium.

“My daughter comes in one day and says, ‘Hey Mom, my friend has Vista, and it has these neat little things called gadgets — I need those.'”

Said Ballmer: “I love your daughter.”

“You’re not going to like her mom in about two minutes,” said Genovese, while the crowd laughed.

She went on to explain that she installed Vista for her daughter — and two days later went right back to using the XP operating system.

That must have been one entertaining session. Read the full story at Computerworld. But first, here’s another quote from Ballmer, clearly on the defensive:

“There is always a tension between the value that end users see — and frankly, that software developers see — and the value that we can deliver to IT.”

Yesss. The key word is IT. As in “expert only”. Perhaps it’s time Microsoft recognize that they failed to serve two “masters”, and in catering strictly for IT, delivering a super-secure (?) system they created a monster quite unusable by individual consumers.

I’ve been ranting about Vista enough here, let me just add another gem to prove my point.

It’s probably fair to assume that a lot of Vista (home) users will have at least one older, XP machine around – and if they do, they want these to see these connected on a Home Network. This should be a piece of cake… or not.

Your Vista PC won’t see the XP ones on the network at all.
There’s no documentation whatsoever, but after Googling around you can figure out that you need to patch the XP machines (!) for them to be seen by the Vista. (Incidentally, the patch requires WGA, which fails on one of my perfectly legit computers, but that’s another story)
When Vista still can’t see the networked machines, back Googling again.
After some research you’ll discover a well-hidden statement that it may take up to 15 minutes for a Vista PC to see a networked pre-Vista one. Fifteen minutes!!!! in 2007!!!!

This is just one example of the many idiocies crippling Vista. Nothing major, just stupid little things that don’t work and there is no easily accessible info about.

Vista is for the corporate world with IT departments, period. I can hardly think of better promotion for Apple then releasing Vista to the consumer market. Oh, and since a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s one from Princeton University (by way of Espen Antonsen)