Eric Mack On-Line

Four companies, two we've heard of and two new ones, will launch their products. Sort of a DEMO-style presentation.

First up: Colanos Software:
Enabling cross-Organizational Teamwork. Team collaboration across company boundaries. (We need this).

Current options fall short: E-Mail, On-Demand, and Enterprise IT - these all fall short as they provide no context, have on-line limitations and time/cost issues...  Colanos solution is a synchronized p2p workspace which allows sharing of workspaces both in real-time and async.

Data fully redundant, resides locally or in the cloud.
Quick Demo: Synchronize, Organize, and Know (instant alerts)
Today's announcement is the addition of voice capabilities in Colanos Phone.
Theme: Join the Collanosphere

Analyst critique: Does the world need another "share with everything" tool? What about the security concerns with having local replicas?
My own critique: do I want to have to have 30 places to visit?

Next up: Clarizen:
Theme: Achieve true teal collaborationwith on-demand, Collaborative Project Management.
Project Management must adapt to the increasing speed with which project activities change.
Seems to be a product to increase visibility of projects across an organization or product team. I have a hard time getting excited about many of these - either I'm missing something new here or they are not communicating what's cool.
Clarizen supports the concept of Templates (a proven 20-year concept from Notes)
Let's see what the analysts have to say...
Analyst Critique: Stowe is unimpressed. Says it's like Documentum (eRoom). These aren't tremendously new ideas. It's not 2.0. Coleman says it's a 1.5. Need to cut cycle time between tasks, rather than increase task management.

Next up: LiquidTalk:  Dave Peak, CEO.
Why is Blackberry (& wireless email/smartphone) use so pervasive? We need knowledge on the go and we are increasingly mobile.
Web 2.0 generation wants information immediately. They are hooked on gadgets.

The problem: a disconnected, disengaged workforce = lost productivity = lost revenue.

Theme: Mobile knowledge for a mobile workforce. Create find and push a/v business content to a mobile workforce.

Quick demo: Seems to be a media aggregation portal - an iTunes for Business with private content focused on the specific business needs and areas interest. Goal: make it as easy as iPod to get the information.

My thoughts; I think this has great potential as a distributed KM & learning tools. I'm curious to see what the analysts have to say.

I think he's about to go over time.  BEEP

Analyst Critique: Dave Coleman: This is more interesting. Would love to see never vendors explain what they do in one slide. (Note to self: Learn from this comment.) Coleman described this as TIVO for business. Does not find it as a tool to transfer Knowledge but more for xfer of information. (typing as fast as I can). Stowe: Intriguing but has a sense that it is better integrated into something else. A plug-in,. perhaps into Salesforce.com. Who will do the work. Seems like too much work. (I disagree - could be part of a KM initiative.)

Next up: KnowNow: Sam Weber
Theme: Live information management app for today's enterprise.
Problem stated: Email overused, portals broken, Search isn't the answer. (OK, we know all that; your time is running out...)
Imagine a day when in-box  is not the junk drawer.
Solution: Live Information Management Services via connections to where info lives. They appear to bring this into their server - not the data but the links to where the data resides. time is running out, show me something...  WAY too complicated slide, could not digest quickly. OK, so they say they will bridge the information gap. HOW? show me.

Ah, good, an actual demo: Looks like a SharePoint CMS web page.  He's showing me stuff I would assume or expect to be there.

BEEP time's up.

Analyst Critique: Stowe wants more demo, less pitch. (Applause) (Note to self: learn that for my own product pitch). You have a real hard road, battling the IBM's and Microsoft of the world. There are 900,000 other products that do this. Coleman: Aggregators make the $. He thinks you are following the right track., Like ideas of information finds you. Is it 9 times better than email?

VOTE:
Audience invited to text their vote to a real-time

Most votes went to KnowNow.

They are voting.
I'm going to abstain as I can't hold ThinkPad in my lap and hold a phone at same time. I would vote for last presenter.

Sorry, no photos, they are still on my camera. Michael is holding my USB cable hostage.