Sunday, April 16, 2006

Tag, Watch, Notify - Moving to a New Web Model



Yesterday's Mercury News had an interesting article about a number of new search / tagging services that are combining simple search with the ability to save the results including notes and share them with others. See the article by Matt Marshall here.

Ben Elgin from BusinessWeek also writes about a Search Engine for Every Subject.

I took a look at two of the services, Jeteye and Kaboodle. As a long time user of del.icio.us I immediately understood the value.

There are number of new services like this stemming from the problem we all have in storing interesting information and then being able to retrieve it later. Kaboodle was created by Manish Chandra because he had trouble surfing the web for items he needed in refurbishing his home. Del.icio.us was created by Joshua Schachter because he was frustrated with the inadequacy of browser bookmarketing. Flickr's Caterina Fake brought the power of tagging to photos. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Side note, both del.icio.us and Flickr have been acquired by Yahoo.

Of course we all understand this problem of find things and then wanting to make use of them later. It isn't just on-line information. Remember the last time you read an article put it down and now can't find it. Or hanging your pictures, you put down your hammer and now - where the heck is it? Or you put that important document in your filling cabinet and now you can't remember which folder.

Tagging helps with this because you can put any number of tags on the same item. This means however you are thinking of a particular item the moment you are looking for it you are much more likely to find it.

But there needs to be more than just tagging, and saving. As we move to Singularity we need to transition from searching to watching, finding to notification and have it all integrated into our immediate context and location.

How about combining Jeteye, Del.icio.us, PubSub, Rrove and Watson into a single service that works from wherever you are.

Stay tuned for more.

From The Desk
From the Desk

Richard Treadway

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Software 2006

Pundit Panel
Pundit Panel at Software 2006

I'm attending the Software 2006 conference in Santa Clara for the next 2 days. MR Rangaswami puts together this conference annually to discuss the state of the enterprise software business.

This morning Ray Lane gave his annual view of the software industry. Nothing new here but Ray always has some good insights. Some key points from Ray. Successful software companies have three attributes.

  1. Low resistance to value (Clear value, immediately recognized with decision to start as a no brainer)
  2. Viral TCO (customers pay after value is created to further viral adoption)
  3. Viral Installability (one button install to be up and running)

Viral is what it's all about.

Unfortunately the conference has turned into a forum for Indian outsourcing. There maybe some Indian outsourcing companies that aren't here but I wouldn't know them.

This afternoon we suffered through 2 shameless corporate pitches by Dave DeWalt, President of EMC Software and Thomas Kurian, SVP of Middleware at Oracle. I've never heard someone use more words to say nothing.

More tomorrow.

From The Desk
From the Desk

Richard Treadway