Companies to Watch
Curious about what companies are hot in Silicon Valley? Every few weeks we'll be writing reviews of companies and products that you should definitely keep an eye on and publishing them in the 280 Insider newsletter as well as here on our site. Have a company you think should be included? Contact us...
Click here to get the PM 2.0 newsletter and have reviews of hot new companies emailed to you...
The 280 Group Hot List:
JotSpot
WIKI Application PlatformBitPass
Incredibly easy micropayment serviceFireTide
Never pull Ethernet again
Socialtext:
The ultimate free-form collaboration tool
LinkedIn:
Use the Internet to leverage your network in a low-risk, highly-effective manner
Plaxo Contact Manager:
Automated Contact Management Software
Omniva Policy Systems:
Complete control over corporate email to limit abuse and risk
JotSpot
****************************
One of the hot new companies that caught our eye recently was JotSpot. Founded by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer (founders of Excite), JotSpot recently received Series A funding from Redpoint and Mayfield, and just released a beta version of their first product a few weeks ago.
JotSpot is entering the WIKI market. For those of you who don't know what a WIKI is, it is a website or intranet that allows a user to add content but also allows that content to be edited by any other user. Think of it as a free form bulletin board that teams and groups can quickly set up and use for projects and to collaborate.
JotSpot is trying to take this to the next level by providing capabilities that make is simple to build full Web applications in a WIKI environment. If they succeed perhaps they will be to WIKIs what FileMaker was to databases years ago - an elegant tool that allowed novices to build very useful and powerful applications.
We wrote about another WIKI company named Socialtext around this time last year. As the market matures and more competitors enter it will be interesting to see if users catch on to the WIKI concept and usage becomes widespread. Who knows, maybe you'll be using one with your team before you know it.
BitPass
****************************
We've been watching BitPass since we first saw them do a demo last Fall at the Silicon Valley 4.0 conference. BitPass offers a micropayment service that is incredibly easy to use. They describe themselves "The easy way to buy and sell online content and services".
With BitPass, spenders purchase online content or services by buying a virtual prepaid debit card using payment methods such as PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or American Express. They can then make purchases on BitPass enabled sites with just one or two clicks (no software downloads required). This is great for content such as photos, comics, ebooks and digital materials, and has the potential to open up low end, high-volume markets that couldn't be effectively reached before.
Setting up a BitPass account and enabling it on your website also appears to be fairly easy. They claim that no programming is required, that it is compatible with most web servers and that most users will be able to start accepting payments in as little as 30 minutes. Payments can be as low as one penny, and there are no setup or monthly fees (however, a 5-15% transaction fee is incurred)
Funded by Garage Technology, Cardinal Venture and Amicus,
BitPass has recently appointed Michael ODonnell (formerly of Salon Media
Group) as CEO. Several dozen companies have signed up to use their system
- it will be interesting to watch over the next year or two as they attempt
to get to critical mass.
FireTide
****************************
One of the hot companies we've been watching is Firetide. Funded by Menlo
Ventures, HMS Ventures, and Hawaiian Electric Industries, FireTide is
a wireless networking company. They have just shipped their first product
and have brought on a talented new CEO by the name of Bo Larsson. Additionally
they also just won the Best of Show at the Wi Fi planet show.
At first glance FireTide appears to be yet another mesh networking company. But when you look a little deeper you realize that they provide a very unique and compelling solution. The HotPoint Wireless Mesh Router, their first product, completely eliminates the need to pull Ethernet cables. Anyone who is familiar with setting up networks knows that when you set up a network one of the biggest hassles is getting Ethernet ports to where you need them. Even if you are setting up a Wi Fi network, you still need to have an Ethernet port to plug in your access point. Thus if you want to network a building larger than a few hundred feet (802.11b only supports about 300 feet), you have to pull wire, which makes it expensive and time-consuming.
FireTide HotPoint routers provide a simple and reliable alternative to standard LAN cabling, forming automatic, self-healing networks. For situations where a network must be set up rapidly (emergency hospitals, army command and control centers, trade shows) or where it is impractical or too costly to pull wire, FireTide has a very compelling solution.
The company has dozens of customers up and running
with the HotPoint router, and have even provided Wi Fi for the downtown
area of Los Gatos. Just go to the park area at the end of North Santa
Cruz Boulevard and you can log on.
****************************
Review of Socialtext Workspace
The Ultimate Free-Form Collaboration Tool
One of the hot new companies we've been following is Socialtext. Headed up by Ross Mayfield, they just launched their official 1.0 version of Socialtext WorkSpace.
For those of you who are blogging fans, Socialtext Workspace provides a powerful combination of features that allow blogging to meet Wiki (Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser). The result: a collaboration environment that lets you and your team work, communicate and collaborate the way that you want to, free of pre-defined, software-imposed rules.
Socialtext actually has several products (Workspace for team collaboration, EventSpace for conference and event management, and Kwikspace for teams that want to install an open source alternative). For the purposes of this article we'll be looking at WorkSpace.
I first came across Socialtext Workspace when working with a team of people at one of my startup clients. Working from virtual offices, with little face time and many things to get done, we needed a way for people to post and comment on what was happening in the company in real time. Multiple email threads were constantly flying back and forth, taking up precious time and energy that could have been better spent.
WorkSpace is based on the premise that everyone is very busy and gets too much email already. Yet they want to get work done together efficiently as a team. They may also be geographically dispersed, so there isn't the "talk to you in the hall" effect that keeps everyone in a small company or group informed.
Socialtext describes WorkSpace as Enterprise Social Software - the easiest way for groups to work together. Think of Workspace as an open-ended bulletin board for your team. Anyone can post. Anyone can respond. Everyone can see what the recent changes are, and what the most important threads are. Postings can be grouped by category, and categories can be viewed to see what is new and updated.
There is an email notification function so that you can receive a message when things change (if you want to), as well as user preferences for editing and layout of pages. Postings can be made to WorkSpace via email, if some of your team members prefer to work in that mode. Attachments can be added to each posting (i.e. latest version of the product launch plan, etc.), and users can set up a "My Favorites" section to track the threads that are most important to them.
Workspaces are password protected, and multiple workspaces can be set up for each user. The content is primarily text-based, so page loading and navigation are fast and efficient. The interface makes it easy to add new users, and getting them up and running takes only a few seconds. And of course, there is a search function to help you find relevant postings quickly.
Typical applications for WorkSpace might include:
- Product development teams: Engineers, Product Managers, QA, Tech writers and others who are working together to ship the next version of a product. Team members can post project plans, open issues, questions to be resolved, meeting minutes/agendas, action items or anything else that is a hot topic that others need to be aware of.
- Coordinating and managing consulting or IT projects. I can imagine using WorkSpace with future consulting clients and having a category for each of my deliverables, including initial task and milestone information as well as project status. If my clients want to check on the status of the project they can just pull up the workspace and get an instant update.
- Sharing customer research and/or competitive analysis. Socialtext provides a great centralized location to post data about what your customers want or what your competitors are up to.
- Managing product launches. With Socialtext you could set up one centralized place for launch plans, sales tools, FAQs, product updates and other information so that your sales force, PR folks and the rest of your team knew to look there for the latest and greatest.
- Business Planning. Set up a Socialtext WorkSpace so that all of the managers in your department can collaborate during your company's annual business planning process. Excel templates can be posted, along with the most current versions of budgets and expense estimates.
Socialtext is available as a hosted service or a pre-configured appliance, depending on your needs. Because it is hosted this means that you and your team can try it and buy it without having to get IT approval or installation assistance.
Getting started with Socialtext WorkSpace is easy - there's even a 30 day free trial so you can easily set up one or multiple workspaces and get hooked into its power. Or you can try out the Socialtext Public Workspace to get a sense of what the product is all about. Pricing starts at $30 per user per month or $995 per year for 5 user starter packs, and corporate licensing pricing is available.
It took me a few minutes to get used to WorkSpace and really begin to explore its feature set. That said, it's easy to click around and find what is available. In many ways it is refreshing that WorkSpace doesn't use the Microsoft "Wizards for everything" model of user interaction - instead they provide fast and easy access and let the user discover what is possible.
There are a few of things I'd like to see in the next version of WorkSpace. These include some pre-defined templates (it would be great to have some examples to look at to get a sense of new and powerful ways to use the software). Sub-categories would also be useful - as larger teams use the product the volume may become too big in specific categories and they may need to be further divided. Additionally, a self-running training demo in flash or HTML would be great too, and would have helped me get to the power user features in the product even faster.
Socialtext WorkSpace is an excellent first pass
at a product that truly brings out the power of web-based collaboration
for groups. Because it is so simple to get up and running, and so addictive
and useful once you begin using it, it is destined to build a large and
loyal following of users.
Review of LinkedIn
Use the Internet to leverage your network in a low-risk, highly-effective
manner
As a Marketing and Product Management consultant here in Silicon Valley I rely heavily on my network and the contacts I have built over the last 15 years. Much of my work comes through these relationships and corresponding referrals.
I was recently invited by an acquaintance to join LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), a new online networking service (if you know me I HIGHLY encourage you to join LinkedIn and invite me as a connection so that we can share our networks). This LinkedIn review covers what the company and product are all about, and why I believe it is a tremendously valuable tool.
LinkedIn is one of the new Social Computing companies. The most well-known company in this space is Friendster, which uses a six degrees of separation model to help people meet others for dating and to build new friendships. Friendster has enjoyed much success thus far, with extensive media coverage, top-tier funding and a user base that is approaching 3 Million users since April of 2002.
What Friendster does for dating and meeting new friends, LinkedIn does for professional networking, providing a powerful and efficient new way of using your network. The difference is that because it deals with the valuable resource of your professional connections, Linked In takes careful steps to ensure that your network remains protected and is not abused.
LinkedIn was founded by Reid Hoffman, formerly EVP at PayPal, and has a seasoned and talented team behind it. The company was recently funded by Sequoia Capital to the tune of $4.7 million.
LinkedIn is all about providing a more efficient mechanism for using your network, while maintaining the quality and reputation of your interactions. It is a great tool for:
- Looking for a job
- Finding new companies to partner with
- Connecting VCs and entrepreneurs
- Finding consultants or contractors
- Locating industry experts
LinkedIn is currently in Beta and is free to sign up and get going. If you begin to use the service a lot and make connections they ask you to take a short survey about the service, payment options, etc. It is likely that when they begin charging they will either use a monthly service fee or a per-contact transaction fee.
When you join LinkedIn or accept an invitation to join, you set up a profile for yourself. This includes what you are currently doing, previous positions, areas of expertise, companies you have worked for in the past and what you are interested in having people contact you about.
The next step is to add some of your own connections from your network. Inviting them to join is easy - you provide their email address and use LinkedIn's standard invitation message or customize it to tell them a little more about why you are inviting them.
You can also have LinkedIn scan your contacts (if you use MS Outlook) to tell you who you already know that is in the system. This makes it easy to connect with them since they already understand the benefits of LinkedIn and are already signed up. LinkedIn gives you a list of people in your Outlook database that have LinkedIn accounts and you simply choose which ones you want to connect with and send them an email suggesting that you link up.
After you invite connections you can get endorsements. Endorsements are key - they help build your reputation and give further credibility to the connections and network you are identified with. In fact, according the folks at LinkedIn if you have endorsements you are far more likely to have people contact you with requests.
Once you have invited some contacts and set up a profile you can search for potential connections using keywords, physical distance from your location, number of connections the person has, number of degrees the person is away from you, and reputation/number of endorsers. LinkedIn provides search results back to you, showing you the people who meets your criteria, how many degrees away from you they are, and their profiles.
When you first start searching, you'll find that LinkedIn has an impressive group of initial users. In many ways LinkedIn is like a Who's Who of Silicon Valley venture capital and the startup world.
If you find someone you want to connect with, LinkedIn will tell you who you are connected to them through and how many degrees of separation exist. From there you can send an email to this person (or through a chain of people) asking them to forward a request to the person you wish to meet.
If the person doesn't want to connect you to their acquaintance they can politely decline via email. If they are okay connecting you they can easily do so.
This is where LinkedIn's philosophy and design become so important and differentiate it. Because you can't directly see who is connected to each of your connections, the ability to abuse or circumvent the system is minimized. And in many ways it is self-policing and self-regulating - if someone contacts you too many times you can choose to either ignore their requests or end the connection.
As you interact with and spend additional time with LinkedIn your results change over time. The more connections you add, the greater your reach and the possibility for making meaningful connections. And as your connections invite other people, your network continues to grow.
There are a few things that we'd like to see added to LinkedIn. One is the ability to choose which path you use to contact other people. Currently if you are connected to someone through more than one contact the system decides for you which one to use. If you have already made a few requests through that person or you don't know them as well as another contact you might want to use a different route for making the connection. A second feature we'd like to see is the ability to save search queries. Both of these things are fairly minor - overall the system is easy to use and very effective.
I found that with LinkedIn I was able to pretty easily build up a core group of connections, and I had few LinkedIn problems. Using it is simple and non-obtrusive, and when I invite others they are usually pretty intrigued about joining the service. I've got about 40 connections right now am adding a few more each week, focusing on quality people that I know well.
If you know me, give LinkedIn a try and invite me to join your network!
Plaxo Review
Review of Automated Contact Management Software
One of the hot companies that we've been following is Plaxo. Founded by Sean Parker (one of the Napster founders) and two Stanford engineers, Plaxo is funded by Sequoia Capital and Globespan Capital Partners, and boasts a world-class board including Ram Shriram, Michael Moritz, Jon Callaghan and Tim Koogle.
Plaxo's flagship product offering is Plaxo Contacts, an elegant and much-needed solution for keeping your contact information up to date automatically. Integrated seamlessly and elegantly into Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Plaxo eliminates the chore of having to manually update your contact information. When a person moves or changes companies, Plaxo instantly updates their information for you, and even sends you an email letting you know that the details have been taken care of.
To review and install Plaxo we simply downloaded the client software (only 450k). The first version of Plaxo is free. It is likely that future versions with enhanced features will be offered for an additional cost (much like the RealPlayer model - the basics are free and the full-featured version is available for a small price). Right now there is support for Outlook and Outlook Express, though support for other services such as web-based email are a natural and likely future direction for Plaxo.
The installation is straightforward and you are given several options to ensure that you are comfortable with the process. For instance, you have the choice to keep your information private, or you can choose to wait until later to announce to others that you have joined Plaxo. There is also an automatic backup of your contact information so that you can easily uninstall the product later if you choose to.
During installation you are given the option to let the people in your Outlook address book know that you have joined Plaxo. All of your contacts show up in a list, and whichever ones you check will get a friendly email letting them know your current contact details and asking then to update you with their current contact information. Their replies are automatically entered into your Outlook or Outlook Express address book.
From that point on, any time you or anyone you are connected with in the Plaxo Contacts network updates or changes their contact information it will be automatically and effortlessly updated. Additionally, a Plaxo toolbar is added to Outlook that gives you access to synchronizing with the Plaxo server, updating contacts and several other options.
Plaxo also gives you access to your contacts from any computer - simply log in to their website and your contacts database is available via a web-based interface. A nice secondary benefit of this (particularly if you don't use a PalmPilot or PDA) is that you always have a backup of your contacts in case things go awry with your computer or hard drive.
One of the best things about using Plaxo is that every day or two you'll get a notice indicating that someone else that you know has joined the Plaxo network. As time goes on your address book becomes more and more automated, and the value of the service continues to increase.
Two other features that are very useful are Click-To-Connect and Plaxo Signatures. Click-To-Connect shows up as an icon in the upper right hand corner of your mail window that shows whether or not the sender is in your address book. If they are not, with one click you can add them to your address book and send then an update request asking for their full contact information. Plaxo signatures is a simple wizard that enables users to create a sophisticated HTML e-mail signature based on the information in their Plaxo business cards.
With a slew of features and a good user experience, Plaxo feels like a mature product. The company is serious about incorporating feedback and making Plaxo Contacts a great product that elegantly solves the problem of contact management. We found very few Plaxo problems when using it.
Using Plaxo feels a lot like using the early versions of Hotmail - you could tell that it was going to catch on and that a lot of people were going to use it. Plaxo Contacts has all of the signs of a viral product destined to take off in large numbers. If it does it will save us all a great deal of time and trouble.
Plaxo review by 280 Group. 10/03.
Omniva Policy Systems Review
Complete control over corporate email to limit abuse and risk
With email being so ubiquitous and easy to use a whole new range of problems have cropped up for smart entrepreneurs to solve. Getting rid of unwanted spam is one of the obvious ones, but there are others that are perhaps just as critical to solve. In particular, how do you control who reads your email and where it travels once you send it?
Years ago back at Apple when we used Applelink, a primitive early email system (though it had advantages over SMTP in the you could see who had read your message and where they had forwarded it). I once sent out a critical and confidential email and a week later checked to see who had read it and forwarded it. It turns out it was sent to over 1800 people inside and outside the company. This is NOT what I expected to happen, and the content of the email would have been dramatically different had I known in advance.
One company working on this problem is Omniva. I first came across them when they launched at DEMO several years ago under the name Disappearing Inc. Funded by Kleiner Perkins, Red Rock, and Mitsui, Omniva's initial product concept was simple and compelling - put a time limit on your email so that after a certain point in time it would expire, "disappear" and become unretrievable. Through the use of encryption keys on servers the product worked with virtually any mail system and required no client software for the receiver to read a message that would expire later.
A while back I did some work for Omniva, writing a reviewer's guide that helped them get very positive press when they announced a new version of their Omniva Policy Manager software. Policy Manager allows you to "transparently enforce secure messaging policies to protect critical business information." The feature set has expanded quite impressively since then. Senders can limit the ability to copy, paste, print, forward outside of the corporation, and more. Additionally there are now built-in functions for auditing if a legal battle ensues and email needs to be audited as part of the discovery process.
This functionality is so mission-critical and so important to managing corporate risk that we believe it will ultimately be built right into Exchange server and all other email systems (particularly with Microsoft's recent focus on control of documents.) If for no other reason, Bill Gates will want to add it so that he can limit the email problems that have plagued the company and gotten him and the Microsoft crew into hot water.
The challenge for Omniva is the same for all Enterprise
software companies: prove that your product is absolutely critical, endure
long sales cycles and custom requests from each Fortune 1000 customer
that demand them, and build a revenue stream and get proven traction.
From the outside it appears they are making progress. Time will tell…
Resources
BLOGS/ARTICLES
White Papers
PM 2.0 Newsletter
Product Management 2.0
Cool
Products Blog
Marketing
Strategy
Opinions
OTHER
SV Marketing
Directory
Seth
Godin Bull Market
Product
Mgmt Assn's
PM Job Description
Companies to
Watch
PM Software Comparison
PM Webinars
BOOKS
Book
Reviews
Product
Mgmt Book
Product
Marketing Books
Best
Marketing Books
FREE
TOOLS
MRD Samples
Feature
Priority Matrix
Dev Program Roadmap
Bug & Feature Database
AdWords
ROI Calculator
Competitive Matrix
Launch Marketing Budget
Adwords Strategies
Brian Lawley runs the 280 Group, a Marketing and Product Management Consulting firm in the Silicon Valley Bay Area. If you need an acting Vice President, Director, or interim Product Manager or Marketing Manager, the 280 Group can provide you with hand-picked, high-quality talent. For assistance with product launches, writing market requirements documents, customer research, developing sales tools, competitive analysis, positioning, pricing or other Marketing or Product Management tasks contact the 280 Group for a free quote and proposal.
Plaxo and Omniva and LinkedIn are trademarks of Plaxo, Omniva Policy Systems and LinkedIn respectively.