It was just more than a year ago that Gordon and I started Infovark. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long since we left world of enterprise systems consulting to build our own product. We’ve learned a lot about writing code, marketing products, and running a software startup. It’s experience we couldn’t have gotten working anywhere else, for anyone else. It’s been hard, hard work. It’s also been a lot of fun.

You might have noticed that the rate at which we post to this blog has slowed lately. That’s because, in anticipation of our one year anniversary, we’ve been planning for the next year, which will bring lots of changes. We’ll conduct a public beta and launch our first product. We’ll set up a satellite office in Australia for Gordon. We’ll establish our revenue model and pricing. And we’ll do all of these things while remaining engaged in the Enterprise 2.0 community.

We started Infovark because we had a particular itch to scratch. We felt that many of the solutions being sold to business professionals failed to deliver on improved productivity or collaboration grounds. We felt like there were tools and technologies that could help, if you could put them together in the right way. We felt that doing so might require totally new approaches, ones that broke with old habits and legacy thinking. And we knew that was going to be a hard sell.

So we’ve been reaching out to a few folks. Some will help us with interface design, some with business development, some with performance and testing. Gordon will catch up with some of his mates in Australia that might want to pitch in. I’ll be looking for talent here in the U.S. But good people and good ideas come from everywhere. We aim to be the smallest, most innovative global company you’ve ever seen. We want to change the world of work for the better.

So here’s to the coming year!

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Mark Masterton left a great comment on my post about contribution and discovery. It’s prompted me to think some more about contribution engines.

As an example, I see FriendFeed as a contribution engine. It collates and collects all of your social interactions from multiple social channels, and unifies them into a central stream that clearly shows what you have been doing on the various different colored social highways that make up the internet. This means that I don’t have to sign up to a zillion different services to find out what my friends are doing.

But what about your workplace? Most of the work that’s going on in those channels isn’t happening in an existing RSS-enabled application in the cloud. And, despite how much Google and Amazon nag us, a lot of that content is going to stay behind the firewall. It’s not discoverable. It’s not sharable, or taggable.

By a contribution engine, I mean a tool designed to find the Dark Matter. There is still a lot of content that is not visible — not REST exposed.  A lot of this content isn’t taggable because it’s the byproduct of personal communication in direct channels — like email — and it’s contained in business artifacts like documents and reports that people want to retain inside the organization. If we want to connect the enterprise, we can’t ignore this fact. We can’t just plonk a giant server in the middle of the organization and say, “Do all your work in there starting… now!”

In any organization, content is all over the place. Some is on share drives, some is in sharepoint, some is in the ERP systems, and lots of it is lying around on people’s personal computers. Is it reasonable to move all of this into the cloud? Why not just publish it from where it sits?

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