Infovark

A tip from Mikal sent us browsing to Startup Warrior. It’s a mashup that uses the TechCrunch database and Google Maps to plot hotspots of tech activity.

ValleyWag reported the ten most concentrated tech regions.

All the usual suspects were there: Palo Alto, San Francisco, Mountain View, New York, Austin, Vancouver. Northern Virginia didn’t make the cut, though Infovark is listed.

On the positive side, we can now definitively state that we are THE best startup within a ten-block radius of the post office in Oakton, Virginia. That’s not something everyone can claim.

I’m still processing all of the information from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Due to some connectivity hiccups, Gordon and I weren’t able to document our reactions as the events unfolded. The good news is that we’ve both had some time to mull things over.

Vendors on Parade

Most of the conference was dominated by product vendors. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for the two of us; we got to check out the competition. Most of the other attendees were hoping for insight into other aspects of Enterprise 2.0, though. You can do your vendor and product research anytime online.

I mentally classified the vendors at the booths downstairs into four categories:

1. The Old Guard. The usual enterprise software vendors, like OpenText, Microsoft, IBM, and EMC, touted their “2.0″ offerings. Their pitch was that E2.0 relies on a bunch of foundational technologies that are already present in the enterprise (and in their product stacks). Collaborative technologies are just another layer in your enterprise architecture. These vendors largely ignored the cultural and social implications of Enterprise 2.0.
2. The Barbarians at the Gates. The largest vendor contingent consisted of companies repackaging Web 2.0 tools for use within organizations. Some of them, like Socialtext, Atlassian, and Jive, had been around for a while. Others were young startups. Their pitch was that Web 2.0 had proven itself on the public web and could also be made to work inside organizations. While they embraced the cultural shifts, they didn’t address issues of legacy data or integration with existing systems and processes.
3. The Enablers. A handful of vendors showcased specific technologies. Veodia, for example, showed off their video streaming technology. Sun highlighted their series of embeddable social widgets. Their narrow focus made their pitches more cohesive, but it was hard to tell whether they expected to be bought by end users or OEM’d by the other vendors.
4. The Odd Ducks. At every conference, there’s always a few vendors that seem out of place. Often, they can tell you the most interesting stories. Sometimes, they leave you wondering what their marketing department was thinking. In the emerging Enterprise 2.0 market, there were quite a few ducks quacking, but I can’t say any of them made a real splash.

And Infovark? Where would we appear in this list? Well, considering our product isn’t for sale yet, we fall into the hidden fifth vendor category: The Silent Ones. We were there to listen and learn from the other attendees. We were one of the companies just doing market research, trying to gauge whether our solution and approach makes sense.

More Than a Trade Show

It’s unfortunate that nearly every conference devolves into a vendor showcase. In the case of Enterprise 2.0, I think it’s far too early for any vendor to claim that they have a solution. We haven’t finished defining the problem yet. Yes, Web 2.0 technology enables different communications paths and organizational structures, but what are these different channels good for? Are they more effective than traditional 1.0 approaches? My gut says that they are, but if we want to move beyond a tiny community of early adopters, we’ll need more than gut feelings to guide us.

It’s a funny thing working for a “stealth” startup. There’s two very diametric forces at work. In one corner, you have the notion that you aren’t willing to share precisely what you’re working on with everyone until you’re sure that it’s ready. And in the other, the fact that as a young organization, you really want to engage with potential customers and partners already in the kind of space that you’re aiming to get to.

This kind of “Come Here - Go Away” paradox is pretty common in startups and their blogs (ours included).

But, after a bunch of long hours writing code, and consulting with designers, and doing other fairly insular activities, Dean and I have decided that we couldn’t possibly miss the big Enterprise 2.0 Conference. So, we’re dusting off our nice clothes, and emerging from the comfortable darkness of the Infovark Burrow to join everyone in Boston next week.

We’ll be in town Tuesday to Thursday - so if you happen to be able to make it, and you’d like to catch up and talk with us about Enterprise 2.0, the stuff we’re working on, the stuff you’re working on, (or any thing at all) — we would absolutely love to see you! You can leave us a comment here, find us on twitter, or via email at info@infovark.com.

Dean and I are leaving the Burrow today to visit the kids at George Marshall High School. We’ve been invited to talk to a couple of senior classes about running a startup, our product, our business plan, and generally share how Infovark came to be.

We’re really excited to be given the opportunity to speak, so we took a few days out from our hectic schedule to put together some slides and prepare a talk.

Thinking back to when I was a fresh-faced young graduate, entering the business world for the first time, one of the really important lessons that I remember was when I realized that business systems tend to change much slower than I would have liked. And not just the adoption of new systems — but the very ideas that underpin the design of those systems take a long time to evolve.

I like to refer to the problem as one of legacy thinking — so as to distinguish it from legacy systems.

Take for example, the replacing of paper filing solutions with digital systems. This has happened over a period of about 20 years (and it’s still going on today). But initially, these computer systems were just electronic versions of those paper systems. They held onto a lot of ideas from the past:

• That information can only exist in one place at a time.
• That originals were innately different from copies.
• That information took up physical space, and you could only retrieve it from that space.

And so the systems that we built were kind of like Virtual Filing Cabinets. Files within folders within drawers and so on. But none of those points apply to digital information. We had new tools to manage the data, but we were still using old paradigms to organize it.

It wasn’t until the rise of the Internet search engine — and particularly Google — that people started entertaining the notion that you could perhaps manage information without a comprehensive underlying taxonomy.

People’s willingness to let go of old ideas is the only thing that can really facilitate new ways of working.

On that note, we’d better go. We don’t want to be late for class!