Vancouver’s First Cloud Camp is in two more days!

What will you do at Cloud Camp? You will learn how to take advantage of cloud computing to do things you could not do before, to save money, to be more flexible and agile. You can get your questions answered about security, privacy, and compliance. You can learn about and understand the differences between public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid clouds. Hear from your peers who are building and developing on the cloud about how they have stopped buying and installing and maintaining physical servers.

CloudCamp is a free full-day “unconference” where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing.

End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to attend and participate.

We’d like to ask your help to spread the word. You can do that by:

• Sharing us on Facebook
• Letting your LinkedIn contacts know you’re attending the event
• Tweet about us using the hashtag #Cloudcamp or full phrase “#Cloudcamp Vancouver”
• Email your friends and invite them to come.

The URL for sign-ups is: http://www.cloudcamp.org/vancouver.

Sign-up closes Friday night at midnight

Details are below as a reminder:

DATE/TIME: This Saturday March 13, 2010, 9:00am

LOCATION: Discovery Park, 887 Great Northern Way (map)

COFFEE and LUNCH is provided and/or feel free to bring your own.

COST: FREE! (bring your friends!)

AGENDA: (this may change)
9:00-9:30am Registration
9:30-9:45am Welcome & Intros
9:45-10:00am Lightning Talk
10:00-10:30am Unpanel
10:30-11:00am Organize Unconference
11:15-12:00pm Session 1
1:00-1:15pm Lunch
1:15-2:00pm Breakout Session #2
2:00-3:00pm Breakout Session #3
3:00-3:30pm Wrap-up Session
Evening – ad-hoc dinner/drinks somewhere??? (at your own expense!)

We would like to thank our sponsors who have made this event possible.

Venue: Discovery Park
Gold: RightScale, Backbone Systems
Silver: Peer 1, Tropo, Agreement Express, Layer 7
Media/Promotion: Bootup Entrepreneurial Society, BCTIA, TechVibes

Thanks from the Cloud Camp Vancouver team.

Dear (Friend):

You asked about my view on the cleantech sector after I took some time to survey it. Let me answer by starting with the big picture and the thing that prompted me to look at cleantech in the first place. Then I will be better able to answer your question at the bottom.

First, the global view.

Globally, we are standing at the confluence of two exponentially increasing tides. The power of one may help us address the risks of the other, but only if we engage them both head-on. One is the curve of resource usage, the other is the curve of technological change.

Curve 1: Overshoot and collapse and “peak everything”

We have used up half of our forests and half our our fish stocks on the planet to-date and given our “peak everything” 3.5%/yr compounding resource usage curve, we will use the same amount of resources in the next 20 years as we used in the last 260 years. It is widely understood that we have already exceeded the capacity of this planet to support our continued growth as a species by between 20-30% and are already going to have to plan for a “controlled crash.”

Curve 2: Double exponential technological advances

Simultaneously, technology is developing at a double exponential rate such that we can not even comprehend what our world may look like by 2050 from a technology perspective. A brief reminder: 30 steps taken 1 foot a a time moves you forward 30 feet. 30 steps taken exponentially moves you forward 1.07 billion feet. It’s hard for our brains to grasp. The next 10 years will be like our last 100 in terms of new technology and that is accelerating.  If predictions by people such as Ray Kurzweil come true, we could have nano solar devices providing 100% of humanity’s power requirements by 2030,  the wealthy and maybe even middle class will be iiving long healthy lives free of disease and many of them will be integrated into computers and robots. If we choose our technologies wisely, even the poorest will have the benefit of low-cost desalination and solar power.

In terms of scenarios, it will already probably be either a huge cliff, a controlled step-down crash, or in a miracle of miracles, a bounce off the bottom and a move to a regenerative world. Hopefully we still have those options.

Actions we need to take:

We need to understand and act on the knowledge that comes from both of these curves.

Regarding the first curve, we need to stop the denial, anticipate the issues, structure responses that address both the rational and irrational causes of inaction, address our flawed, emotional, homeostatic tendencies, and work towards creating a regenerative world, rather than the destructive negative overuse cycle we are in.  We know a lot about why we do not act. We don’t need “more information”, we need to build plans that take into account our very human responses to things. Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter‘s work is key here.

Regarding the second curve, we need to stop sticking our head in the sand about technology and embrace and channel technological development. Relinquishment of technologies won’t work. That would be like standing idly by saying “I will have no part in that river coming dangerously close to the village” when that river is doubling in volume and power every year. We can’t stop it, but we can channel it. We need to slay our sacred cows by revisiting nuclear power (which is emissions free) and genetically modified foods.  We need to use every advantage we have to both increase resource generation and regeneration and also to decrease resource usage per person. This will require structuring government incentives for radical expansion of green technologies.  The Sustainable Development Technology Canada program is a great start. We need more. We need to think like Vinod Khosla who says “if we do not address maintech (building materials, concrete, water, chemicals, coal, oil, efficiency) and solve them at low-cost, that can get to market unsubsidized in China and India and scale to the whole planet, then we won’t solve our problems”. Since we don’t know where the innovations will occur, we need to structure capital to create massive “optionality” and R&D across the board, focusing on those areas that are most ripe for change / disruption / innovation and that are causing the biggest problems. Sadly, I think we should also continue to support companies and organizations like Space X and the LifeBoat foundation, both of which are trying to get off the planet in case we really make a mess and can’t live here any more.

We need to work the top line by increasing resources

We need to Increase outputs and resources and regeneration through restoration of forests, soils, forests, fisheries. We need to boost agricultural outputs (again) by raising land and water productivity and studying ways of producing protein more efficiently that with the standard corn-fed cattle approach. This includes continued research into genetically modified foods.

We need to work the bottom line by decreasing our resource usage per person

We need to also lower our resource use/person by restructuring economically through things like cap and trade, removal of subsidies on things like oil (we spend $700B annually across the globe subsidizing the exact wrong behaviours), restructure the energy landscape by decommissioning coal, shifting to renewables, pushing for all of the efficiency we can get now and every year going forward. We need to get MUCH better at urban design since in 30 more years, 80% of the planet will live in 3% of the surface area in cities and that means urban transportation, bikes, water use, city farming, squatter gentrification. We need to implement “third world” solutions in our own backyard – micro finance, entrepreneurial education, population stabilization (which happens automatically as people move to the city).

National leaders…aren’t leading

Global progress on our bigger issues is stalled. Copenhagen was widely regarded as a failure. Nations are too slow to act. China and the US refused to take material action at Copenhagen and that means that no other nations will follow. The US is frustrating cap and trade. Canada is also lagging. Within our borders, our provinces and territories are too heterogeneous and their populace has too many diverging interests.

We have structural capital issues that are impeding our ability to bring investment into Canada that will continue to haunt all forms of technology development, including cleantech, and they need to be addressed. The Section 116 problem has never been resolved and makes it difficult for investors to invest in Canada without great hassles. We need to fix this as it continues to scare US venture capital away and is causing a hollowing out of Canadian companies as US investors must move our companies south in order to invest in them. It’s easier for a US company to buy out and move a Canadian company than to simply invest in it.

This revolution will happen provincially, regionally and municipally:

BC is already the 10th largest “cleantech market” in North America.  We have top-notch universities that pump out research, we have core resource and mining people, law, and organizations in place that can be repurposed for cleantech company creation, financing, and implementation of things like carbon projects. We already have an excellent industry association leadership in the BCTIA, the Premier’s Technology Council is already very supportive of cleantech, and we have programs such as the newly launched CleanWorks BC marketing campaign intended to attract foreign investment to BC. We also have a large number of excellent cleantech companies here and we have strong core competencies in hydro electric power, power transmission, storage and battery technology, wastewater management, and bioenergy.

The Lower Mainland as a region and all of the cities inside it will be key. You can make a difference at the regional level. Cities are massive producers of the problem and they’re also massively incentivized to solve the issues for themselves – they are almost self-contained zones.

In Vancouver, we have a mayor who sees the benefit of working on all three pillars of sustainability: “people, planet and profit” as it is often referred to. He is building ties with Governor Schwarzenegger from California and Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room Initiative , among many other things. In short, he is trying to put Vancouver on the global map as a “Green Capital” in the world.

So what do we need to do next?

We need capital fixes. There are many others who know much more about this but I know that we have capital gaps. The exits are long and difficult for investors (10 years) for many of these green technologies and so many companies suffer or fail as do their investors.

We need to continue to back primary research at the universities that feeds into our technology landscape.

We need to build more funds that create small companies that can fail faster – allowing us to create promote “optionality” or the creation of as many options as possible.

We need to build a more unified province wide Cleantech BC association that unifies traditional energy, renewables, materials, efficiency, and water all into one cohesive strategic plan.

We need to survey our assets in the universities and our companies, scan the market for current and latent need and then really support those clusters where we can excel and build networks of inter-related and successful companies.

As a province, we need to realize we are competing globally, not within Canada.

As a province, we need to redefine “cleantech” to include all of our “maintech” – the stuff that will move the needle. That will require vision expansion and coaching. This means expanding our idea of “cleantech” from renewables to greening of the entire supply chain and all materials and energy usage.

We need to continue to push these changes bottom up because waiting for national governments (Canada, US, or otherwise) will take too long and be too ineffective. The only exception to that is major cap and trade policy and other regulation which mostly needs to happen federally. But even without it, cities and regions can adopt their own and enforce them locally as they’re doing now. It’s less effective but it’s a step until the national dithering is resolved.

The province must address issues of forest, agricultural land, fisheries and water restructuring in order to once again focus on maximizing sustainable, regenerative yields. One area I’m significantly concerned about here is water rights. It appears that we are selling off our water rights to foreign interests and that needs to be reversed. Peak water is right behind peak oil as a critical issue.

My final summary?

We have a lack of national leadership on the major environmental challenges ahead of us as evidenced by Canada’s embarrassing performance at Copenhagen, but that is countered by highly motivated provincial, regional, and municipal leaders. And we have a province filled with excellent cleantech companies, entrepreneurs, and teams that are highly capital efficient.

So, while my survey of the sector has tempered me with its long, difficult, unpredictable company builds and exits, the people working on those companies have excited me with their passion, vitality and energy for finding and creating solutions to our big challenges. That passion and energy is one of the key reasons I have decided not to return to the US and to instead, stay here and work to build BC’s local technology sector. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s get to it.

And if you’re interested in cloud computing, please remember to sign up to attend the full day Cloud Camp Vancouver being held on March 13 at Discovery Park on Great Northern Way. I’m co-hosting it with local cloudies Trevor Orzstynowicz and Jenny Yang, both of whom are building cloud companies here in Vancouver.

Thomas L. Friedman wrote an excellent post over here at the NY Times pleading with the climate folks to go on offense with a simple 50 page grade six english report on the state of the world. It’s awesome. Read it. I agree with all of it and particularly getting rid of the phrase “global warming” because idiots then say “well it was warm today here in Arizona so Al Gore is OBVIOUSLY a lying idiot.”(sigh)

Key quotes are below:

What’s real? In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

At the same time, they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense. The physicist Joseph Romm, a leading climate writer, is posting on his Web site, climateprogress.org, his own listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now.

Here are the points I like to stress:

1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.

The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.

2) Historically, we know that the climate has warmed and cooled slowly, going from Ice Ages to warming periods, driven, in part, by changes in the earth’s orbit and hence the amount of sunlight different parts of the earth get. What the current debate is about is whether humans — by emitting so much carbon and thickening the greenhouse-gas blanket around the earth so that it traps more heat — are now rapidly exacerbating nature’s natural warming cycles to a degree that could lead to dangerous disruptions.

3) Those who favor taking action are saying: “Because the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let’s buy some insurance — by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit — because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.” We will import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.

4) Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next great global industry.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Global Weirding Is Here – NYTimes.com.

It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals.

Congrats VS team and City of Berkeley on the launch!

]]> http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/city-of-berkeley-launches-their-climate-action-plan-using-vancouver-based-visible-strategies-see-it-wow/feed/ 0 http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/01/04/happy-new-year-everybody/ http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/01/04/happy-new-year-everybody/#comments Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:23:33 +0000 Troy Angrignon http://www.troyangrignon.com/?p=932 Here is a photo of the Club Fat Ass “Fat Ass 50 New Years Run” hosted by none other than Ean “Action” Jackson, who not only started this run 17 years ago but also managed to run it as his 100th ultra. And thanks to Sibylle Tinsel-Jackson, the Chief Fat Ass, for all the organizational effort as usual.

Congratulations to everybody who came out. Check out the full race report.

Note: Blue the dog and I didn’t do the 50, we did our own custom length of 24k and ended up at Delaney’s for a mocha to warm up from the rain and wind!

I thought it seemed appropriate to write Jeffrey a good-bye note here. I couldn’t write it yesterday as I had too many things going on in my head so here it is:

-

Dear Jeffrey:

Well, that damned cancer finally caught you. That’s rotten. I knew something was up when I saw MCB’s facebook posting a couple of days ago and then Jeff Clavier’s comment yesterday. Of course that led me to the lovely “Goodbye Jeffrey” post that your family posted on your blog which was really just perfect. I’ve never met Jessy, Brittany, or Mac but since they were your family, they must be cool. I’m sending them my hugs from afar.

Reading the comments over on that blog post made me think back to when I met you and the various interactions I have had with you over the past few years. I’m not sure if you remember but you and I first met in January 2007. I had just posted a blog post about wikis and you had responded, thoughtfully and with gratefulness for the positive comments and for the criticisms that would make your company better. I remember meeting you shortly thereafter at some industry event and as we both skimmed each other’s name tags and recognition registered on both of our faces, we both lit up as we remembered our recent exchange. I remember that moment so clearly. I remember thinking as we spoke, “this one is different.” You spoke passionately about Atlassian but also about music and blogging and building businesses and connecting people. I wasn’t meeting The President of Atlassian, I was meeting Jeffrey Walker, renaissance man, who played music, blogged, hacked, and was also the leader of a great little startup company.

I regret that we never got to spend a lot of time along the way although we would cross paths at the various enterprise 2.0 conferences and I would always feel like I was catching up with the old friend I never really made, if that makes any sense. I was always happy to see you anywhere we met up because you were just so darned friendly and authentic in the way you communicated and connected. I got to know you through your writing more than time spent together and then our paths diverged for a long while. When they reconnected, I learned about all of your trials with cancer and the impact that your writing had had on so many others. That prompted our final brief email discussion about this last round and how you were heading into it the same way you had the others, head held high, nice clothes on, new sunglasses on the head, and guitar in hand. And yes, that picture of you in the hospital in your cool new shirt and sunglasses does make you look bad-ass. I love it.

Then in a blink you were gone and we’re all now trying to figure out what that means and what to do with the hole you have left in so many different communities: your family, your Atlassian family, the greater Atlassian community, the Enterprise 2.0 community, the blogging community, the music community, and the entrepreneurial community. I know you will be missed in all of them.

Well, I for one am done with mourning and am moving on to celebrating and acting. You’ll be with me when I’m attending a conference and talking to my 200th (or 500th!) person and I remember that the most important thing I can do is be authentic and interested in them and in the world around us. I’ll also think of you when I continue to work on things I love with people whose company I enjoy,  and I will think of you when I put that work down for the day to go spend time doing other things I love to do like my sports and playing outside, remembering that work and family and creativity and friends all need to be blended together, just like your life and your blog.

Jeffrey, we didn’t spend enough time together but I want you to know that you had an impact from afar and that I’ll miss you and not forget you. I expect that where ever you are, you’re getting to play on an even larger stage, hack the universe and not just computers, and continue to build community. With any luck you’re up on some stage, jamming with the greats.

Rock on brother.

Part 1
Part 2

I have been thinking about this a lot as I’m currently living in Canada, but working with two clients in the U.S. For the most part, because so many teams are distributed, including their client’s teams, there is no “there” to go to, even if I did want to fly somewhere. The only way to have a “there” is if we all meet in the middle somewhere. So I might as well live in the country side surrounded by fresh air, mountains, stream, squirrels, and birds or go live in Costa Rica for a month as be in an office park in Silicon Valley. I have to say…I’m all for this.

There are more but those have been the ones I have spent the most time immersed in this last couple of years. I have worked quite intensely in teams that have used all three of these modes:

• Phone (audio)
• Google Talk (live chat) and Phone (audio)
• Skype (live and persistent chat and audio and video)

The experiences are all very different and it has become more pronounced for me lately. I wonder if anybody has had similar experiences. First, it helps to set some context. Every tool addresses a slightly different X/Y where X is persistence and Y is dynamism.  Bob Serr has a slightly fuzzy but interesting graphic of this on his site that I’ll link here:

Phone and video and IM are highly transient and very dynamic in nature. Intranets (particularly old-school ones!) were very persistent and static. That’s changing with products like Google Sites, Microsoft Sharepoint, ThoughtFarmer and MindTouch. Documents are moving up the dynamic scale too as they move out of Microsoft Office and into Google and Zoho Docs where they can be more dynamically updated. But you’ll find something called “Persistent chat” up in the corner and it’s something that has been around in many applications for years but it’s not something that people think much about.

My point is this: your collaboration platform dictates your collaboration space – how much area you cover in this graph. More is better.

My experience in working with Group 1 (phone people) is that it’s okay but human English language is not that great at describing things so I often have to share documents or my screen out so that the people on the other end of the call can really understand clearly what I’m discussing. It’s okay but it’s very limited and I often try to move these people towards more collaborative tools.

My experience in working with teams that are using AIM, Gtalk,  or MSN (does anybody use MSN any more?) is that we can have great one-to-one communication (open channel, ping person, chat, optionally move to phone, close conversation, close channel). Moving from that to group chat is simple enough (add a person to the chat) but isn’t frequently done because group chat was only added recently, so users are not accustomed to it. Most of the GTalk users don’t know that there IS a group chat or that you can do audio and video because those features have been slowly rolled into the product but since it was always used as a one to one chat channel, it’s kind of hard to envision as anything but. It’s a chat tool trying to move upstream to become an audio/video tool and it’s not getting there very quickly from a user adoption perspective.

My experience working with teams living in Skype is materially and significantly different. It’s like going from 1940 dial phones to 2020 Star trek video phones. You might think of it as “the way to make free international phone calls” but it really is much, much more. Firstly, the whole company can have an open “watercooler” channel for trash-talking and cross-company live chatter. It’s like the kitchen of the virtual office. It’s always there and you can wander in anytime to see who’s around or even what was said hours ago. That is the power of persistent chat. Second, you can instantly set up and tear down group chat rooms, sort of like pulling four people away from their desks and ducking into a meeting room at a real office. Third, if there’s a reason to do so, you can just hit CALL and all of the attendees are now on speakerphone. Ta-da – instant voice conference without having everybody dial into a freeconference on-demand line. Fourth, you can leave those rooms open sort of like project “war rooms” so that people can have discussion in there about the project and it doesn’t have to pollute other group chats. This is really just another persistent chat, but this time narrowed to a subset of people in just this one project. The great thing about persistent chat rooms is that if you’re logged off when people are chatting, the next time you log in, all of the missed conversation will be replayed for you. This is powerful stuff. Sixth, because video is built in and works very well, people tend to set up their laptops (or purchase new ones) with cameras and actually USE them. In a prior company, we bought all employees new MacBook Pros so that everybody had instantaneous access to skype audio and video without saying “oh hang on a sec – I have to find my camera and headset and plug it in.” Heck, even the new base 13″ MacBooks have them for $1000 each! Seventh, Skype now offers one-way screen sharing which means one less application to fiddle with if you just want to jump on a screen to demo something. It actually works pretty well. That to me is a bonus because there are definitely better screen-sharing applications out there.

Running distributed project teams is hard but it’s becoming the norm. Buying centralized real estate doesn’t make sense for a whole team anymore, not when you’re hiring people all over the globe in order to get the best people for the job. My recommendation is this: if you’re running a distributed project team, figure out how to ensure that they all have machines with built-in mics and cameras and use Skype. Set up a company wide room and a room for every project team. Teach your team how to quickly assemble ad-hoc team rooms and how to make team audio calls. It will give your team a sense of connectedness and the ability to assemble ad-hoc teams that is really really hard to achieve using anything else out there at the moment.  It’s hard to run a distributed team at the best of times. the more barriers you can remove (time-wise, setup-wise, technology-wise, excuse-wise), the better the communication, and the better the business can run.

Please add your thoughts to the comments below. I’d love to hear other people’s experiences here.

My question is this. For all of us uber connected networking, writing, blogging, conference-going wonks, is your system as horrendous? What great ideas have you found to tame the chaos?

Current view:

And here’s the resulting Venn diagram of how my stuff just DOESN’T stay connected in one large meaningful (and simple) way.

Will somebody fix this please? It’s only going to get worse. I’d happily pay somebody a monthly fee to manage all of this, keep it clean and de-duped, analyze my email to capture email and phone number changes, and let me never think about this ever ever again.

And Skype team: WTF are you doing way out there in space?

Cool talk. Worth watching. Great job Seth. Good tribe-finding and leading yourself!

Image via Wikipedia

Wow. I went to see MILK tonight at the Castro Theatre on Castro Street in San Francisco tonight. What an incredibly well done and powerful movie. It tells the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the United States.

It was incredible to be at ground zero for this story, in the same Castro Theatre that you see in the movie, to walk out the door to walk up the street where these events took place and where 30,000-40,000 people marched in silent vigil the night that Harvey Milk and George Moscone were murdered.

Given that it is Thanksgiving, I choose to use today to give thanks to those who have come before me in the gay community who have fought and struggled and been beaten and disrespected and who continued to hold their heads high, claim their place in the world, and say, “we will not be quiet and we will not go along to get along.”

Here we are thirty years later and the instead of Anita Bryant trying to take away civil rights, we now have the Church of the Latter Day Saints spending money and influencing voting to take away marriage rights from gays. Milk fought Prop 6. We just lost Prop 8. The names will change, and the battles will continue because as Martin Luther King said: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

So for Thanksgiving today, I’m going to say thanks to those people who have fought and who continue to fight. I’m going to thank all the people who came before me who have made it easy for those who came later to be truly themselves in the world.  I came out in the 1990′s. It was very easy for me because of the struggles of those people in the past. I know that my life would have been very different had I been born a few years earlier and I owe you all a debt of gratitude I can never repay. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

• updating the interface in version 2.0 which was released around August 2006. It is indeed cleaner and simpler than the original one by a long shot. Nice job on that guys.
• releasing an open source distribution of the wiki;
• they released a mobile version (I have not looked at this);
• they released an offline sync tool that allows you to take all or part of the wiki with you offline, make changes, and then resync them. I haven’t tested it but that is a really cool feature. Now that we’re building out a lot of pages in our wiki at our office, I can see the value in having that ability, although as with all syncing/replication, the devil is in the details.
• Basic text-editing, the core of the application is still really really basic. Tables are not functional at all, with no real ability to move rows and columns.
• They have also announced that they are working with Dan Bricklin on combining Wiki Calc with Social Text to create Social Calc. I pointed out to Ross that if they are planning on using a spreadsheet tool to also be a table tool, that I’m not sure I believe it. They are different animals with different behaviours (or at least, traditionally they have been.) He is attempting to use Social Calc to be a universal sheet / table editor right within the main wiki page. It will be interesting to see if that bet pays off. I’m all for simplification and innovation. If they can combine the two into one functional sheet/table editing mode, good for them.

So, what does this all mean? Has my opinion changed? Well in the days since I wrote this, Atlassian and Socialtext have continued to grow at reasonable rates, and the market for corporate wikis has heated up. Some of their competitors have been aquired and gone into the horizontal layer (Jotspot into Google). And they are now being joined by companies like Jive Software with Clearspace or Blogtronix and SystemOne. It’s time for me to do a new vendor bake-off I think…. Until then, here is my one-line horribly opinionated overview of the vendors at the moment but I realize I’ll have to do them all justice by reviewing them more fully very soon. Here goes:

• Atlassian/Confluence: solid enterprise wiki with on-premise and hosted options; an ecosystem of partners who extend the wiki functionality; a solid team running the company that is focused on revenue AND profit; and a somewhat dated interface which they are addressing in the next release; extensive management tools; really solid exporting functions. I  recommend this product, despite its UI quirks as they are focused tightly on being profitable above all and on knowing who their customers are.
• Socialtext/Socialtext Workspace: many deployment options: hosted, on-premise, appliance; nice looking and intuitive interface; focused on solving the hard problems (mobile, offline) but slow in dealing with the fundamentals (the text editor is still really bad – tables are awful and functionality is very limited); have been early and loud proponents of wiki use in corporations; very supportive of the open source movement; are working to integrate in Social Calc – too little too late? Jotspot has spreadhseets, Google has Google sheets, Zoho Office has sheets, everybody has sheets; less obvious management and administration tools; If you need mobile and offline use, Socialtext is your only option. The text editing is limited and the lack of useful tables is a non-starter for me but maybe not for others. Also the only remaining appliance/wiki vendor now that Jot is out of the picture.
• Blogtronix: doing some very interesting work by combining blogs, wikis, and social networking for the enterprise. I have not reviewed them but a friend called the other day to say, “These guys are “coooooooooooool” so I’m intending to check them out soon.
• Jive Clearspace: a single platform that combines blogs, wikidoc module (for creating documents collaboratively), forums, document management, identity, and reputation into one seamless whole. Great visual design; solid fundamentals (they are the forum technology used by Apple, SAP, and Citrix for example); new product though so may have standard v1.0 issues; wiki functionality is really aimed at document creation rather than large-scale wiki development. I’m just reviewing the product now but haven’t made any final determinations at this time.

Stepping up to the bigger picture, there are two overall trends going on here. Much if not all of the features found in collaboration tools today is going to be heading either down into the horizontal players infrastructure (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM/Lotus), or else becoming features inside other industry categories (enterprise software for example!) Second, I believe we’re about to see the same pattern we saw with enterprise applications many years ago: the rise and fall of stand-alone applications and then the rise of comprehensive suites, particularly as consolidation hits. In the social software space, I think that will play out as applications becoming suites and both of them being consolidated into larger vendors quickly. It should be an interesting year or two ahead of us.

If you know of one, please let me know.