Most of the time

Launch Silicon Valley 2007 -- June 5, 2007 at Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, CA

At this year's event, Guy Kawasaki will speak. From the SVASE site, yesterday:

Launch: Silicon Valley 2007 is THE premier event designed specifically to give you the opportunity to stay on top of the latest emerging technologies, products and startups. And as a special bonus, hear Guy Kawasaki explain "How I Launched a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for only $10,918.09"

I was part of the steering committee for this event last year. Companies looking for funding or partnerships sent a two-page brief and the winners got to pitch their product and set up a mini-booth. The variety of companies was what struck me most, and the quality of those selected made the event valuable for the attendees. One of my favourites, iBloks, was there and they've been a mainstay of Microsoft's Vista launch programs ever since. If you want to see very promising companies at an early stage in their growth, this is a great forum.

Transpara: Visual KPI's for smart phones and Office 2007

I worked a while back with a company called OSIsoft. They do great things in real time performance management: anything to do with visualizing time-series data from oil wells, energy transformers, turbines, and so on.

It was a blast working with OSIsoft as they put a specific business solution on top of the platform software that I focus on. In addition, I got to meet some great people -- smart, energetic and fun. One of them was Michael Saucier, then OSISoft's VP Marketing and Alliances.

Michael has moved on to a related business. He's now Founder and CEO of Transpara. He stops by once in a while to keep me up-to-date on progress and things have really moved along.

Transpara uses Excel 2007 to create KPI's like this:

KPI's can be composed from a number if data sources (including OSISoft's RtPM) and then viewed dynamically via smart phones, like these:

   

Transpara's Visual KPI is part of the Office 2007 Launch and the Transpara video is here.

Cool stuff, Michael.

PARTNERING WITH MICROSOFT: The Insider's Guide for Start-ups

Microsoft and IBDNetwork will be hosting a one-day symposium on Tuesday November 29th at the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley. Information and registration for the event is available here. A summary of the event ...

For emerging companies, building and nurturing strong partnerships is critical to your success. Start-ups, VCs, and business development executives are invited to this one-day symposium, hosted by Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team (EBT) to learn how to maximize opportunities, build strategic initiatives, and develop a successful partner engagement with Microsoft.

The event is titled "Partnering with Microsoft ..." and we want to share our best advice on working effectively with us. Here is some helpful pre-reading: Behind the Veil: how the Microsft Emerging Business team works.

Most of our team will be there, and will share our view of opportunities and some relevant product plans. However, we'll all get even more out of the event if you share your candid vews. Please bring your advice about how we can work better with startup companies and VCs.

Microsoft Shakes Hands With European/Israeli Start-Ups, VCs

Article from Venturewire on Microsoft Emerging Business team in UK, Germany, Israel, and France and their outreach to the startup and venture capital community. You have to subscribe (well worth it) to read the full article, but here are a couple of snippets:

Microsoft Corp. is reaching out to start-ups and venture investors across Europe and Israel in an effort to increase the number of companies creating new applications and launching new businesses around its products.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company is now developing a program for the U.K. that would offer access to Microsoft's sales and marketing resources, customer networks, training programs, and technologies. Already, comparable programs are underway in Germany, France, and Israel to support start-up companies and work with local venture capitalists.

....

I posted a while back on how the Microsft Emerging Business team works, but I didn't say much about our international team. We have a virtual team located and operating worldwide, and each member of the US team is also responsible for ensuring good contacts and support for the folks outside of the US. I am responsible for smooth operations with our team in the UK (presumably because English is my first language and I have mastered some of the trickier dialects) and China (because I asked first :-)

Compassoft: masters of metadata

  This week I had the good fortune to meet with the executive team from Compassoft. On a web conference, Paul Bach (President and CEO), Libby Koehn (Founder and EVP Customer Services) and Eric Solberg (CTO) showed me around Compassoft's new product family .

Compassoft collects and analyses metadata from spreadsheets, databases, and reporting systems -- to identify dependencies, locate errors or possible fraud, and track usage. Essentially they make visible and auditable, a company's opaque (and likely out-of-control) collection of business spreadsheets, databases and reports.

It was impressive. I saw Compassoft locate different versions of the same spreadsheets in email and desktop files, identify inconsistencies, show hidden pages and "a second set of books." They analysed data from Excel spreadsheets. Access databases, and RDBs to map dependencies and identify an audit trail.

I don't see this as an easy business to copy. Compassoft obtains the metadata by a combination of search-like spidering indexing and ranking, and deep technical insight into the complex metadata structure (table defintions, label, macros, formulae, ...)  of each data source(spreadsheet, databases, reporting systems, ERP systems, ...). Last month, Compassoft acquired a UK company, Spreadsheet Auditing Limited and its EXChecker spreadsheet auditing product, which Gartner saw as "... a signal of new seriousness in a fragmented and still immature market."

I have been dazed over the last year or so by the welter of producst that address one part or other of Sarbanes-Oxley (or Higgs in the UK) legislation -- but Compassoft is a breath of fresh air. They don't focus on complex procedures and tools to avoid spreadsheet hell. They deal with today's mess,  and -- in dealing with it -- show how to avoid (and detect) it in the future.

Compassoft has great investors: Advanced Technology Ventures, and Leapfrog Ventures.The product has been shipping ony a few months but they have an impressive customer list that includes Deloitte, Lloyds Bank, and Citigroup. I imagine the big accounting firms will be all over them soon.

I think Compassoft is going to find a valuable opportunity as a partner with us -- particularly related to Office 12. In my opinion, the most exciting element of Office 12 is its evolution as a new kind of business intelligence tool -- where business users will meet previously hard-to-locate business data. The Mendocino work with SAP is just the start of major democratization of business intelligence. I think any company with sophisticated insight and reach into business data will find an even broader market than they had suspected.

How Microsoft invests in Start-up companies

Article by Dan'l Lewin (my manager) describing the Microsoft Emerging Business team and Microsoft's start-up investment strategy. Some key points:

We are heavily investing in startups. We’re open for business and care passionately about entrepreneurs and their commitment to changing the world. In fact, during the last three or four years, we’ve had hundreds of extremely successful engagements helping startups drive their shareholder and end customer value. The reality and leverage of the Microsoft partner ecosystem is amazing—96% of Microsoft’s revenue is driven through our partners, and for every $1 of our revenue, our partners make $7 to $8. We know venture-backed startups are fundamental to Microsoft’s long-term success.

...

At the core, we are a software platform  company. We do well when others build on our platform. Successful startups spur disruptive innovation and create unique end customer value propositions. We see our role as guiding entrepreneurs and venture capitalists about where our platform assets can be best applied, and helping them plug into our partner ecosystem—it’s all about leveraging our tools and platforms, and  our marketing channels.

...

We’re serious. We spend more than a quarter billion dollars on platform evangelism for technical enablement every year—not including the billions we spend on our partner sales and marketing programs.

You can also read the views of others in the Emerging Business team:

Don Dodge

Sam Ramji

More of the team will be online shortly.

Stopping Digital Decay -- yet another way

Lots of discussion recently stimulated by the State of Massachusetts laudable goal of preserving important state documents. To achieve this, the State of MA decreed recently that it will support only Adobe's Portable document Format(PDF) or the Opem Document Format.

David Coursey at EWeek ssuggested that the state's decision looks like little more than a harmless swipe at Microsoft.

David's colleague at eWeek, Steven Vaughan-Nichols, responded that Microsoft should be punished for "trying to set its own standards and formats to lock competitors out of the marketplace." Steven's article didn't demonstrate a firm grasp of the problem, but it was fun to read.

Now Microsoft has announced that Office 12 will include native support for PDF. As Don Dodge pointed out, this is a huge step forward, which should settle the dust around this topic for a while.

Whatever your vendor leanings in this debate, it's interesting that the selection of PDF, or Open Document Format, or even the upcoming Office XML formats are really a bet on the logevity and support of the community that uses and produces each one. I.e. depending on Adobe to keep its format upwardly compatible over many many years, and having enough users to make it importnat thay they do.

Is that the right answer?

An article in the recent Economist Technology Quarterly lays out the problem and a different solution:

... the most popular preservation strategy is to copy files from one generation of hardware to the next. The problem is that today's word processors and web browsers, for example, do not always display files in the same way that older software did. An accumulation of subtle errors can eventually make the original item unreadable. An alternative approach, called emulation, uses software to simulate the old hardware on a modern computer, to allow old software to run. But today's emulators will need another emulator to run on the next generation of hardware, which will need another emulator for the next generation, and so on. This can also introduce errors.

Strangely, the solution they have highlighted at the University of the Netherlands involves a virtual machine (developed with IBM) that hosts document decoders. As the article points out:

The researchers are writing programs to run on this virtual computer that decode different document formats. Future libraries will have to write software that emulates the virtual computer on each new generation of computer systems. But once that is done, they will be able to view all their stored documents using the decoders written for the virtual computer, which only have to be written once.

This is completely different approach. Essentially, it's a bet on a group (librarians) who will regularly snapshot a number of document implementations, and also keep a virtual machine up to date over time.

Obviously there's no simple way to address the underlying tension between evolving software and hardware, and the guarantee of readibilty in the distant future. So, while the dust may have settled around Massachusetts, the hiatus looks temporary to  me.

Tegrity Campus -- the bright future of lecture notes

How often have you taken notes at a meeting or lecture and later tried to match your notes to the lecture? "What did she say about that?" or "what did I mean when I wrote that?"

I was introduced to Tegrity Campus -- a product that addresseses that problem -- a few months ago and have been meaning to write about it ever since.

Tegrity's system captures a professor’s lecture (film, audio, presentation material, annotations) on a server. Students take their own notes on a Tablet PC or using a Tegrity pen (actually the Logitech Digital Writing System) and notepaper. Later the student can click on any point in their notes and the server will take them to the same spot in the lecture. This Flash demo makes teh point.

The secret is in the timestamps kept in the students notes and the professor's lecture notes. They serve as the vital link between what was said or shown and what the student wrote. Here’s a news clip from NBC showing Tegrity Campus in use at Coppin State Universtity in Baltimore, MD.

If I had had this at university, perhaps the British taxpayers would feel better about the money they spent on my education :-)

Adesso Systems

I've been impressed and intrigued by Adesso Systems' potential for maybe a couple of years now. They are so reminsiscent of the best of Lotus Notes ... but based on a relational data store and focused on the  application model and infrastructure.

The team includes smart guys from Thinking Bytes and a number of Lotus Alumini, including CTO John Landry, VP Technology Phil Stanhope, Chief Designer Amando Neves, VP Product Management and Development Scott Durgin, and another great Product Manager from Notes and Sametime days, Vin Colella.

Adesso's application platform is based on the premise that storage and processing power have grown faster and cheaper than bandwidth -- and that will continue to be the case. In other words, we can carry all the data we want, and all the processing power we need, all of the time, but we won't always have connectivity to reach or send data.

We've developed application-unique solutions to this problem (like downloading and uploading email) but few have come close to offering a broadly adopted platform solution. Groove and Lotus Notes each goes some wy to addresing the problem, but Groove focused on finished applications (rather than the platform) and IBM has not adopted Notes as a long term strategic application platform (see the post and discussion on that here).

So what's the right application platform for when you want to have your data all the time -- even when you aren't connected to the network? Well, it's some sort of continual and opportunistic replication. Whenever you have connectivity, data moves from your local PC or device to your server, and vice versa. When you are disconnected, you likely have all the data you need, and you can work on what you have.

Combine this underlying replication model with a rich set of ways to view, create and protect data (not dissimilar to the tables, forms and views model you see in Notes, or even Access) and a rich set of semantics for data access rights (John can see this, but Cliff can see this and change it), and you have a powerful and highly approachable way to build distributed business applications.

Add support for a variety of devices (PCs, tablets, PDAs, Smart Phones and so on) and you have the ideal application platform for the mobile data force.

Well, I'm a fan, of course, but check Adesso out for yourself. If you'll be at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles next week, Phil Stanhope of Adesso will be demoing Adesso technology built on top of Avalon and WinFS. Here's a brief description:

http://commnet.microsoftpdc.com/content/sessions.aspx

DAT310  "WinFS" Future Directions: Building Data Centric Applications Using Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon") and Windows Forms

Day/Time: Wednesday, September 14 3:15 PM- 4:30 PM Room: 408 AB

Speaker(s): Ramesh Nagarajan

Session Type(s): Breakout

Session Level(s): 300

Track(s): Data & Systems

This session discusses the future directions of building rich, data centric applications on the Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly codename "Avalon"), Windows Forms and "WinFS" technologies; and provides an overview of the some of the cool and innovative developer capabilities in "WinFS". The demos, samples and walkthroughs in the session help jumpstart you on the path to building applications that leverage these technologies.

Venture Capital Workshop: Incubating New Ideas

Microsoft (actually Larry Gregory from the MIcrosoft Emerging Business Team) is running this session Friday 16th September at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in LA.

Venture Capital Workshop: Incubating New Ideas:  Compete for the best Windows Vista-based solution idea and hear what leading venture capitalists find compelling. Enterprise developers can voice their interests and hear how the startup community is approaching those areas today. ISV developers can test new solution ideas and understand the venture capitalist perspective on viable business opportunities. Come prepared to participate, have fun, and win prizes!

At last! Someone breaks the tradition of VC panels, where a group of well-informed VCs hide any real insight, and provide only bland answers to good questions  -- sometimes for up to two hours at a stretch! This should be different.

Brad Feld at Mobius Venture Capital has some interesting comments about this.