Bottom Line: This is good for users. Yahoo! has been working hard for the past year in understanding and integrating RSS into their online business. It’s clear that Yahoo! 2.0 is all about Web 2.0. It’s all about the consumer experience and open media. Yahoo! is leading in this area and taking RSS mainstream and participating in the emerging RSS community. Other key bloggers at the Yahoo! announcement in San Francisco include Dave Winer, Mike Arrington, Om Malik, and Steve Gillmor.

Full Transcript of the Yahoo! Podcast Interview:
Yahoo: Scott Gatz, Sr. Director - RSS & Personalization Platform and Ethan Diamond, Director Product Management - Yahoo! Mail

PodTech: John Furrier, Founder and CEO

John Furrier: Welcome to the PodTech.net InfoTalk exclusive Podcast with Yahoo’s announcement today…with RSS, Yahoo mail integration and alerts. Scott Gatz and Ethan Diamond. Welcome to the PodCast.

Yahoo (Scott Gatz and Ethan Diamond) Thank you.

John Furrier: What is the announcement? You have a lot of moving parts. Basically you are bringing RSS to the mainstream users. Making it easier for consumption and personalization. Getting stuff out there blogs, podcasts etc. What is the announcement about?

Scott Gatz: I’ll take a start John. This is Scott Gatz. When we set out to bring RSS into Yahoo…It has been over two years now. When we first launched RSS on My Yahoo in January of 2004, the goal was really to begin bring RSS to the masses, Making it really easy for consumers get any content they want from all over the Web and bring it all into one place. It has been an amazing progression to see. When we started some of the most popular RSS feeds were things like Slashdot and very tech oriented, but over the years we have seen that general consumers have taken to it, to the point where our research shows that about 31% of Internet users are using RSS whether they know it or not. It seemed like a natural progression. If we really wanted to provide users with what they want in one convenient package, to figure out how we more effectively integrate that across the Yahoo network. Where are the places that users want to see us integrate RSS? That is what we are really excited to talk about today is two new big launches where we have integrated RSS. The first is in our Alerts product. Our Alerts product At Alerts at Yahoo.com allows people to go and sign up and subscribe to real time alerts for all sorts of things — if a stock price reaches a certain limit, if your favorite sports team has won the game, it runs the gambit for all the different types of alerts you can get. Isn’t this a perfect place to integrate RSS? Wouldn’t it be amazing if any RSS feed on the Internet could be made into an alert? What if the moment an RSS feed were updated you can get an SMS alert to your mobile phone, you can an instant message alert in Yahoo messenger or maybe we can even send you an email…as those updates happen. Whether that’s a blog that you track… maybe the blog only posts once every three weeks or so. You don’t want to put that into your aggregate or you don’t want to put that in you’re my Yahoo page, you just want to get an email when that blog updates. WE can help you out there by signing up and we’ll send you that at the moment that it updates. Or maybe you want something a little more real-time. I live in California, so I think about the US Geological Survey. They put out an RSS feed that actually tells me when there are little earthquakes in the area. They actually put out warnings when they think “the big one is coming” I want to know about that and I want to know about that the moment that it happens. So for that alert, I am able to subscribe to that. The moment their RSS feed updates I have it set to give me an SMS message on my mobile phone. So no matter where I am, I able to know “the big one is coming”, not so far fetched.

John Furrier: So from earthquakes to any kind of information that is relevant to any user. Which is hard to figure out, but what you are doing here is you are basically saying to any user, “Whatever is important to you, we will make you aware of it in real-time”.

Scott Gatz: Absolutely. You are talking about the tens of millions of RSS feeds that are now out there having become INSTANTLY “alertable”. You can get alerts on any of them. You give us the RSS URL that you would like us to track, and the moment it is updated we can alert you by IM, SMS or email.

John Furrier: A lot of times when I am looking at blogs…and blogs and news in particular… are really an important part of this new shift with RSS and Web 2.0. A lot of times my life takes me out of the mode of being real-time. It is hard. I miss a lot. How are you guys looking at RSS from an alert standpoint? Do I have to be at my computer? Is this announcement going to be on platforms like mobile devices?

Scott Gatz: Absolutely. I think that is one of the things. There are some times where there is information when you are happy to go to your own personal page and check into it. But other times you want the information to come to you wherever you are at, and that is why we have integrated with Yahoo Messenger. You can get a pop-up while using Yahoo Messenger with the information that, “Hey, this feed is updated”. Or you can get it on your mobile phone via and SMS message. So no matter where you are at, we will help deliver that you in an easy and pretty simple way.

John Furrier: How do you figure out the Instant Messenger piece … with users who just want to talk to each other? Is this going to be interruptive to users?

Scott Gatz: Not at all. It will look just like any other Instant Message that you get through your messenger line. A window will come up and say, “Hey we’ve got a message for you, would you like to read it?” If so, you can click through and go over to the website and read the full information. It is a non-obtrusive way to get that information out to you.

John Furrier: So people can interact better with the content.

Scott Gatz: Absolutely.

John Furrier: Because they are alerted to it. You guys also talk about in the announcement, “Yahoo expands the RSS platform, adds RSS feeds into Yahoo Mail beta and Yahoo Alerts”, which you just talked about. Everyone in the industry knows that you have had RSS around for a while. Like HTTP the protocol that makes web-browsing in the early days of the web, RSS has been in Yahoo, My Yahoo… in with all three Yahoo. What specific extensions are you talking about around RSS? What does it mean to the users?

Scott Gatz: Yes, I think that ultimately different people want to consume content in different ways. Some people feel completely comfortable with having a personalized start page…like My Yahoo… getting headlines, getting their dashboard to their online life all on one page. But other people… maybe they are used to spending more time in their Yahoo Mail experience. We have 227 million unique users that use Yahoo Mail…that used it in the month of October. When you think about that large audience, of folks that feel comfortable in the email environment…we looked at that and said, “Well, if our goal is really to bring RSS to the masses, isn’t that where the masses are?” How can we bring the idea of personally relevant content to them where they are? (Which is email, which is where they feel comfortable.) Ethan and my teams have worked really closely together to actually figure out “how do we do that” and “how do we make Yahoo Mail the place to consume RSS?”

John Furrier: We are here with Ethan Diamond the Product Manager – Product Management for Yahoo Mail. Talk about Yahoo Mail. Everyone knows about mail; they have been using email. Email has been the killer app for the Web for years, but now it is getting more complex. There are news sites and there are blogs. There are RSS extensions. Most people look at their life through the email window (and IM) for the most part.

Ethan Diamond: True.

John Furrier: What are you guys doing with the Yahoo Mail in this announcement that is a little bit different, and how does RSS play in that?

Ethan Diamond: I think there are basically three reasons why you would want RSS integrated into your mail experience. The first one, you just hit on, is more and more people are using mail as the hub of their entire Internet experience. They sit in front of their email clients all day long. They get not just email, but photos from friends. They get favorite bookmarks or links from friends. So having news be a part of that and not making people leave their mail client is a good idea. It is natural. The second part of is that when you read a news story I think the most common activity you perform, besides sort of absorbing the information, is sharing it with friends. If you are inside a web browser it is always awkward to find or email this article link… if it exists at all. If you are inside of a stand alone RSS reader or aggregator, you don’t have your contacts there. Whereas, if you are inside your email client, you have got your entire address book. You can select a post and share it with a friend and have address auto complete, for example. That is something that is definitely part of this release. We can talk about it in a second. The third reason that I would say that it makes a whole lot of sense to integrate RSS right into a middle reader is that it is a familiar environment for people. We are not forcing anybody to go out and download and install a new application in order to get what RSS is and “give it a shot”. They are in an environment that they already “get”; they are in an interface that they already understand. What you will see when this rolls out is that RSS is just another folder in your folder list, essentially. When a feed contains new information it lights up, and you can click on it. You can read posts just like they were email.

John Furrier: So basically you are taking the experience from browsing…where readers are… and then websites (which is mostly blog content and news sites). So much information is coming at people. You are actually integrating into the mail client.

Ethan Diamond: That’s right. We are doing it in a way that I think that actually solves the problem of information overload…rather than making it worse. What we have done is rather than just feeding posts into your Inbox or feeding them into a folder as email, we present it in a way that is really familiar to people (from reading blogs). We show the full post in sort of a “blog view”. We detect whether a feed is a “blog style” feed…in which case we display it in one way. We also detect if is more of a “news summary”… kind of a “headline feed”… in which case we display it differently. That just makes the whole process of absorbing the information a whole lot easier. One other thing that we have done to make it easier to use RSS is … we have in addition to all of the feeds that you subscribe to… we have something called the “meta feed” or feed of feeds. It’s a river of news style aggregators. When you look at the application, all of your feeds are underneath a folder, essentially, that says “All our RSS feeds”. When you click on that it shows you, in reverse chronological order, an interlaced view… a news ticker type of view of each post of each feed that you subscribe to in the order in which it was published. What that allows me to do is now rather than looking at all of the feeds that I subscribe to and seeing which ones have lit up, and have new content… I keep that folder closed and I just look at “what is their content overall”…in all the feeds I subscribe to. I just click on that once and I read my feeds…the ones that I want to share with people. I click on them. I can forward those posts to friends as emails. I can even select those posts and drag them into folders. I can archive them, and then I can switch right back to my Inbox and keep reading my email. It is a very seamless experience. It is very natural for people who are familiar with the email interface to make the transition into this interface.

John Furrier: Basically what you guys are saying is that there is so much online content from so many different sources…there is so much diversity. On one end with the Alerts, you are making it convenient for people to get things in a timely manner… to interact with stuff that is important to them. Then on the Yahoo Mail side you are basically making it easier and saving time for people. People can spend their whole day reading blog posts.

Ethan Diamond: That’s right.

John Furrier: You are integrating into the mail client, because people have their attention there already?

Ethan Diamond: That’s right. They have their attention there and also ,… simply the idea of RSS itself. Instead of you having to go scan the ten websites that you are interested in for new content; it is just going to tell you when those sites publish new content. You end up saving time by not having to go out and find that information.

John Furrier: Yahoo is hardcore on RSS. Now it is going main stream. When can people get the Yahoo Mail beta? Is it available immediately? Where is the user experience going from a Yahoo perspective? Obviously, you are having mobile devices with the Alerts (and being convenient). What is the big picture in terms of where it is going next?
Ethan Diamond: Sure I can talk a little bit about the “when” for Yahoo Mail and then I’ll let Scott talk about the big picture. For “when” … tomorrow everyone who is a user of the Yahoo Mail beta will see RSS integrated into it. The actual date for when the Yahoo Mail beta will go GA, we don’t know, because we are actually in the process of doing a lot of testing of the interface in a lot of different areas. The actual date depends on the results of those tests. As part of this release, we are broadening the beta pool by quite a bit.

John Furrier: Okay great… and Scott the big picture on RSS? Obviously, you are taking something technical and making it main stream.

Scott Gatz: Absolutely. In all the steps we have been making…in the year 2005 we have launched something in the RSS area every month of this year. We see this as a nice way to begin to end the year… to bring RSS to the largest mainstream audience that there is… 227 million unique users on mail. This is the direction we want to be able to see going. We recognize that people consume RSS differently. Some want to read it on their mobile device, some want to read on their on personalized home page….in their Inbox, some want to be tapped on the shoulder when their feed has been updated, some want to read it on Yahoo news, and some people want to search through it. Some people want to do a little bit of all of that. The great thing about Yahoo is we learn about you, we learn about what sources you care about, and we integrate all of those pieces so they come together. If you are at your home computer, your work computer… on your phone, no matter where you are at… that information should follow you. It shouldn’t be tied to one computer… one software application. It should follow you wherever you go. That is the benefit of personalization on Yahoo… the idea that it knows who you are, it remembers those things and makes them easier and easier… as we integrate it throughout the entirety of Yahoo…wherever you want it to be.

John Furrier: We are here at a PodTech Exclusive announcement of Yahoo expanding their RSS platform… adding feeds into Yahoo Mail, offering Alerts… with Scott Gatz and Ethan Diamond. Final word to end the segment here about RSS and mail?

Scott Gatz: I hope that we have been able to layout, and I hope that everyone will have a chance to take a look at the steps we have made to really give a rich, robust experience around the whole concept of RSS. When we explain these benefits to consumers they really love the idea of being able to pull anything they care about all into one experience… the way they want it, when they want it. It has been exciting for us, and we hope that the consumers love it as well.

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With Web 2.0 being one of the more exciting developments on the Internet in the last couple of years, there’s been sustained interest by large businesses trying to figure out how Web 2.0 affects them. Recently Darren McKnight, Vice President for Technology of government contractor SAIC, invited Chief Technology Officer of premier enterprise IT firm Sphere of Influence, Dion Hinchcliffe, to come and talk about Web 2.0 at their Enterprise Content Exploitation Industry Day on November 16th, 2005 in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Dion has been publicly discussing lately the similarity between many aspects of Web 2.0 and the popular IT software architecture approach, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). With Gartner saying that by 2008 up to 80% of all software development will be based on SOA, it’s clear that Web 2.0 and SOA will be highly interrelated and Dion thinks even mostly overlapping.

Dion’s Web 2.0 luncheon address at the Enterprise Content Exploitation Day gathering was about how Web 2.0 radically opens up and enriches the content trapped within the massive IT systems of most large organizations. SAIC’s customers are often in the government space and have firewall and security issues that many do not. So Dion focused the speech on their specific requirements in his wide ranging speech that opens up on how Web 2.0 concepts were used to locate Hurricane Katrina survivors, to the origins of Web 2.0, what Web 2.0 is exactly, good Web 2.0 exemplars, and much more. The speech is non-technical and is an excellent resource for anyone trying to get up to speed on the emerging concepts in the Web 2.0 toolkit that have made Google and Amazon major successes while fostering a new generation of innovation and startups for building a two-way Web.

Dion Hinchcliffe is Chief Technology Officer of premier enterprise IT firm Sphere of Influence, leader in agile/lean methods and Service-Oriented Architecture. He regularly advises SOI’s clients in the federal government and Fortune 500. Dion’s Web 2.0 blog is a member of the Web 2.0 Workgroup and is one of the leading sources of Web 2.0 commentary and analysis on the Web.

To check out NextPage’s free product trial go to:

Full Transcript:

Guest: Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
Host: John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net: Welcome to the PodTech.net InfoTalk series with Darren Lee the President and CEO at NextPage here in Utah. Darren welcome to the Podcast.

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
Thanks, John.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
NextPage is a company that is big sponsor of my sight, I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. Let’s talk about your company that you’re running here. It’s really an innovative company, involved in a very cutting edge area around, what some people think is a boring area, document management…big enterprise companies like Document and a lot of other ones out there that make document management software. You guys are a little bit different. I talk about Web 2.0 on my program a lot about the shift to a whole new social grid. Consumers are consuming information differently. They are using the internet more in a social fabric type of way. People are more digital savvy, employees, consumers. Talk about your company and some of the things that you see and some of the big problems that you’re addressing and about your solution.

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
Where we’ve decided to focus is document management for the masses. So you said earlier, kind of a potentially boring topic of document management. It is a boring topic. So we actually came at it from a totally different approach. If you’ve followed the market at all, it is completely grown up around a very centralized approach; it is very command and control. Today what you find is that particular market sometimes categorized as the Enterprise Content Management market (or ECM) is really focused on very high end type, repeatable publishing type solutions. And they are, they’re boring. They’re typically more enterprise class style; hardly the common mans problem. Traditional one, like new drug applications or records management for your finance group. It’s just not something that the bulk of your professionals out there ever actually deal with in their day to day life. We choose to come at it from a completely different perspective, which is the end users have a massive problem of document chaos. Microsoft estimates there are about 400 million users of Microsoft Office, 20 million of those are power users. If you sit down and watch their behavior, there is probably about 6-7 billion documents created a year. As they create them, if you talk about those power users, it’s typically done in a very collaborative fashion. Most people will have experience this, you write a document, you send it out in email to 4 or 5 people. You await there feed back, they create edits, and they send them back to you. As you work through that process it very quickly becomes this chaotic pattern of where is the right version, who actually has touched this document, what did they do to this document? What changes were made and now how do I incorporate it to deliver a proposal, to deliver an agreement, or to deliver some form of a mission critical document that comes out of that organization? Traditional document managements completely failed in delivering on that particular problem, because best illustrated by an example: I met with a chief knowledge officer of one of the largest consulting firms in the world. We sat down and went through our product. He absolutely loves it. His comment back to me was, “Three years ago we spent $2.5 million on a particular document management vendor’s product. We intended to deploy it to 10 thousand users.” And he said, “Guess, how many people actually have deployed and are using it today?” I took my guess. He came back and he said, “There are twenty five people in the organization that use it. It has been an abysmal failure.” So it has a long sale cycle, it had an incredibly long deployment cycle for them. And only in the end after three years amazingly low adoption rates. The reason is it doesn’t work like they do. It’s a very, very heavy solution. At NextPage we completely reinvented the model; there is no IT required. It integrates very, very easily into the desktop. We tie it directly into your email and to Microsoft Office. The user does nothing different in the normal way in which they write documents, send documents, edit documents, review documents, proof documents. But as a very light weight service, we can track all of that, kind of like a GPS system for your documents. It knows precisely where they are, what’s changed and what’s going on. It’s changing the marketscape completely.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
So you’re saying earlier the other ways, people were projecting onto users, “Here this is the rules, you need to control this way to work.” They were being told how to work.

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
Yes, it is very mainframe PC. The mainframe was the centralized, obliviously very heavy (if you what to call it an application), and the PC just enabled the masses to do what they do. They do a spread sheet. They don’t do data processing. The same thing is happening in this marketing. I write documents. I do marketing collateral. I send a proposal to a customer. I write a memo. I do a product requirements document. I don’t do new drug applications. I don’t do massive records management types. That doesn’t mean that those things don’t matter. There is a place for them; there is a place for Mainframe even today. There is a place for that stuff. But that is not the problem of the masses. Now, if you’re going to try and address it you have to shift the model completely which we did. We came in with a completely different model. It’s light weight. You down load it, very simply. It installs in a couple of minutes, and you’re off and running.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
So this takes away the problem that users kind of solve for themselves. So they just change the name, add a JF edit or whatever or some sort of naming convention. It’s not standard. It’s someone’s own way of figuring out what you do. When documents get shared, is that how you see it too? People solve it on their own. But now with your solution that goes away? Right?

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
That’s right…any time you talk about, “Who’s the competitor in the market?” It really isn’t these high end document management vendors. Ultimately we eat away what they do over the long haul. However, today it really is a user is so used to this pain and dealing with it, that they find ways by naming it, storing it in funny places on the hard dive, calling it final version, only to have to then to call it “final final final I really mean it this time final version.” NextPage eliminates that completely for you, because again we track every single version and we know precisely how they sequence together to create the versioning of that entire document

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
So give me an example of a used case of a user’s pain.

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
Great example would be to take one of our users at a consulting group. Small sized consulting firm. In their case they get a large contract to do a set of M&A activities for a large hotel chain. In doing that, they bring in twenty-five or thirty different consultants, all of whom begin generating these documents (whether it’s agreements, whether it’s proposals, whether it’s financial analysis, whatever the case may be, as they put together this deal). You’ve got attorneys in the mix. You’ve got auditors in the mix. You’ve got the consultants in the mix. You’ve got the management team in the mix on both sides of the fence. All of these people are now trying to stitch together an M&A activity. And ultimately the deliverable of that is, in fact, a document. They generate over 7,000 versions within that activity over about a 90 day period of time. It’s a big document factory. All of it was done through email; all of it was done on hard drives, etcetera. The complete confusion that takes place is incredibly costly. At the end the risk of poor quality showing up in the documents, because when you coordinate that may people that fast you’re bound to obviously have not just human error, but the error of coordination among lots of humans. That’s really a sweet spot for us.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
It’s really not an enterprise issue, it’s really more document chaos. Anytime you have more than one person working on a project where documents are generated, there is going to be chaos. Your approach is just looking at it from how people work. You mentioned email, so your product fits into how people do their job. Is that a technical thing, it is more of…your relationship with Microsoft? How does that work?

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
Well, there is a little bit of both. We do have a relationship with Microsoft, as a certified partner with them. But the way in which we solve is really is our technology, there’s really two pieces to it. One is a very simple client that gets downloaded, you install it on your machine and it gets integrated with Office. Because of that we know what’s going on with the document. We watch very carefully, every time it’s saved, and the location as to where it is saved. On top of that we have a service that we host, so think of it as a server in the sky, a document management alla sales force.com model it’s a hosted service. We never host the document for security reasons, but what we do host are a set of meta-data or pointers as to where these documents are. That’s how it can coordinate it so that you and I work in different companies but if we’re working on a document together we can actually use NextPage and I can see the versions on your machine and you can see the versions on my machine. We can coordinate that activity because of the service that gets hosted in the sky. So it works great in a cross enterprise cross border application as well.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
Let’s talk about meta-data. I think that’s a really key point. Right now in a lot of this web 2.0 everything is about meta-data. Information about information, search engines, human filtering, all the search engines, all the new stuff happening in this real-time web environment is about meta-data. You are applying meta-data to the product and then managing that for the users?

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
No, not in the way you would think that you’re describing. Our meta-data is really…think of it as a Swiss bank account number (kind of like the UPS barcode or the FedEx tracking system). We basically label the document so that we can uniquely identify it. So now when it’s traveling, we’re simply watching that particular tag which DOS has metadata embedded in the document. Now we know where the document is, who’s got it, what they’re doing with it, etcetera. We can derive a lot of interesting information for the user from that.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
This is a productivity boost for them…

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
Yes, it’s focused on the productivity boost that’s the core application of why we would track in the first place.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
So give me a user case now…one the other side. You gave one of the (cases describing) pain points. Give a user case of someone who feels no pain. So a consulting group says, “Give me the latest REV.” Do they go to your service and say, “Where is it? I don’t know what folder it’s in?” Take me through an example of a user using your product.

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
Actually a really, really simple example. We’re working with a guy who is sitting the board for a particular company. They’re divesting some assets. As we were going through the priorities, he was going through the process of creating the documentation on this transaction essentially. He was about to attach a set of documents to an email to go out to the board for approval. When he goes to attach those documents, the collaborative team that had worked on them were, obviously CFO, CEO, Chairman of the Board, outside counsel, typical auditors, etc. As he goes to attach that document to send it out traditional problem would have been you don’t know which one is the right version after that kind of activity. He goes to send it on to the board. The moment he attaches those documents he gets notified, because NextPage notices that he’s doing something really important. He is about to send some documents out. Behind the scenes, NextPage does a quick check for him as to whether or not those in fact are the most recent versions of the document. They were not. So we notified him in real time, we tell the user and say, “Guess what, these are not the most recent versions of the document, in fact, and then we name the person who has the most recent version, who happened to be the CFO.” He checks in with the CFO, and the CFO says, “I’m sorry, but I forgot to tell you, but there have been last minute edits. We had to change terms on a couple of things, the payout schedule and the price changed just a little bit.” That becomes very material to get that in the hands of the Board with the right stuff. Completely solved the problem, and saved him from that pain. One simple example, but that’s the typical stuff that we see.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
You compound that problem with the fact that without your solution someone has to be in charge of it. Basically, document management, project management, human labor, someone is responsible for phoning people up, “Did you mail me the last version?” All of that stuff goes on.

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
If you talk to…another great market for us is people who do really extensive proposals. If you talk to them typically on the team they’ll appoint somebody who is responsible for watching for out versions of documents that are going to ultimately hit the proposal. Very expensive, very human expensive, time expensive, speed expensive, quality expensive, we eliminate all of those problems.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
I’ve been using the product for awhile and I like how I get notified every time I do an attachment, so It’s really smart enough to know that I am doing an attachment. It wakes up and tells me, “You want to check for the latest version or here is the latest version.” It’s really clearly for the masses. From a customer perspective on how you’re selling it, what are your customer profiles? And how does that look when you are out actually selling it?

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
In terms of segments, the legal market does really well for us. Large sales groups where you have a negotiated agreement, think of them as customer facing documents. I mentioned proposals, agreements, statements of work, those end up being terrific markets for us. Marketing teams when they generate collateral product design requirements. In a more generic level, if it’s a document intensive process, it’s collaborative meaning you have two or more people that have to participate — that ends up being just a sweet spot for us.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
A lot of people have headaches, I do at a personal level, but I probably wouldn’t buy the product because I am just one guy. I do virtual work where I use it, but of all the people who have the headaches, which ones stand out the most in terms of the profile of the user? Is it the IT manager? Is it the marketing person? Is it the office administrator? Who’s your “major profile” that you call on and customers if they are listening maybe would identify that it’s them?

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
Typically, where we do the best is think of the VP of sales or at least a VP sales operations, because they’re responsible for how the sales team will actually interact with that customer with an agreement, in combination with corporate counsel because they weigh in on legal matters. Sometimes business development teams who get involved as well. And then finally sales engineering teams, because they have a lot of responsibility for accurately representing the sale of the product from a technical perspective than that is very document intensive to do that. They end up being terrific targets.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
This in one of the things from a business perspective, it’s a good opportunity for you guys because you don’t have to go in and do the big sale to an IT, you don’t just say, “Oh, port all of your systems to us…” You can go to someone who has decision making capability like a VP of marketing, VP of operations and say, “If you’re doing any collaborative transactional document generation you can just buy this product.”

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
Yes, they buy it. It’s a service and it seamlessly runs for them. Sometimes IT gets involved just to do a check on security. We always clear that very easily because we never host the document, so it’s always protected by them. It ends up being very short in the sales cycle.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
You’ve had a lot of experience. You’re an entrepreneur. You’ve started NextPage going back to Folio which was part of open market. Now you’ve spun that off fast, and now you have NextPage just focused on document collaboration space. You have a new product coming out in the fall, launching it at the demo conference. Where do you guys see the road map going forward in the next year or so? Download then service?

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
I think what you’re going to see in the next year from us is …we’re still at a phase where the product just gets so much investment from us. It’s probably 80% of our spend is on product investment. It’s a terrific product today, and we have an amazing road map over the next 12 months to mature it. Then we’ll really begin to put our efforts into the scale of the product. But what you’ll find is we’ll hold true to the themes of: number one, limited to no IT infrastructure required for it. Continue to work like the user does, so we don’t run into the adoption problems that larger players have run into. A price point that just makes it a no-brainer for the user to buy, and then finally, we’ll continue to just chip away at that document chaos problem because it’s huge, it is very horizontal, it crosses all kinds of segments, it crosses geographic bounders, so it represents a significant business opportunity for us. So we’re going to stay right there.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
Right now, you can have a free trial at NextPage.com. For folks out there who what to try it or want to download it, go to NextPage.com. For them, what would you have them look for? As one of our listeners downloads the trial, what would you have them look for as they use it? What would you highlight?

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
The biggest thing I’d highlight for them is they will find very, very quickly within two minutes they are up and running. One of the biggest things, we find with these users when they first try it is they say, “Does it really work, because I am just working like I always did? I don’t have to check a document in or check a document out. I don’t write all kinds of meta-data about the document to get it to someone.” They just email it, like they always did. So what they’ll find is they’ll get all the version history, the version mapping of those documents will be available to them. They will get real time awareness that pops up and shows them at any given time where the document is, what’s its status, who’s opened it, who’s reviewed it, who has not. They will find that they actually don’t do anything different other than NextPage now appears through this elegant way of notifying them of what is going on.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
That’s good stuff and you guy are going to be at the Demo fall conference which is going to be in California.

Guest: Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
That’s right

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
Chris Shipley’s famous DEMO conference if anyone is listening and wants to check out the DEMO conference you guys will be there. What about a big prediction in the next five years in this whole area of Web 2.0 very viral market place, your prediction?

Guest: Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
I am self interest in this prediction because I really do believe this. You’re going to see a complete overhaul of what we know today as the enterprise content management market. There are so many people… there is no “e” in enterprise content management. When you peel it back, you’re seeing very high end deals, long sales cycles, long deployment cycles, and very, very small adoption. What you’re going to see in five years, you’re going to see the masses, the people on the edge who have the document problem everyday, that problem will be solved for them. From that, that will position companies, like NextPage, to then enter into the enterprise and begin solving some enterprise problems. But it’s all going to start by solving the end users day to day business problem. Then we’ll go solve problems for the enterprise not the reverse.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
You guys are really just pioneering an inevitable force which is the idea of buying software in an enterprise classic sense, its history. You guys are evolving that model in a whole other direction.

Darren Lee - President and CEO of NextPage
We’re going to completely turn it up-side down. That really came out of client server architecture days, it’s a different world. I mean, even five years ago you couldn’t reasonably download software for your own use on your professional PC. You couldn’t reasonably download that and be effective with it. Today you can. They’re selling models, marketing models, all of that needs to change. So it has to be companies like NextPage that come from a brand new paradigm, they’re going to take advantage of that.

John Furrier – Founder of PodTech.net
Very innovative on the social grid concept, and leveraging the whole shift to a Web 2.0. Great product, and can’t wait to see it at DEMO. Darren Lee, thanks for the PodCast

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“If offense is going after the bad guys, and defense is making this country less vulnerable, then the third leg is the war of ideas. We are the most powerful country in the world—economically, militarily, culturally—but power is not the same thing as authority.”

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Support out sponsors and download the NextPage client software to handle real time document changes!
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Support our sponsor NextPage.com - download their new viral “Digital Thread” technology to manage document chaos. Sign up for free, try it, then buy it

Find PodTech.NETwork on iTunes

Support out sponsors and download the NextPage client software to handle real time document changes!
Podcast sponsored by Nextpage.com
Support our sponsor NextPage.com - download their new viral “Digital Thread” technology to manage document chaos. Sign up for free, try it, then buy it

Find PodTech.NETwork on iTunes

Also check out the best spam firewall and spyware killer product for your enterprise at Barracuda Networks.
{Podcast sponsored by Barracuda Networks - Best Email Spam and Spyware Appliance and No per user license fee}

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