As Hawkes points out, the military is capturing hours of video content that isn’t being used. In addition, the tools available today to bring stories to life make it easy to create a digital publication that is interactive, engaging and far more memorable. The popularity of social networks like Facebook and MySpace are driving awareness and creating the expectation for more than a static picture book. Paying tribute to a fallen friend through a story captured on video is more personal and helpful to the soldiers, the family and to the military.

In this video podcast, Hawkes speaks with Brad Baldwin about her efforts to share the Remember My Service with military leaders, business executives and even local communities who want to gives something back to those who have served.

Tags: StoryRock Electronic Publishing, Sharlene Hawkes, Remember My Service, Miss America, social networks, Brad Baldwin

Tags: San Jose Mercury News, TechCrunch40, Flock, Shawn Hardin, publishing tools, social browser

Transcript:
Host: Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Guest: Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Welcome to this edition of Thought Leaders, where we bring you candid conversations with the people whose research and writing are guiding both the buyers and suppliers of IT Solution. I’m Jim Leach. Today we are joined by Andy Schroepfer, President and Founder of Tier 1 Research. Andy is unique in market research field in that he is part Wall Street analyst and part IT Industry analyst. He applies his experience on Wall Street through his research and how IT companies are turning customer solution into shareholder value. Thanks for joining us on Thought Leaders Andy.

Andrew Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Hey, happy to be here, thanks for having me.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Can you put on your Wall Street Analyst hat first and give our listeners your view on the hosting industry? How big is it? How do you segment it? Where are the growth areas?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Sure. Well, from the Wall Street perspective, there were a ton of people that got burned back in the Internet bubble that looked at Exodus as the be-all-end-all company in the hosting sector and then there was Acomi and all these other companies that had monstrous billion dollar valuations, and obviously those all came down in fact, to zero to something probably above zero.

So, in a couple of years that ensued since then, it was tough for people to really understand why would I go back to that industry, it was part of the bubble. And fortunately now, we’ve had a five year - half a decade separation to where people can come back and revisit these.

So, that’s because of the Web 2.0 movement that gives a lot of prospects. BusinessWeek article from a couple of weeks ago; we have a $12 billion industry in hosting that people still don’t necessarily know how to look at. There is two ways to look at it. One is the old way which is the — there is data centers, and that’s a co-location business. There’s people with dedicated hosting that actually own the gear and it’s actually a single device or multiple single devices for specific a client. Then there is shared infrastructure; shared infrastructure used to just be defined as shared hosting, but now as you look, it includes utility computing and virtualized hosting. That’s the old way to look at it.

The form factor — way to look at it is not how we believe investors would want anyone to look at it. The new way should be, who is the buyer of the services that are being sold in this $12 billion hosting industry; it’s the consumer which buys blog services, media publishing, and sharing tools; it’s the small business that buys different software, the service applications, or host their own version of an appliance as an application. Then there’s large enterprises that have big needs for disaster recovery, big needs for facilities, for lots of their analyst applications.

So, the right way to look at it is by customer type that’s buying; and that’s how we are starting to segment our industry at least, in our revenue view of this $12 billion sector. But now that’s the right way to look at it, as people are starting to understand that and understand how these business models are working. The investors have started to come back, and most of the stocks in this sector that are public, and what we’ve seen are doubling over the last year, or at least they are more formalization in how their capital structures worked. So, I think investors have more of a reason to come back to this sector as well as a healthier sector to come back to.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Very interesting; so let’s dig into those buyer segments a little bit, the consumers, small business and large enterprises. Where are the growth areas in those segments, are they all growing at about the same rate or are some of the areas hotter than others?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
The consumer sector interestingly, is actually being driven by free services, which are advertising based. So, it’s actually a different revenue model than people buying actually for the services whether it’s a blog service, whether it’s a shared hosting account, whether it’s an email account.

So that business model is completely different and there’s tremendous growth in online advertising because of the benefits that you can have from better targeting who you are trying to reach with your ad. As you get into the small business, those companies are finally understanding that they can take advantage of the applications that larger enterprises have used because they can buy them in a ‘software as a service’ delivery model, which gives it a per user, per seat, per month, pricing structure, and lets it be approachable by both the user as well as the buyer from the small business.

So that’s the biggest growth area as it relates to hosting. The large enterprise has already decided whether they’re going to do something in-house or whether they are going to do it on an outsourced basis. That usually has a five year cyclical nature and I think we are coming back to the marketplace — we are coming back to the part in that cycle, where the enterprises want to be outsourcing more. And interestingly the dynamic that’s hitting at the same time now is the availability of so many enterprise applications through this ‘software as a service’ model, which is causing enterprises to need less data center space in some cases, or if their delivery model is to be a ‘software as a service’ company, a lot of these companies are taking on more infrastructure.

So there’s as many companies growing huge in a large enterprise as it relates to their hosting needs, as there are companies who have a significantly less need. So a good large enterprise is probably the slowest growth sector but it’s more about who you’re targeting that large enterprise group.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
So the buyers of Web hosting services are starting to segment themselves into these different categories of consumer and small business, large enterprises. Are you also seeing a similar type of segmentation in the Web hosting providers? Are they trying to deliver different types of services and to meet the needs of these different segments?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Yes, that’s a great question. It’s been the changeover from the seller having the power to the buyer having the power; and there’s equally as many companies that get this change, to the companies that don’t. So, the companies that get this change are offering so many services on a needed basis, or on a pre-user basis; that’s how the buyers are interested in buying right now. As you go down across those different segments from large enterprise down to consumer, the consumer is becoming so used to having free services, and they are happy to understand that advertisements are what’s allowing them to get that service for free.

You no longer have people interested in buying a software package at ‘Best Buy’ or ‘Circuit City’ or having them download software from the Web, you’re wanting them to just be able to drive right in and use the service and pay for it; then again, as you go up into the small business and large enterprise to be able to use that and pay for that on a pre-user basis, and above and beyond that the ones who really get this change that’s happened, understand that you are personalizing and verticalizing their offerings; so, not just offering a utility computing platform but tailoring it towards a particular vertical market such as financial services or retail or healthcare.

Whatever the application is that’s going to reside on top of an infrastructure, it’s going to have a better growth story behind it and a better traction and adoption if it’s tailored towards this specific vertical market. Those are the companies who really get what’s going on right now.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Or in a sense that the consumer segment is driving the business segment; and from an IT supplier perspective, a number of the biggest hosting companies, firms like IBM, EDS, big telcos like AT&T and Verizon, they grew up in the business sector. Are firms like those big traditional outsourcers going to have trouble surviving in this new market? Do they have to regroup?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
They definitely need to regroup. I wouldn’t go as far as to say they have a problem surviving. I hope a lot of these mega-companies lay off a lot of people that hopefully go and start a lot of new interesting entrepreneurial companies. The entire reason that the consumer is driving the innovations in the enterprise services world is that it’s easier to adopt something that’s free. I mean you can get mass adoption of something that’s free, and you get a lot of people that battle-test different applications that are online.

So is Microsoft ready to offer their entire Office suite in an online format yet? Sure they’re probably ready, but will they? They won’t until they have to. Unfortunately, there’s companies from Google all the way on down to the companies like Zoho that are launching spreadsheets and word processing documents online, and making that something that Microsoft will have to react to; same thing can be said for the outsourcers on your question. If these services are geared towards being tuned with expensive consultants and expensive engagements, it’s not necessary that that’s wrong, there’s the need for that personalization.

They’re using the tools that have been battle-tested in the consumer world. You are able to more quickly and easily adopt, customize, personalize, and verticalize all these applications and the enterprises outside do think that IBM is at a disadvantage as a company, but hopefully the IBMs, EDSs, the CSEs will use to their advantage the divisions that are focused on looking at those technologies to their advantage for their enterprise accounts. So again, I wouldn’t go as far as to say they’re in trouble; I would go as far as to say they are disadvantaged relative to companies that do get to work closer to both the cutting edge consumer side as well as the small business side.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Let’s talk a little about the startups that you alluded to, that it might start emerging over time. I know you keep an eye on that part of the marketplace. Have you seen anything interesting with the startups that you think could have a big impact on the broader Web hosting industry?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Yeah, I think social networking is essentially the heart of what the Web 2.0 movement stands for; it’s the ability for anyone to interact with any content and share it with anyone that they want to, in any format that they want to. Whatever website you might go to, whatever application you might interact with, it should afford you the opportunity to use that in a community fashion whether it’s reading a news article online, whether it’s buying a product online, whether it’s writing a blog entry online; everything that you might do is something that should be something that can exist in a social network.

So, whether it’s the social network software makers themselves that actually pioneer this into all of the enterprise applications is yet to be seen - kind of like business analytics, that’s the sector that still exists today with business objects and a lot of mega companies still – essentially analytics need to be applied to every application. We think social networking is the latest thing out of the startup movement and needs to be applied to almost every website, every application that exists.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
It’s always a pleasure to get a chance to spend some time and talk with you Andy, I really appreciate you being a part of Thought Leaders. Let me asked you one last question.

Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research
Sure.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
There has been a lot of press coverage recently about an impending battle between Microsoft and Google. Are the battle lines really being drawn between these two companies, and if they are, who’s going to win and what will it mean for the IT industry?

Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research
When the company is afforded evaluation like Google has, and is simultaneously able to spend increasingly mega amounts of money and be rewarded for that, that’s a hard monster for anyone to compete with. Fortunately, there are a couple players in the world like Microsoft that have dollars that they can go and compete.

So, Microsoft committed a couple billion extra dollars in this current year to go build the platform to compete. But what’s really happening is, who can build up a complete platform that anyone in the world can plug an application into and be able to like Google, help monetize that in return for access to this monster platform. Microsoft, I think is going to do the same thing; so, I guess, I do believe they are at battle completely and wholly. Do I think Microsoft has the ability to win? They have the chance to win, but this is Google’s game to lose at this point. The longer the market continues to afford Google, evaluation, to the extent that they have it for putting together this monstrosity of the computing platform, it will become almost untouchable.

So, everyone in the world that wants to have an application — and again, this comes back to the hosting sector and say, if I wanted — do I want to go build my own complete resource, or do I want to potentially tap that into a Microsoft platform or a Google platform or a Yahoo platform or an Amazon - eBay could, on down the line. Fortunately, the hosting companies that get this, again are offering utility computing, so you can hopefully tap into an unlimited amount of resource, so you can serve all of the people that want to come visit your site. But specific to Google and Microsoft if I had to pick a winner, I’m still picking Google at this point, but if you had to compete against anybody - if I’m Google, I don’t want to compete against Microsoft, if I’m Microsoft I don’t want to compete against Google; its going to be an interesting battle. Google’s my pick for the winner right now.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Thanks again to Andy Schroepfer, President and Founder, Tier 1 Research, and thanks to you, our listeners for joining us on this edition of Thought Leaders.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Thought Leaders, SAVVIS, Andy Schroepfer, Tier 1 Research

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Tags: Content Management, EMC, Documentum, Geoffrey McCaleb

Ten years ago, these same folks were afraid to order online from Amazon due to lack of privacy or fear of their credit card information being mysteriously hacked into. Heck, the Kenneth Star subpoena for Monica Lewinsky’s book purchases from Barnes & Noble sent shockwaves through the bulletin boards back in 1998.

Yet people don’t think twice now about posting the most intimate details of their life online these days. What their wishlist on Amazon is, what their music tastes on MySpace are, where they went to school, and on and on. Isn’t it just like stripping naked online? Instead of baring their bodies, posters are baring their habits, desires and personalities for the world.

And they do it voluntarily. God bless the Internet.

Of course, the minute it happens involuntarily, like with AOL’s data Valdez incident—suddenly it’s time to shut down the search engines. So how will forcing operators to delete personal information protect our privacy? Imagine a nude photo, but with all the interesting parts, and the face, cut out. You’re fooling nobody. If you are really seeking to disguise the data, doesn’t it make sense to talk about better ways to anonymize data? Ie, scrambling all the parts of the photo so that the viewer couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

–Ken Leung

Tags: Ken Leung

Tags: Hitwise, YouTube, Yahoo, Jeff Karnes

The boom in worldwide video gaming is pushing China’s gaming device manufacturers to boost production and to expand product lines to include cutting-edge on-demand game services. More than 30 manufacturers in mainland China are ramping up production for the worldwide and domestic markets.

China is not a major competitor in the realm of video game publishing, but the country essentially outfits the world with gamepads, joysticks, specialized controllers, video game consoles, and other product gaming accessories. Once made mostly for export serving and supplying companies like 3M, Best Buy, Kmart, Philips, Samsung, Sony, Thrustmaster, Wal-Mart; the tools of gaming have helped to increase the population of Chinese and Asian video game players.

Chinese manufacturers are leading edge in many ways. Many are planning to produce high-end wireless gaming accessories including Bluetooth-capable controllers. The gaming devices industries in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan are expected to enjoy robust growth. According to UK-based Research & Markets global worldwide production valued at $24 billion in 2005 is projected to reach$55 billion in 2009.

The growth of the industry is being driven by the development of hardware and software as well as the increasing numbers and expanding demographics of gamers all over the world. About 140 million gamers play on consoles, 200 million on PCs and 100 million on handhelds. More than 60 percent of these gamers are more than 18 years of age.

Multimedia search is one of those things that not alot of people are talking about but is a big deal. As we move into Web 2.0 and soon to be 3.0, the media format of choice will move from text to audio and video. Today most of the search engines don’t do a great job on searching multimedia. Yahoo is moving to change the landscape of multimedia search.

Full Transcript: Here is a link to the full transcript of the interview.

Highlights:

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: ….broadband subscribers now outpacing dial up subscribers. It is happening globally as well. So whether you look at Europe or Asia, broadband as an infrastructure has certainly grown, so I think you’ve seen that as a key influencer in terms of how people consume this (multimedia). And you’ve seen this with the amount of content coming online; not just video and audio, but images as well. So folks are consuming more and more of this (multimedia) on a daily basis. The second piece that has happened from a product perspective is the production costs and the barriers to entry have dramatically lowered. So as folks, weather they look at using consumer tools, editing tools, putting content online and using the internet as a distribution vehicle, has become fairly robust and easy to do. It has opened up a huge distribution channel for multimedia.

John Furrier, Founder of PodTech: New formats are coming in; you mentioned broadband and the ease of publishing. How are you guys handling that and from a product perspective

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: …Part of it was to align with our vision in search, which is to enable people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge. Part of that was to look at the vertical applications. We looked at the query logs and we looked at what the users were doing. We found that whether it was video, audio, or an image, there were a lot of folks that were doing that type of search. What we have recently done is we have started to introduce more discovery. So we do try to help you discover what is on the video Internet at any one time.

What we have also done outside of the front pages or the homepages with video search recently, is on the search results page. So we just recently launched two different views we have the grid view which is the normal key frame view so I can quickly scan the thumbnails and see what the video is out there. We also have a list view now that shows you any additional metadata that is associated with that particular piece of video. We also allow you to filter and say “Show me more from this particular site.” So it allows you to keep discovering. So we are helping from the expansion perspective to say, “I’m consuming, I’m discovering, let me help others consume and discover as well because a recommendation has a level of trust with my community.

John Furrier, Founder PodTech: Is tagging an open source search algorithm? Think about open source development, people will just chip in on projects but one little tag adds to the overall thing. It’s like open source search. You guys are pioneering that, right? Talk about that.

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: Yes, I think that it also puts search in the hands of the user. You know the statement, “The tyranny of the webmaster” right? I think tagging gets you around that because the users become much more involved in terms of their search experience. One of the key areas with that is with the community and the ability for users to share that and rate that and to use each other for trust and for relevance. I think from a tagging perspective that really opens it up for the users to do that. We are very excited about that particular element. So between the traditional automated ways of getting metadata, but also the new ways of getting metadata through tagging, that experience in combination really delivers that right discovery experience for users.

One example of the integrated experience for us is the recent release of our audio search product so it’s audio.search.yahoo.com we released it in August. There were three components to that experience. We’ve got music related queries and content, there’s other audio, so sound effects that type of thing, and then we also have podcasting. So between those three things we give the user and we’ve got over 50 million audio files in the index so through partners and through web crawling we really have a comprehensive and open index for folks to discover what is out there on the audio internet. What we’ve done in the results set is to integrate. … We want to hide the complexity of the back end, from the user. Where the user experience is simple, easy, and open. But the back end, whether it is the processing, the relevance, the search, the discoverability, all of those heavy lifting things we do ourselves.

John Furrier, Founder PodTech: So talk about how multimedia search is changing traditional search.

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: I think that is a really good question because you could just say let’s just make the multimedia experience part of the web experience and just create this unified search. From our perspective, users do consume multimedia differently. They do go to multimedia search for different purposes and they do expect a different experience from multimedia search. From our perspective, that is why we broke them out into separate vertical searches and are working to deliver those specific experiences for users and publishers to get the content into the system to get the users to come there and to start consuming and to get more engaged with that work flow and that user base and that discovery mechanism which is different from web. However, if you come for video search, image search, or audio search, certainly we like you to stay for web search. That is a big core competency of Yahoo and we are very proud of web search and so we use those vertical searches as a way to drag traffic that direction.

John Furrier, Founder PodTech: Talk about some of the highlights in your mind from a product…you must be proud of some of the stuff that you guys have done.

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: I’m proud of video search. The amount of progress we’ve been able to make coming out of beta, coming in beta in December, we launched in general availability back in April. The amount of partners, the amount of web content we’ve been able to get into the system, our launch of Media RSS as a way for the average consumer to send and syndicate content into our index. We are in fifteen different countries, translated into six different languages. We recently launched a new search results page that ties together finding more from a particular site, integrating with My web, and also to help that discovery mechanism. I’m proud of that release and the way that we’ve been able to take something that was new to the market in terms of this new market in December and really drive a lot of features, a lot of functions, and we’ve received a tremendous amount of positive user feedback on that. The second piece is on audio search and our ability to put that product together at a time when podcasting, along with music and other audio, were really starting to converge into a single experience. And for us to deliver that experience in the way that we did it from the user experience I was very proud of the team in terms of the way they were able to do that in a relatively short amount of time.

I think you will continue to see us align with the core search vision which is enabling people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge and share and expand.

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

Host: John Furrier, Founder of PodTech.net

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Supernova PodTech InfoTalk™ Podcast - Future of decentralized computing with blogs

Andrew is a great guy and hits some great points on where the blogs are going… It’s must listen …

Sound bites:

Question: Where is the blog world going? Andrew: It’s going everywhere ..a great year for the industry. Cover story on Business Week article recently made the statement “Blogs will matter and change your business.”. What we’ve seen is that we’re going past just blogging …200 m people soon to be blogging…it’s about a mass approach…broadly horizontal use cases…six apart is doing anything we can to enable blogging…

Blogging is becoming the personal publishing platform but more than that …at it core is communications… not about low end content mgt it’s really about closed loop of communications – it’s a conversation… the blog post is not as a statement but the start of a conversation between tools like comments and trackbacks that tease out the interraltionship between blogs you get a sense of a much larger dialog. Traditional media have only been about a one way dialog.

Marketing with blogs: Watch out for the “Bullshit Screen”
With blogs marketers need to learn about honesty… you get called out in the blog world between the back and forth there is a ‘bullshit screen’…it very hard to create a standard party line with blogs.. You can’t fake it in the blog world. The critical thing is that you have to get in early and participate and can’t jump in too late… there isn’t a handbook and you need to learn what blogging means for your company.

SixApart products: Typepad – conversation for the masses; LiveJournal - conversation for small groups

Wild Prediction: Believes that everyone will have a blog account just like people have email accounts today.

Andrew Anker Podcast Supernova 2005 Supernova 2005 Podcast Supernova Podcast Technology Podcast Silicon Valley John Furrier Business Podcasts podcast shows Six Apart Six Apart Podcast