Collanos Blog

Zürich/San Francisco, 26. Februar 2007 – Collanos Software wählt ihre Schweizer PR-Agentur Jenni Kommunikation zur weltweiten Leadagentur. Das rasch wachsende Schweiz-Amerikanische Start-up Unternehmen will seine Präsenz in den wichtigsten Märkten rasch verstärken und setzt darum auf die Branchenerfahrung, die gute internationale Vernetzung und das Know-how von Jenni Kommunikation.Das im November 2003 gegründete Software-Unternehmen Collanos Software, mit Sitz in Zürich und San Francisco und einem Büro in Sofia (Bulgarien), hat sich rasches und nachhaltiges Wachstum auf die Fahne geschrieben. Innerhalb der nächsten zwölf Monate soll weltweit die Marke von 100’000 aktiven Nutzern des kostenlos zur Verfügung gestellten Collanos Workplace überschritten werden.

Um Collanos Software auch über die Schweizer Grenzen hinaus bekannt zu machen, wurde Jenni Kommunikation mit der Suche nach geeigneten Partner-Agenturen beauftragt. Die Selektionierung wurde in Deutschland (100zehn: www.100zehn.de) und den USA (FutureWorks Inc.: www.future-works.com) bereits abgeschlossen. Weitere Länder werden folgen.

„Die Lancierung von Collanos Workplace 1.0 verlief reibungslos und mit der Einführung der deutschen Version mit Collanos Workplace 1.0.2 konnte das Wachstum an Nutzern nachhaltig beschleunigt werden. Wichtig ist für uns nun die professionelle und fachlich kompetente Zusammenarbeit mit PR-Agenturen in unseren wichtigsten Märkten“, sagt Peter Helfenstein, CEO von Collanos. „Für Collanos ist erfolgreiche PR rund um den Globus entscheidend. Unser durch Jenni Kommunikation koordiniertes Agentur-Team kommuniziert startup-gerecht, sehr engagiert und innovativ mit Online Medien, Presse sowie über Social Web-Anwendungen. So erfahren immer mehr Menschen, die gemeinsam Dinge tun, wie einfach es ist, im „Virtuellen Meetingraum“, ohne teure Firmeninfrastruktur, effizient zusammenzuarbeiten und hervorragende Ergebnisse zu erzielen.“

Die kostenlos erhältliche Software steht unter www.collanos.com zum Download bereit.

Über Jenni Kommunikation

Die 1996 von Urs Jenni gegründete PR-Agentur Jenni Kommunikation, mit Sitz im Zürcher Seefeld, ist auf Media- und Blogger-Relations im Bereich Consumer- und Corporate PR spezialisiert. Namhafte Unternehmen aus dem Technologiebereich, Telekommunikation, Unterhaltungselektronik, Lifestyle und Travel & Tourism vertrauen auf das Know-how und Beziehungsnetzwerk der Agentur. Ein wichtiges Standbein bilden zudem schweizerische Start-up Unternehmen. Jenni Kommunikation betreut für ihre Kunden alle Sprachregionen der Schweiz und kann international auf ein breites Netzwerk an Partner-Agenturen zurückgreifen.

Über 100zehn

Die 100zehn GmbH ist eine Agentur für Kommunikation mit einem Fokus auf Informationstechnologie, Telekommunikation und Unterhaltungselektronik. Consumer und Corporate PR, Markenkommunikation sowie mobile Kommunikationsthemen kombiniert mit Event Marketing sind Schwerpunkte der 100zehn. Die Agentur unterstützt marktführende Firmen wie Anycom, Apple, Navman, Palm und Sybase iAnywhere bei deren Kommunikation.

Über FutureWorks Inc.

FutureWorks (www.future-works.com), mit Büros im Silicon Valley und San Francisco, zählt Marktführer und Start-ups zu ihren Kunden, für die sie die Medienpräsenz verstärken, sie ins Gespräch bringen, die Märkte pflegen und ganz neue Möglichkeiten zur Expansion der Geschäftstätigkeit schaffen.
Die Agentur verfügt über ein sehr gutes technologisches Verständnis und ist darauf spezialisiert, marktspezifische realistische Lösungen für verschiedene Märkte und Personen zu präsentieren. FutureWorks kombiniert Print und Web PR mit Networking über Blogs und Social Applications, um intelligente, erfolgsorientierte und wirkungsvolle Kommunikationsprogramme zu entwickeln.

SAN JOSE, CALIF. – Feb. 20, 2007 – FutureWorks PR, an award-winning New Media PR agency, announced that it has joined Collanos Software’s global network of marketing and public relations teams. FutureWorks will collaborate with Collanos’ lead agency, Jenni Kommunikation, www.jeko.com and will head their media, analyst, and blogger relations in North America.

In the past, premium collaboration services have been primarily targeted at enterprise organizations. Collanos becomes the first company to offer free collaboration solutions to all internet users, anywhere in the world. Teams who were unable to deploy expensive collaborative services can now instantly embrace Collanos Workplace without any dependence on servers, IT personnel, or license fees. Collanos users can select their choice of operating system, take their data offline, and securely work together on team projects.

“FutureWorks has earned an impressive reputation for navigating the convergence between traditional, social, and new media landscapes. We look forward to working with them to reach the teams that can greatly benefit from the use of Collanos Workplace,” said Peter Helfenstein, CEO of Collanos.

“Collanos is providing teams with free Collaboration tools that will help them become more productive on their own without requiring an investment in enterprise-class software and administrative support,” said Brian Solis, principal of FutureWorks. “Collanos will truly benefit many, and we will do what it takes to help them share the benefits with the masses,”

About Collanos Software
By leveraging open-source technologies, open standards, the familiarity of existing tools, and a global development model, Collanos delivers a friendly, all inclusive team-based solution that combines the benefits of classic client/server, web, and peer-to-peer architectures. Collanos was founded in November 2003 and has offices in San Francisco and Zurich, Switzerland.

Collanos Workplace can be downloaded for free from www.collanos.com.
More information: www.collanos.com, blog.collanos.com.

About FutureWorks, Inc.
With offices in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, FutureWorks, www.future-works.com, partners with market leaders and emerging companies to increase visibility, spark conversations and customer-pull, cultivate markets and create new opportunities that are necessary to expand business.

The agency’s specialty lies in its ability to understand technology and in turn, present market-specific, real-world solutions for specific markets and people. FutureWorks combines PR, social tools, and grassroots marketing for intelligent, results-driven communications programs that impact the bottom line.

Contact:
Lisa Christopher
Lisa [at] future-works.com
408-428-0895 Ext. 106

Dr. Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, said, “Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are generally cheaper, simpler, smaller, and frequently, more convenient to use. … . Ironically, in each of the instances studied in this book, [Innovator’s Dilemma] it was disruptive technology that precipitated the leading firms’ failure.

It is very interesting to see how Christensen’s research is being further validated by the rise of up-and-coming incumbent internet technology companies who are now taking away market share from enterprise application vendors. Telecommunication, content management, customer relationship management (CRM), database, and portal enterprise vendors are slowly seeing their market share erode as smaller more agile companies are building technologies that meet 80% of the customers need at a much lower cost. Companies such as Alfresco, Liferay, mysql, and salesforce.com have all built products that are competing against leading vendors such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and EMC.

Other smaller companies have selected not to compete directly with enterprise application vendors, but to compete with specific functionality in an enterprise application. A good example of such a company is Xing. Xing created a business network that allows business professionals to maintain and share their business contacts with others. Xing now has over one million members who share their contacts freely. Businesses have been trying to do this same thing with CRM systems but with little success. As Xing continues to grow and build its network, businesses have started to turn to Xing for assistance with managing their company contacts.

The Internet provides a way for small businesses to build a solution that either competes directly with enterprise vendors or with functionality in an enterprise vendor’s product. Both strategies are potentially disruptive to enterprise vendors. Today, expensive marketing budgets, unaffordable infrastructure costs, security concerns, and technology superiority are a lot less penetrable barriers to entry. Companies can leverage the internet to cheaply market their solutions, buy hardware and host their products at very low and affordable costs, and outsource and use open source components to build products faster and cheaper. Although security concerns are increasing, trust in vendor hosted solutions has greatly increased. All these forces, plus the fact that existing vendors are tied to out-of-date architecture and are delivering functionality for the most demanding user, set the stage for market disruption.

In the Collaboration market, the innovative disruption has started. Companies such as 37signals, Zoho, and Zimbra have build collaboration solutions that challenge the likes of IBM, EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft. Collaboration prices have dropped, and continue to drop, making technology more affordable for the enterprise. But because of their hosted architecture, that incurs hosting and storage costs, incumbent vendors have faced price barrier that have prevented them from truly disrupting enterprise vendors and serving underserved markets.

Similar to Xing, Collanos choose to first compete against a few specific functions offered by enterprise and incumbent collaboration vendors. Where more holistic collaboration solutions required a high degree of computer expertise, monthly costs to support hosted infrastructure, restrictive company policies, and closed networks; Collanos choose to focus on a basic collaboration functionality that was easy to use, free, and open. Selecting a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture was the innovation that has enabled Collanos to become a disruptive technology.

User feedback has been overwhelming positive. Students, small businesses, non-profits, and global markets have received Collanos simple but very innovative Collaboration solution. Users around the world can now experience the benefits of a collaboration system and a collaborative network for free. Thousands of users have downloaded and registered with Collanos. Daily teams have joined the Collanos network.

Collanos ambition is to provide its user network with a complete set of functionality that will allow them to benefit from the same tools that help make the enterprise successful.

Collanos aspiration is in line with Dr. Christensen’s findings, and according to Christensen’s theory, disruptive technologies such as Collanos who successfully start out serving underserved markets, eventually blossom and pick up the speed required to displace established vendors.

For those who attended our “Think Out of the (In)box” event, here’s a recap with some of the ‘best of’ video clips captured during the live webcast.

For those who missed it altogether, no worries! Thanks to our sponsor, Translumina, we were able to broadcast the event live and are now able to stream it to you over the web using Veodia’s services.

Our moderator, panelists and energetic audience provided a great discussion on fundamental issues facing teams seeking solutions to support their collaboration needs.
Here are some of the questions that were addressed during the event:

• What is the difference between groups and teams and, respectively, group-work and teamwork?
• Why is email still being used in the context of teams even though it is not a many-to-many collaboration solution?
• Why are enterprises to blame for the stagnant progress in adopting more team-friendly collaboration solutions that will replace email?
• When is it best using synchronous collaboration solutions and when asynchronous? Who prefers one over the other?
• What are ‘high-performance teams’ and do start-ups qualify as such?

As well as some more entertaining questions, such as:

• Why does Dave Hornik hate wikis?
• When does Sara Beckman expect the Myers-Briggs test to be delivered online?

Discussion Highlights

On the topic ‘teams vs. groups’ that Sara Beckman brought up, Jane Creech provided some great insight on how groups scale up to become high-performance teams once the characteristics of teams become more prevalent.

Dave Hornik was quick to point out that start-ups, by definition, are high-performance teams yet they lack the tools to support this team-intense environment with the exception of ‘mediocre’ wikis:

I have not come across a start-up that has a software tool that really addresses teamwork in a meaningful way.

Interestingly, wikis have become increasingly a tool that start-ups are adopting…they’re horrible, they are purely about information.

In response to the moderator’s David Coleman question: “If email works best for one-to-one and sometimes one-to-many interactions, while teamwork is a many to many interaction, why are most people still using email?” Dave Hornik brought up the fundamental differences between synchronous and asynchronous communications and the demographics that constitute who prefers one means of communication over the other. As for himself, Dave needs sleep time and, therefore, async is key!

Collaboration works best when everybody is available and yet we’re all busy and running around so nobody is available at any given time. Email has become the best tool for asynchronous communications…I use it for that reason alone…We see evolution where our kids are more interested in IM and don’t believe in email…We need to find better tools that deal with asynchronous.

Who is to be blamed for the slow progress being made with more team-friendly collaboration solutions than email? According to Jane Creech, it’s the enterprise:

What keeps people from breaking out of the email cycle is that enterprises haven’t realized yet the power of team knowledge sharing systems and until they acknowledge the power of teams, email will be used.

Finally, for those of you MBA students still looking for jobs and missed our event, here’s another opportunity to get some insight on the job market prospects:

Collanos Workplace releases version 1.0.2 of its innovative P2P software for virtual teams

Zurich, February 8, 2007 – Collanos Software now offers its free cross-company, cross-platform collaboration solution in German.

Collanos Workplace allows teams to work together over the internet more efficiently, flexibly, and securely. They can access shared information such as contacts, discussions, documents, team calendars, tasks, and projects. Now, users can switch between English and German as Collanos takes the first step into localizing its global software.

“Tens of thousands of users have already installed Collanos Workplace on their computers, and every month we see a 130% growth rate,” said Peter Helfenstein, CEO of Collanos.

With offices in Switzerland and USA, Collanos expects to further accelerate this rapid growth with the German version.

“Over 25% of our users originate from Switzerland, Germany and Austria,” says Helfenstein. “With the German version, we will become even stronger in the Germanic region.”

Typical Collanos users are MBA students, small to mid-size businesses, non-profit organizations, and mobile work groups in large consulting companies seeking cross-organizational collaboration solutions. Users all commonly share the need for a flexible collaboration platform that spans several locations in order to optimize the workflow with colleagues, customers, providers, partners, and remote employees.

These users require that all team members have access to the latest version of documents and that all project-related discussions, emails, and other content are easily accessible in a shared environment. Since Collanos supports all major operating systems, users can always invite additional members to their workspaces.

“As a small company with globally dispersed employees and countless partners, we suffered from overflowing email inboxes and endless attachments,” recalls Alex Fries, CEO of PURE SWISS Inc. in San Francisco. “Thanks to Collanos, we are now able to work as a ‘virtual team’ in a secure, structured environment, and in the context of our teams. Without Collanos, we would have had to invest in an expensive and complex collaboration system limiting us to a closed network.”

Reto Hartinger, a Swiss Internet expert and organizer of IT conferences, believes the free software has great promise, “Although Collanos is not yet as powerful as some of its older siblings, Lotus Notes, Sharepoint, and Groove, it will rapidly gain market share especially with innovative companies and collaboration within teams with high member turnover.” Hartinger also sees huge potential with lawyers, software developers, advertising and marketing agencies, and universities.

Peter Helfenstein added, “The German version was translated entirely by volunteers in our user community. This will happen with upcoming languages as well. Collanos will work with the community to maintain these versions.”

The software is available for free and can be downloaded at www.collanos.com.

Collanos Workplace 1.0.2 nun auch in deutscher Sprachversion. P2P-Software für virtuelle Teams revolutioniert den Markt für Kollaborationswerkzeuge

Zürich, 8. Februar 2007 – Collanos stellt seine Software für firmenübergreifendes Zusammenarbeiten nun auch in deutscher Sprache zum Herunterladen bereit. Die kostenlose Software arbeitet unter Windows, Mac OS X und Linux. Gleichzeitig baut Collanos den Marketing- und Supportbereich aus.

Mit Collanos Workplace können Teams im Internet effizient, flexibel und sicher zusammen arbeiten. Sie können auf gemeinsame Informationen wie Kontakte, Diskussionen, Dokumente, Teamkalender, Aufgaben und Projekte zugreifen. Die Sprachversion der Benutzeroberfläche lässt sich im laufenden Betrieb von Englisch auf Deutsch umschalten.

“Bereits jetzt haben Zehntausende Collanos Workplace auf ihrem Rechner installiert und jeden Monat registrieren sich rund 130 % mehr Benutzer als im Vormonat”, erklärt Peter Helfenstein, CEO von Collanos. Das rasante Wachstum will das Jungunternehmen mit Sitz in der Schweiz und in den USA mit der deutschen Version nun noch beschleunigen.

“Über 25% der Registrierungen kommen heute schon aus der Schweiz, Deutschland und Österreich”, sagt Helfenstein. “Mit der neuen Version werden wir im deutschsprachigen Markt noch stärker.” Collanos baut darum in der Schweiz auch das Mitarbeiter-Team aus: Zusätzliche Stellen in den Bereichen Marketing und Benutzerunterstützung werden besetzt.

Typische Collanos-Nutzer sind kleinere, innovative Firmen, mobil arbeitende Arbeitsgruppen in großen Beratungsunternehmen, aber auch MBA-Studenten, die eine flexible Kollaborationsplattform über Standortgrenzen, für das Zusammenspiel mit Kunden, Lieferanten, Partnern und externen Mitarbeitern oder für den mobilen Einsatz benötigen. Diese Nutzer sind darauf angewiesen, dass jeder jederzeit auf die letzte Version eines Dokumentes zugreifen kann und dass Diskussionen, E-Mails und Kalkulationen eines Projektes innerhalb einer gemeinsamen Struktur immer von allen abrufbar sind. Da Collanos alle Betriebssysteme unterstützt, können Collanos-Nutzer einfach weitere Personen in ihre Projekt-Arbeitsumgebung einladen.

“Als kleine Firma mit weltweit verteilten Mitarbeitern und unzähligen Partnern litten wir unter hoffnungslos überfüllten Mailboxen mit unzähligen E-Mails mit angehängten Dokumenten”, erinnert sich Alex Fries, CEO von PURE SWISS Inc. in San Francisco. “Dank Collanos haben wir nun unsere virtuelle zentrale Umgebung und können überall professionell und strukturiert zusammenarbeiten. Das wäre sonst nur mit einer teuren Collaboration-Umgebung im Rahmen eines firmeneigenen Netzwerks möglich.”

Reto Hartinger, einer der führenden Köpfe der Schweizer Internet-Szene und IT-Konferenzveranstalter, gibt der Gratissoftware gute Chancen: “Collanos ist zwar noch nicht so leistungsfähig wie einige seiner großen Brüder, aber gerade bei innovativen Firmen und für die Zusammenarbeit in Teams mit wechselnder Zusammensetzung wird sich Collanos rasch durchsetzen.” großes Potenzial sieht er unter anderem bei Anwälten, Software-Entwicklern, Werbe- und Marketing-Agenturen sowie Universitäten.

Weitere Sprachversionen von Collanos Workplace sollen folgen. Peter Helfenstein erklärt: “Bereits die deutsche Version wurde von Freiwilligen aus der User Community vorbereitet. Weitere Sprachen werden künftig gänzlich von den Nutzern erstellt und gemeinsam mit Collanos gepflegt.”

Die kostenlos erhältliche Software steht unter www.collanos.com zum Download bereit.