As reported earlier, Collanos was also invited to present as one of the four LaunchPad companies. The above picture was taken during Collanos’ six minutes announcement of our new Voice Services. Stay tuned for more details, as the Collanos Phone is going be be beta-released shortly.
As a member of Collanos, I can very much relate to the Ent. 1.5 vs. 2.0 dilemma.
In recent demonstrations in Silicon Valley we often find ourselves over-shadowed by cool Ajax-based (and SaaS) applications that are cool but often either premature for mass user adoption or not justified as stand alone applications. Collanos may be missing the flare of some of these cool applications but if ‘cool’ is the criteria to be considered a 2.0 company, we are very happy to be a ‘1.5’.
Collanos is targeted at users seeking an easy-to-use, affordable and cross-platform solution for managing all cross-organizational team interactions in the context of their teams (hence ‘think out of the inbox’ and why it’s ‘9* better than email’). Enterprises may not be at the forefront of our targeted user-base but there surely are many enterprise users who can use such application when they need to figure a way to get an external member of the team onboard in a shared workspace without needing to put a request in for IT to grant the permissions and make access possible. The thousands of early adopters of our solutions can already attest to Collanos meeting these requirements as well as serving other critical requirements such as ad hoc team formation, data stored only on user machines (no data on servers) and more secure data transfer.
Collanos addresses the pains of today and therefore may in fact be a 1.5 company. When the underwater cables went down in Asia a few months ago and users could not connect to the internet, users flocked to Collanos. When users lose trust in their data being stored on some remote server due to another major breach of data privacy, they will seek out P2P-based solutions such as Collanos. When users come to terms with their email Inbox being their worst nightmare and seek a more contextual solution, Collanos’ team workspaces will spur their interests.
I can go on and on listing the benefits of Collanos Workplace, our flagship solution (and yes, we still need to further enhance the application), but I will leave it to the readers, including the enterprise ‘2.0’ users, to see for themselves how 1.5 is greater than 2.0.
Boston — June 20, 2007 – Collanos Software was selected to participate in Enterprise 2.0’s Launch Pad. Collanos’ mission is connecting people and enabling professional teamwork on a global basis and beyond enterprise boundaries.
Launch Pad features companies that are demonstrating the release of a new product or service. Collanos is one out of four companies selected to present on the main stage during Enterprise 2.0.
Collanos Workplace provides an easy to use, p2p platform for team members to collaborate on projects using Windows, Mac, and Linux Systems, without the need of a server. At the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad, Collanos will preview its new integrated communications services allowing team members to collaborate via voice and video in addition to conversation threads, instant messaging, and notes.
Collanos Workplace offers small business teams, students, non-profit organizations, and other knowledge-sharing professionals, an easy-to-use set of comprehensive collaboration tools. Collanos’ global collaborative network allows internet users to easily form teams and effectively collaborate together on a shared passion, goal, or project.
Enterprise 2.0 unites IT and business professionals striving for a more creative, alert, and productive company atmosphere. This conference drives the exploration and adoption of collaborative tools and technologies, focusing not only on the technology, but how the technology works with people.
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:
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:
As part of our community activities and the official launch of pilot programs across global MBA programs, we are hosting a panel discussion, open to the public, on February 6, in downtown San Francisco. Below is some general information on the event and on our web site you will find more details, including a link to RSVP.
Event: Think Out of the (In)box:Team-intensive collaboration solutions from an MBA perspective
Date: February 6, 2007, 6:30-9:00PM
Location: Swissnex, Montgomery 730, San Francisco, CA, 94111
Overview: Join MBA alumni and faculty members for a panel-lead discussion on the topic of new trends in team collaboration technologies. Leading Bay Area academics and industry experts will lead a discussion on state of the art collaboration solutions and social trends that support knowledge-intensive team projects from an MBA student’s perspective.
Panelists: Well-balanced panel of professionals, academics and analysts on team collaboration. Panelists include from the academia Dr. Homa Bahrami and Sara Beckman (Haas, UC Berkeley), Micah Siegel (Consulting Professor in Stanford and Managing Director C2C), venture capitalist Dave Hornik (August Capital), and the moderator, David Coleman (Collaborative Strategies), an industry specialist in the field of collaboration.
Today we had nice party with a toast as we officially launched Collanos Software’s U.S. operations, introduced our team, and heard from Peter Helfenstein, former Country Manager of Novell and Cambridge Technology Partners Switzerland, why he has decided to join the company.
About 50 friends of the company joined the event in the event hall of our 1850 red bricks office building in downtown San Francisco.
