Collanos Blog

SAN FRANCISCO — May 24, 2007 — Collanos Software today released Collanos Workplace 1.1, a free p2p platform that enables team collaboration on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems without the need for a server. Version 1.1 lays the foundation for global team collaboration. In addition, several new features have been added, including a Central User Directory, User Sign In/Out, and Vista OS support. Collanos delivers increased reliability, speed, and overall performance.

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.

With the introduction of the Collanos Central User Directory, users will be able to see and invite any other Collanos community member, even if they are offline. Collanos Workplace allows users to restore any previous version of team member contributions. The Auto start kicks off the replication process immediately after the computer goes online. With the new Sign In/Out step, on top of the existing data encryption and secure storage, Collanos adds an additional security measure to protect project and team data.

Existing Workplace users will see an immediate improvement with the overall performance of the application, and in the speed of content replication across each team member’s workspaces.

With this new release, Collanos Software continues to execute on its vision of bringing free, easy-to-use, yet powerful team collaboration solutions to millions of internet users. Collanos’ mission is connecting collaborating people and enabling professional teamwork on a global basis and beyond enterprise boundaries.

“Over the last few months Collanos has been collecting input from the thousands of Windows, Mac and Linux users to better manage their team projects,” said Franco Dal Molin, CTO and President of Collanos. “Quarter over quarter Collanos triples its users. From the new release we expect important acceleration for this growth.

As founder and CTO, I would like to initiate a dialogue on our company blog about the technical aspects of Collanos’ offering. This article discusses the main limitations of today’s Workplace release as well as our ongoing activities to address and rapidly fix the problems. The focus is on fundamental platform evolution. I will not talk about business features or collaboration functions today. In my next blog postings, I will shed more light on other aspects like Collanos’ vision, product portfolio and feature roadmaps.

Collanos had been in “beta” for about half a year before dropping the “beta” label two months ago. We have come a long way, but the journey has just started. There are many exciting new features we plan to release to our growing user base. This post introduces some of the features we will release in the coming months.

Starting Out
In eight months, we went through a dozen of small releases, fixing nearly 400 bugs and issues. Don’t be surprised; this is software engineering best practice: quick turn around cycles and “perpetual releases”. We also added many features, and with every improved version, the number of downloads continued to increase. We are about to reach 40,000 downloads, and it is exciting for us to see that famous “exponential curve” (aka the ‘hockey stick curve’) kicking in.

Invaluable Feedback
A big thank you goes to our active user community. Your great feedback helps us better understand what works, what doesn’t, what you like and dislike, and what you miss. This blog post is a summary of the main limitations of our product and how we are addressing them. If you are interested in raving quotes and why users are enthusiastic about Collanos, you can find them on our web site. We have about 30 rotating quotes on the Products page, and new quotes are added daily – just refresh the web page regularly to see them.

Main Limitations
While we receive great feature requests and lots of ideas from users, many could be classified as “nice to have” or are subjective to a very specific use-case. Still, there are a number of issues that come up frequently. In fact, there are important limitations in our current product release that prevent some of our users to deploy the solution more widely. Here is the ranking:

1. User must be online to be invited – An invitee must be online, otherwise there is no way to invite this person. This limitation comes from our current “pure” P2P model with no additional centralized servers or “helper” services.
2. Conflicts can lead to data loss – If two users make changes to content at the same time, then one of the two will likely lose his/her changes. This is a limitation of the current simple “last modifier wins” rule. BTW conflicts cannot be avoided in a P2P system – only mitigated and managed.
3. All content must be received from its originator – The current P2P replication algorithm fetches data from the source (i.e. its originator) only. If the originator is currently offline, its new content or latest changes cannot be received even if another team member is online with that new content.

Near Future
We are addressing all of the above issues with high priority. Our goal is to relieve “user pain” with as simple and pragmatic solutions as possible. We could certainly think of very elaborate and complex “enterprise class” feature sets, but this would only delay the process. Our mantra in engineering is: Deliver great user value fast. In the near future we are going to ship the following features (in this order):

1. Central User Directory – This new central service serves multiple purposes. First of all, it’s a directory for our community so users can easily find other users regardless if they are online or not. You will be able to search by different attributes – much like current social networking sites. And no matter if a person is currently online or offline, you will be able to invite this person.

2. Conflict Bin – This simple “save my data” concept will prevent users from losing their work due to unexpected conflicts. If a conflict happens (again, this is unavoidable in P2P networks), then the overwritten (or even deleted) copy will be saved into the Conflict Bin of the affected user. From there, the data can easily be recovered. At a later stage, we might expand the concept and add support for file versioning. With this, users will be able to refer back to any previous document version.

What’s better? These two features will be rolled out within 3-5 weeks so stay tuned!

3. Improved Replication – Another major effort is going into bringing our replication algorithms to the next level. We are building in some advanced capabilities and intelligence like a peer’s ability of fetching new workspace content from any other peer who already received it, or fetching it from many peers at the same time. Other measures will include advanced optimizations such as measuring P2P bandwidths or dynamically applying priorities. It will also be possible to see how much data is left for transmission on a per object basis.

As you can imagine, the third feature set is a bit more complex to implement. We plan to roll out features gradually with the first set of improvements due in approximately two months. This second-generation synchronization will be the single most important improvement of the Collanos platform. The benefits for our users will be substantial. Users can expect faster replication times and higher transparency of what is being replicated.

And Beyond…
We have a bolder vision, and some of the building blocks are already on the drawing boards:

• Permanent Peer – This service will be an on-demand subscription offered through ISPs. It will boost your overall Collanos experience. Think of it as your other always-on peer that not only maximizes up-to-date workspace content, but offers backup, workspace management, and more.
• Web Workplace – This extension will come with the Permanent Peer. It essentially brings the Workplace to your standard web browser, allowing you to access your workspaces from any connected device. This flexible hybrid architecture will make Collanos the first seamless Peer-to-Peer-to-Web offering.
• Voice Services and Instant Messaging – We will integrate VoIP and more general instant messaging services with our Workplace very soon. The idea is to facilitate individual and team calls directly from the context of your various workspaces. Imagine a one-click conference call with your team!
• Multiple Languages – With the help of our user community, we recently added German to the Workplace and will soon add Chinese. More languages will be added this year. If you are interested in contributing with a specific translation, please get in touch with us.

I hope this information was valuable for you. Do you think we are addressing all the right issues? Do you have questions or would you like to see other topics covered? Please let me know what you think.

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.

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.

The term Unified Collaboration is being used by analysts, bloggers, and reporters to describe the convergence of instant messaging, voice services (one-to-one calls and conference calls), web conferencing (presentation sharing, screen sharing, remote control desktop), presence awareness, and team workspaces (team workspaces, file sharing, discussions, tasks, calendars).

The belief is that the use of a single integrated tool that allows teams to leverage the benefits of all these different collaboration components will allow teams to become more efficient and productive. A recent survey conducted by AV Interactive, a video conferencing network supplier, “showed that 80% of respondents said that communication was the most important element to keep a business running efficiently and 75% agreed that collaborative communication technologies would contribute towards more productive home or remote working.”

Current Unified Collaboration offerings are very expensive, $60-200 per user - costs that only wealthy enterprises can afford. For small businesses, ad-hoc teams, and consumers the Unified Collaboration vision is very expensive. Existing collaboration platforms used to share documents require customers to pay for storage space, limit the number of workspaces a team can create, and limit the number of users a team can invite. Consequently, Unified Collaboration still remains a vision for these users who end up working with disjointed tools, expensive pricing options, tools lacking functionality, and restrictive collaboration platforms.

Helping consumers, ad-hoc teams, and small businesses become more productive and efficient is Collanos’ top priority. Starting next year we will release additional functionality to complement Collanos Workplace, this additional functionality will become our first step towards providing customers with a unified collaboration platform. We will start out by releasing a soft phone with an instant messaging client that will allow Collanos users to call and video call each other, conduct conference calls, send SMS, and instant message other Collanos users and contacts who are part of other instant message networks such as Yahoo, Google, AOl, and MSN. This first release will focus on unifying the instant messaging and voice components, which many analysts refer to as Unified Messaging.

Our goal is to then follow-up this release and enhance the Collanos Workplace and allow team members to easily click a button in their Workplace and start a conference call with all their team members. Also, users can right click on a team member from there team member list and choose to call, sms, video call, or invite a team member to a conference call. The introduction of this new unified messaging functionality into Collanos Workplace will mark the beginning of the Collanos Unified Collaboration Platform.

After releasing the Collanos Unified Collaboration Platform we will introduce a web conferencing offering. Once we reach this milestone, we will become the first vendor to deliver a complete cross-platform Unified Collaboration Platform that is designed and priced for small businesses, ad-hoc teams, and consumers. By leveraging Collanos Workplace’s peer-to-peer infrastructure, consumers will benefit from all the unified collaboration functionality, while being free of the limitations that many hosting offerings impose. In addition, all of the team’s data will be stored locally by each member, further insuring user security and privacy, which is unmatched by hosted providers.

Future releases of our Unified Collaboration platform will include tighter, seamless integration with Workplace and application interfaces that will allow integration with other solutions. Also, next year we are planning to add a team calendar, videoconferencing, and web-access coupled with the ongoing flow of new features that will build upon the unified collaboration platforms capabilities. We are determined and diligently working to deliver you the Unified Collaboration Platform. With Collanos Workplace being recently released and now with our upcoming release of the Unified Collaboration Platform, Collanos is leading the ‘consumerization’ wave that will shake up the collaboration industry.

Gartner (NYSE: IT), the largest technology analyst company in the world, predicts Collanos’ type business model will become “the most significant trend affecting information technology during the next ten years.”

The Collanos’ type consumerization business model focuses on providing consumers with a collaboration platform that will allow internet home users, university faculty, small businesses, and inter-enterprise users to benefit from the collaboration tools that only enterprises have been able to provide at an expensive price to their employees.

By differentiating ourselves from other Collaboration vendors who require the use of a server, utilize a resource expensive development model, depend on longer release lifecycles, and have their own agenda that forces the need for further infrastructure investments, we gain a strategic advantage that allows us to deliver to the consumers the collaboration tools they need at prices they can afford.

David Mitchell Smith, Gartner Vice President and Gartner Fellow, predicts that our approach “will affect every enterprise.” Collanos’ approach is much like Wi-Fi’s, smart mobile phone’s, pc’s, voice over IP call’s and conference call’s, instant message’s, and the internet’s approach. Each of these was quickly adopted by consumers who benefited from the use of these technologies in their homes, families, clubs, and organizations. Consumers then took these technologies to work and caused the viral spread that later led to enterprise adoption.

Already in our beta offering, we see Collanos Workplace being not only demanded by ad-hoc teams, but by teams in the enterprise. Enterprise users refuse to constrain themselves to their current email and server based collaboration tools. Collanos, starting with its peer-to-peer Collanos Workplace, will soon provide consumers with a complete set of collaboration tools and like that create greater demand for Collanos in the enterprise.

Collanos prides itself in helping internet teamworkers and leading the evolution of the consumerization of collaboration technologies. We do not believe collaboration tools should only be available for the wealthy enterprise but should be available to everyone both outside and inside of the enterprise.

Two weeks ago, our global startup made it to the Swiss top 50 venture list published by Cash Private Equity Magazine 2006. We were competing for the number one spot with other companies such as biotech and medical equipment ventures.

This successful achievement is another milestone Collanos has achieved and we are grateful to all of you who have helped us receive this important ranking.This success is an even bigger achievement because Switzerland’s economy was recently ranked #1 in the Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum in front of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Singapore and the United States. Switzerland scored highest in many categories; some of the most relevant included:

• Quality of its research institutes
• Cooperation between Universities and companies
• Education of the work force
• Modern infrastructure (transportation and
  telecommunications)
• Quality of its political institutions

Switzerland’s ranking further validates Collanos’ global strategy and our decision to start and base our company in Switzerland. Our belief is that the internet has enabled startups such as Collanos to go global from the beginning. We are already gaining many customers from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the US.

Basing our company in the most competitive global country, focusing on a global market, and leveraging Swiss quality engineering with a global development model gives Collanos a strategic footing that allows us to globally differentiate ourselves from our competitors and serve a broader base of customers faster and more effectively.

Global Competitiveness Report

As posted as a comment in response to a TechCrunch posting this week:

“It appears that TechCrunch is giving a lot of coverage recently on File Sharing, with many new companies entering this space. However, the effectiveness of many of these solutions is very limited in the context of business and even more so in the context of intensive team collaboration settings.

Imagine you are working with a team on a project that involves frequent exchanges of emails along with constantly modified documents (basically what many of us do routinely these days). Supplement that with ongoing IM and phone/VOIP calls and you have a labyrinth of communication, cooperation and collaboration challenges (See very interesting article on the difference between these) with critical content scattered across a range of applications and systems.

File Sharing by itself is great for exchanging simple media such as photos and music and even for backing up files, but when a team has to collaborate on a file (s), discuss, modify, approve, version, track changes, etc. there needs to be ONE, consolidated solution in place to make it possible.

At the enterprise level, Lotus Notes and Sharepoint are common solutions to address many of these needs, however, they are costly and complex, therefore inaccesible to those of us ad hoc users or smaller businesses seeking something simple and inexpensive. Web-based solutions are…web-based, therefore restrict much of the work from being done offline and require centralized (or hosted) servers.

Although still a few weeks away from launching the fully loaded version of our free team collaboration solution, “Collanos Workplace”, has set out to take file sharing to another level. Our Peer-to-Peer, cross-platform (Yes, Mac, Linux and Windows!) solution will not compete with File Sharing solutions rather with those evolving to the next level of P2P 2.0.”

The CEO and parts of the core team at the headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, the CTO and another part of its nucleus in downtown San Francisco, USA, a software development team in Kharkov, Ukraine, as well as a number of additional small contractors and “company ambassadors” around the globe - Collanos Software is a what Business 2.0 Magazine calls a “Global Startup” in a recently published article:

How startups go global

Think multinationals have to be big? Think again. Scrappy, savvy small companies are operating worldwide in the battle for technology, talent, and customers.

Collanos is just at the beginning of this development. “We want to add additional talent to our already global team.” says Franco Dal Molin, Collanos’ founder and president, “We are ready to push the limits by implementing collaborative innovation networks and global sourcing models”.