Collanos Blog

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”.

To accelerate the adoption of our solutions, we focus of viral marketing activities on chosen groups that truly reflect our target audience. Our first “seeding” areas include MBA students and faculty at Universities.

MBA students spend most of their time on multiple team oriented projects, exchange large files and correspond about them frequently, have different operating systems and require offline access to their files. Sound familiar?

These characteristics represent what Collanos is all about and selecting this target group was a natural choice for us. Furthermore, many of us on the team have gone through advanced degree programs several years ago. Now, as we spend more time getting to know future users of our solutions, we realize that when it comes down to team collaboration solutions, little, if not none, progress has been made. It’s the same old email, file servers and random instant messaging. Time for change!

We are working closely with MBA programs at leading universities to prepare for the launch of simultaneous pilot programs. Some of these include:

• Boston University
• Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley
• University of San Francisco
• Stanford GSB
• San José State University
• University of Phoenix
• MIT Sloan
• IMD Lausanne (Switzerland)
• University of St. Gallen (Switzerland)

Several programs have already committed to the pilot and, based on an early demo of our applications, faculty and administration alike are eager to introduce our free solutions on campus.

According to Guy Kawasaki, author of the book “The Art of the Start”, traditional mission statements should be replace with a mantra. Most mission statements are like a “…long, boring, commonplace, and pointless joke”, states Guy.

On the other side, a mantra is short, and evokes power and emotion. Collanos’ mantra is:

Intrigued? Read more about mantras on Guy’s blog.