Collanos Blog

Top 10 lists are out. Analyzing the short tail of registered Collanos users per country is nevertheless revealing. The distribution of the countries is changing slowly, not really surprisingly.

United States is number 1 with 35% of the registrations. This percentage share is growing steadily since the introduction of version 1.1.

Position 2 is Switzerland with 12%! After all, it is Collanos’ home country and Collanos Workplace has a German version of the product. The share of Switzerland is slowly decreasing which actually is expected given the size of the market.

Not surprisingly number 3 is Germany with 9%.

Rank 4, 5 and 6 are Canada, UK, India with each 4% and Australia 7th with 2% as all are strong English speaking markets. These countries have shown the strongest growth percentage over the last month with India having the highest growth rate.

8 and 9 follow the top markets even without national language versions: Netherlands and Italy with 2% of registrations.

Ranked 10 now is China also with 2%. The introduction of the Chinese version has led to nice growth, not only in China but overall in East Asia. Many countries in that area are climbing up the list and are in the meantime positioned between 20 and 30.

And who is positioned to enter the top 10? 11 to 20 are Portugal, Sweden, Austria (Collanos needs some push in the German speaking neighbourhood it seems), Brazil, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Russia, France, Poland and Philippines.

It will be interesting to see the changes over the next few months. Since the numbers of registred users are still small the effects of launching new language versions as well as of the work of active Collanos Ambassadors and communities are strongly influencing the growth of the user base.

Great to see the number of Collanos users growing all over the world. I am glad to share these stats with all of you regularly.

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.

Thought our blog readers would be interested in reading the latest Collanos Momentum Newsletter we sent out via email last week to the Collanos community:

“Since our last Collanos Momentum Newsletter in October 2006 we progressed well towards our goal of becoming a “one million users teamwork internet platform” by the end of 2008. Here’s a short update on our latest milestones:

Collanos’ management and financial foundation has been reinvigorated with the addition of Andreas Danuser, as a major investor and board member. Andreas is a successful serial entrepreneur (Inalp Networks, SwissQual, NetModule, CTModule, Comitas and Translumina) who brings all his VoIP competence into our company.
We are now working on the next investment round, which will allow us to switch gears, further enhancing our offering and, most importantly, solidifying our global structure and reach!

Collanos Workplace, our flagship solution, has matured a lot. On December 14th, 2006, after a six months beta phase, we launched Collanos Workplace 1.0. On February 8th, 2007 we released an important update making it available also in the German language.
Finally, last week, on May 14th, 2007 we launched Collanos Workplace 1.1, our newest version adding new key functionality to the product. Now users can find and invite other Collanos members and team workers around the world, even if they are offline. We also added the ability to restore older document versions of the team at any time. In addition Collanos supports now a third language – Chinese. After English and German this will allow us to increase our user base in the fastest growing internet market.

Since February we further broadened Collanos’ global PR reach. Our head agency, Jenni Kommunikation in Switzerland, was complemented with PR agencies in the United States (FutureWork PR – specializing in social media PR) and Germany (100zehn). This increased the effectiveness of our PR work in these countries very notably.
Just the fact that at CeBIT we were awarded with the “Office Organization Innovation Prize 2007” increased our visibility all over Europe!

Collanos’ user base has grown substantially with nearly 10,000 registrations just on our own website. We estimate the downloads on more than 1000 freeware download sites to be at least 5 times that number!
Using Collanos Workplace 1.1, you can now see for yourself how many users have registered with Collanos.

The growth of Collanos’ user base is fueled by successful use-cases and teams. We started to document these stories and role models, including: JC eBell, Pure Swiss, San Jose State University (SJSU), the agency teams of Jenni Kommunikation and Tweakfest.
With the much improved Collanos Workplace 1.1, new stories will be added frequently over the next weeks.

Early this year we also launched the very successful Collanos Ambassador program. Collanos friends from all over the world, including the U.S., Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Canada, Nicaragua, Brazil and the Philippines, voluntarily motivate, communicate, invite and support other Collanos users in their vicinity. This has been a great reward for our team to see other users so actively engaged with the Collanos community and provide us with valuable feedback.

Is there anything else we can do better? Oh, yes, there is!
We learned a lot over these last few months and have pushed our team decentralization to the maximum and beyond. Technology allows having teams spread all over the world but there are also limitations. As a result, we are going to concentrate our business functions in certain locations with the development organization in Kharkov, Ukraine, and the management and marketing in Switzerland and San Francisco.

Our product needed more time to mature than we had expected. This was a tough learning. The good news is that Version 1.1 is a major step forward and with Version 1.2 we are going to close the final open gaps: Just glimpse into the future with our Founder and CTO Franco Dal Molin.

If you are interested in contributing further to Collanos’ success, we have come up with four examples of things you can do:
1. Use Collanos Workplace with your teams
2. Talk , write, comment about Collanos to others (users, bloggers, analysts, journalists or investors…) about your team success and experience, and, of course, share it with us
3. Motivate and help others understand the value of Collanos-based teamwork - by becoming or nominating an ambassador
4. Invite friends and colleagues to use Collanos
We highly appreciate your help. Collanos Workplace 1.1 is a major milestone in the history of Collanos and a great point to start spreading the Collanos word out to all team-based professionals.

Many thanks to all of you who supported us over these first months, following the launch of Collanos Workplace.”

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.

Collanos bringt Workplace 1.1. mit neuen Features auf den Markt

Zürich, 15. Mai 2007 – Collanos Software bringt Collanos Workplace 1.1. auf den Markt. Die aktuelle Version der kostenlosen Software für firmen- und teamübergreifendes Zusammenarbeiten im Internet wartet mit Neuheiten auf: Sie ermöglicht das Auffinden von Teammitgliedern, auch wenn diese nicht online sind, vereinfacht die Zusammenarbeit unter den Mitgliedern, erhöht die Sicherheit und läuft neu auch unter Vista.

Collanos Mitglieder können ihr User-Profil dem gesamten Netzwerk zugänglich machen. Damit schafft Collanos ein globales Netzwerk. So können andere Collanos Nutzer via Internet einfach gefunden und eingeladen werden – selbst wenn ein Mitglied offline ist. „Wir müssen öfters neue Teammember in Collanos einladen, die genau zu dem Zeitpunkt nicht online sind“, erklärt Christian Aglen, Wirtschafts-Student an der Maharishi University of Management in Iowa. „Mit dem neuen Benutzerverzeichnis können wir jeden User finden und unabhängig vom Status einladen.“

Mit Collanos kann man jederzeit auf frühere Versionen von Beiträgen und Informationen zurückgreifen. Neu synchronisiert Collanos die Informationen unter den Mitgliedern, sobald die Computer eingeschaltet werden. Die neue Version garantiert hohe Sicherheit der Projekt- und Teamdaten dank Login und verschlüsselter Datenhaltung sowie Übertragung.

Typische Collanos-Nutzer sind kleinere, innovative Firmen, mobil und global agierende Arbeitsgruppen, aber auch Studenten, die eine flexible Kollaborationsplattform über Standort- und Firmengrenzen hinaus benötigen.

„Zehntausende Benutzer brauchen Collanos Workplace, um auf gemeinsame Dokumente, Kontakte, Diskussionen und Projekte zuzugreifen und dies unabhängig davon, ob sie unter Windows, Mac OS X oder Linux oder einer Kombination davon arbeiten“, erklärt Peter Helfenstein, Collanos CEO. „Collanos verdreifacht von Quartal zu Quartal die Nutzer. Von der neuen Version erwarten wir eine weitere Beschleunigung des Zuspruchs.“

Der kostenlos erhältliche Collanos Workplace 1.1 steht unter www.collanos.com zum Download bereit.

Jenni Kommunikation commits to climate project by donating a percentage of their travel costs to myclimate.org’s climate protection projects. In addition Jenni Kommunikation is leveraging collaboration tools to cut down on travel costs and increase productivity.

Zurich, April 2, 2007. As of April 1, 2007, Zurich based PR agency Jenni Kommunikation started investing in myclimate’s climate protection project. Each time an employee of Jenni Kommunikation travels on business purposes by car or airplane, Jenni Kommunikation donates a sum of the travel costs to myclimate.org. In addition to the donation, Jenni Kommunikation is also using collaboration tools like Collanos Workplace or Netviewer to reduce travel frequency, while still holding productive meetings.

Since its launch on April 1, 1996, Jenni Kommunikation has consulted companies in various industries: IT and telecommunications, travel and tourism, and start-ups. In order to provide a high degree of customer support, and agility in reacting to market influences, Jenni Kommunikation has to constantly be in contact with their clients.

“Thanks to the adoption of collaboration solutions like Collanos Workplace and Netviewer, we can work in real-time with our clients without needing to travel to work with them. We can be just as efficient virtually using Collanos Workplace to share documents and Netviewer to work on documents in real-time. We have also been able to cut down on car and airplane travel, which helps reduce CO2 emissions,” said Urs Jenni, owner of the agency. In addition we actively contribute to conserve an intact environment by compensating for our remaining car or airplane business travel by buying certificates from myclimate. I am of the firm opinion that companies in our communication’s industry have the responsibility not only to communicate about role models but to live them actively.”

René Estermann, CEO of myclimate, is pleased by this decision of Jenni Kommunikation: “It is key for our cause that small enterprises also set an example and demonstrate their sense of responsibility.”

Myclimate, the Zurich based non-profit foundation, is one of the leading providers of voluntary compensation measures. The compensation of the emissions is achieved through projects protecting the climate in less developed countries. Emissions are reduced by replacing fossil energy sources with renewable energies and are implemented with more energy efficient technologies. In addition to the reduction of greenhouse gas, myclimate’s climate protection projects achieve a demonstrable positive lasting contribution to development.

More information:

Jenni Kommunikation
Urs Jenni
Sudstrasse 85/PF
CH - 8034 Zurich
http://www.jeko.com

myclimate
Kathrin Dellantonio
Technoparkstrasse 1
CH - 8005 Zurich
http://www.myclimate.org

About Jenni Kommunikation

Zurich based Jenni Kommunikation founded in 1996 by Urs Jenni is specialized on Media and Blogger Relations in consumer and corporate PR. Well known companies in technology, telecommunications and consumer Electronics trust in the expertise and the business network of the agency. Main pillars in addition are Swiss start-ups. Jenni Kommunikation covers all Swiss language areas and can build on a broad international network of partner agencies.

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.

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.