Once in a while, one comes across an idea so profound that it has the power to change one’s life. So was the case for me yesterday on my way to Columbus, OH. Feeling like Christopher Columbus (re)discovering the Americas, I re-discovered the ancient Stoic philosophy through the reading of A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B Irvine’s, thanks to a program I recently listened to on KPFA. I had never read the philosophy of Zeno of Citium, Epitectus, Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius, but I knew in my heart that such a liberating yet deceivingly simple way of living must have been devised before. I just did not know where to look for it. And much like the author, I had been recently intrigued by Zen Buddhism, but could not fully relate to its esoteric nature.

Classic Stoicism preaches a way of life that can bring tranquility and joy to anyone. Through simple psychological techniques such as negative visualization, dichotomy (/trichotomy) of control, or internalization of goals — all brilliantly described in Irivine’s book — one can suppress negative feelings such as anxiety, fear, or frustration, while learning how to better deal with insult or grief, and why fame and luxury should not be looked for (more on this later).

While reading through the 336 pages of Irivine’s book, I was amazed at how natural the overall philosophy felt to me. Its guiding principles were some of the very few absolute values that I could genuinely call mine, and many of its techniques I had discovered myself over time. In the author’s words, I must be a “congenital Stoic.” Nevertheless, I had never been able to spell out such a coherent system on my own, nor had I come across anyone who had until now.

Reading through the book’s last chapters, and especially Chapter Twenty-One — Stoicism Reconsidered — I experienced an exhilarating rush of wholesomeness, being confronted for the first time to a coherent philosophy of life. Religious minds would say I got a revelation. Being agnostic myself, I would call it an epiphany, and it came in the form of Irvine’s proof that Stoicism was a “correct philosophy of life,” not by referring to Zeus as the ancient Stoics did, but to evolutionary theory in general, and evolutionary psychology in particular. Not being a professional philosopher myself, I cannot adequately criticize Irvine’s argumentation, but it made sense to me. In fact, I would even go as far as challenging the author’s excessive modesty, and suggest that he actually delivered a modern proof for Stoicism’s overall correctness.

To say the book convinced me is an understatement. It converted me, not only to the doctrine, but to the scholastic approach of ancient philosophy. And as Seneca put it, “I do not bind myself to some particular one of the Stoic masters; I, too, have the right to form an opinion.” (Seneca, “On the Happy Life,” III.2). So let me offer some suggestions as to how Stoicism could be extended to benefit from more recent discoveries.

First, the notion of “duty,” which ancient Stoics justify by the mere fact that we are social creatures and that we all mutually benefit from virtuous social behavior, should be further developed. In order for it to become more acceptable, its justification should go beyond the benefits of harmonious inter-personal relationships, and include a notion best described as statistical Karma: if more people act benevolently with others in a pass-it-forward kind of way, the world at large will become a better place, and we will all benefit from it indirectly.

Second, the notion that fame after death should not be set as a goal, while advisable at first, is unnecessarily challenging for those who do not believe in life after death. Instead, I believe that one’s goal could (should) be to create a lasting legacy, either by passing the virtuous of a Stoic life to one’s descendants, or by making positive contributions to mankind, small or large. Such a legacy can reasonably be considered as some form of life after death by agnostic philosophers, or a component of life after death by their religious counterparts. Furthermore, because such a legacy will be judged by those who survive us after our passing, setting its creation as a primary life goal should not expose us to the usual traps of fame seeking. Last but not least, it should be obvious to anyone that such a legacy should be a positive one, as in one that will benefit those who survive us and for generations to come, as opposed to a free entry into history books for reason of crime against humanity.

Third, I believe that the Stoic reaction to insult (offense might even be a more appropriate term) should be extended in order to include what is possibly the most powerful discoveries of the past two millennia: Christian forgiveness. Before explaining what I mean by that, let me give some personal background: my mother was born in France and received a Catholic education. My father was born in Algeria and was raised as a Muslim. I was born in France thirty-five years ago and grew up in a perfectly atheist environment, like many kids of this time in post-68, pre-socialist France. Nevertheless, I later developed a keen interest for Christianity and its principles, originally through the watching of movies from David Lynch. Fire Walk with Me gave me an intuitive understanding of the notion of the original sin and its repercussions on our collective psyche as members of a Judeo-Christian community, while The Straight Story offered a moving demonstration of the power of forgiveness. While I view the concept of original sin as fundamentally anti-Stoic, I consider the notion of forgiveness as the ultimate exercise of Stoic mastery. The reason for this is simple: on one hand, ignoring an insult or offense is neutral at best, even slightly negative as the author would admit, for it creates frustration on the side of the offender. On the other hand, genuine forgiveness, although tremendously challenging for the one who received the offense and arguably rare, has the power to deliver a transforming epiphany to the offender. In other words, forgiveness could be the ultimate act of Neostoicism, and is positively viral by nature, therefore should be practiced whenever possible.

I am now sitting on a plane on my way back home. Practicing negative visualization, I realize how fortunate I am that the previous three legs of my trip were completed without any incidents. And while I contemplate the prospect of the plane crashing before we make it back to SFO, I know in my heart that I am living a good life now, at this very moment (carpe diem). I realize that I shared through these lines more than I expected to, and that it does not make me a proper stealth Stoic as advocated in Irvine’s book, but I also know that many of the ideas he brought back to life were born through Socratic debate. I simply wish to contribute to the discussion, with as much innocence that my ignorance will afford me.

Tonight, I found my way (in a Taoist sense), and this brings me joy.

BuzzGain was launched by my friend Mukund Mohan, and does an amazing job at identifying influential voices on the web (from a database of 150 million entries), automatically learning about the topics they cover, and systematically engaging with them over multiple social networks. It’s essentially doing what a next-generation PR firm should do, directly from your web browser, and for a tiny fraction of the cost.

We’re about a week away from launching our Dogfood process. While we’re migrating it to Intalio|BPP 6.0 (Beta 1 shipped yesterday), we’re playing with BuzzGain and will integrate it within the main Marketing & PR process in a second iteration to be released later this month. Stay tuned!

First, the Customer Support Process. It’s a pretty complex one originated from a custom user interface built in Ruby on Rails, integrated with our new trouble-ticketing system (itself integrated with Salesforce.com), our knowledge database (Confluence), our legacy bug tracking system (Jira), and our original Demand Driven Development (D3) portal (itself to be migrated to a collection of processes running on Intalio|BPP). This process is only a prototype right now, but should be fully implemented within a month or two. In the meantime, feel free to download the BPMN project for it, which you can import directly from Intalio|Designer (File/Import…).

Customer Support Process

Second, our Marketing Process, which was described in details in this article. After some internal discussions, we concluded that the process could be implemented through a generic BPMN pattern, rather than dynamically generating BPMN code. This is a much better solution, for three main reasons: One, it’s a lot easier to implement. Two, it will allow any changes to the Execution Table (the spreadsheet describing the process) to be applied to running process instances in flight. Three, it will support the definition of any loops within the process, and the use of recursion within the process — a process instance can create a new one, like is the case when a Public Call or a Webinar have to be organized for example. What follows is a map of the generic process that will support the execution of any process designed with our Execution Table Template.

Marketing & Public Relations Process

The Execution Table Template has been cleaned up in order to support its design with Google Apps or Zoho (Google Apps version), the definition of arbitrary loops, recursion, and multiple forms, which are now captured through separate sheets (Data Input Form). Integration Points, Ideas, and Timesheet are also captured through separated sheets, and used for documentation purposes only. What follows is a screenshot of the Execution Table designed using Google Apps, also made publicly available (Decision Table | BPMN Model).

Execution Table

What’s truly remarkable about this project is that Intalio|Designer and Intalio|Server could be used off-the-shelf for implementing a custom process design and execution framework built upon a proprietary process execution meta-model, in a matter of days, and without having to write custom code. So far, we spent 18.5 hours on the project, and we expect to have a first running version of the end-to-end process within two weeks, working on it in our spare time.

Another interesting discovery made through this project is the fact that processes modeled with our Execution Table Template can be used by auditors working on SoX compliance projects. We presented our idea to half a dozen companies in Japan earlier this week, and every single one indicated that they could use our tool for their J-SOX projects (J-SOX is the Japanese equivalent of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act). As a result, we’re seriously considering packaging this template with our Business Rules Engine (Intalio|BRE) and upcoming Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine into a solution for next-generation Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC).

Third, the side project I mentioned above. As part of our Marketing & Public Relations project, we had a need for an Enterprise Content Management system that could be used to develop and publish all our marketing collaterals. While we could have used Intalio|ECM for this purpose, integration with Google Apps and Zoho was lacking. Furthermore, we wanted a system that could not only store our marketing collaterals, but also all our process artifacts, fully integrated with Intalio|Designer. Last but not least, we wanted a system that could store XML documents natively, and provide integration with Apache Cocoon, in order to support the publishing of content on our existing website.

After some internal discussions, we decided to develop our own system. It is built on top of Apache Sling, which itself is based on Apache Jackrabbit. The funny story about Jackrabbit is that it is based on Apache Slide, which itself was contributed by Intalio to the Apache Software Foundation 8 years ago. Small world, very small world… Sling also includes Apache Felix, which is the OSGi framework that all Intalio’s runtime components will be deployed on top of moving forward. Jackrabbit now includes Apache Lucene, to be used as search engine. Finally, we’re looking at the Jena Semantic Web Framework in order to support the tagging and indexation of documents in a scalable manner.

At present time, a prototype integration of Sling with Tempo has been developed by Nicolas (Cf. blog post and screencast), and we are considering creating a D3 project for it, while debating about the Open Source license this new project should be released under. If this sounds like fun, please take a look at our tentative roadmap and drop us a line. The codename for this project is Doubleshot.

Sarah is looking for an internship abroad, ideally in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the United States, working for either a large or a small company, in any vertical industry, in the area of product management, product marketing, or communication. She is fluent in English (she spent six months in the U.S. last year), and very hard working — she has been working in Denmark for three month every Summer for the past five years picking apples and strawberries to pay for school.

If you know of any matching opportunity, please drop me a line.

First, the announced pricing of $200 is pure wishful thinking. If an established company like Asus cannot sell a subnotebook for less than $300 while manufacturing millions of them, it’s unlikely that a custom-built tablet sporting a thinner case and expensive multi-touch screen could retail for anything less than $400.

Second, sourcing critical components such as the multi-touch screen might be quite challenging. Last time we checked, no large multi-touch screen was available, and developing a custom one would cost quite a bundle. Also, should such a screen become available from one of the established suppliers, it is very likely that Apple would buy all available units for an extended period of time, as is the case today for the iPhone’s multi-touch screen. No one should ever underestimate Apple’s mighty buying power.

Third, open source hardware design looks nice on paper, but it’s virtually impossible for any cutting edge product, mainly because of patent issues. When trying to bring such a device to market, one has to deal with the collection of patents that are owned by large manufacturers such as Apple or Samsung, and cross-licensing of patent portfolios is pretty much the only way to make it work, which in turn makes open source design a non-starter. Last time I checked, Apple owned quite a few patents in the area of multi-touch user interfaces…

Fourth, a web tablet without 3G wireless and GPS capabilities won’t be very useful. Problem is, building that into the device is more complex than it looks, for a host of reasons. First, very few chipsets integrating 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS are available today, especially if you’re trying to drive a high-resolution screen (say WXGA). In fact, there is only one (Qualcomm Snapdragon), and you cannot source it unless you license Qualcomm’s IP portfolio. This will cost you several million dollars in lawyers fees alone, assuming that Qualcomm even agrees to talk to you. And because Qualcomm is still battling Nokia on a nasty patent litigation case, the chipset isn’t really available to many manufacturers. Another option would be to contract Samsung to design a custom chipset for you, which is what Apple did for the iPhone, but you should be ready to spend anywhere from $50M to $100M for the design alone, and to guarantee that you’ll buy millions of them in the first 24 months or so. If you have that kind of money, and if your addressable market (readership) is large enough, this might be a viable option. Otherwise, forget about 3G and GPS. Second, putting all these wireless technologies into a single enclosure is actually more challenging than it looks, especially with respect to the design of the antennas. Antenna design is extremely complex, takes an awful lot of time and resources to debug, and very few engineering teams know how to do it for 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS altogether. If you’re planning to do that, make sure that you get access to this talent first.

Fifth, if you decide to forgo 3G and GPS, you might be able to pull it off, and the only complex part will be the battery. If you want an ultra-thin form factor, you’ll have to work with a battery manufacturer that can design a custom polymer battery for you, and this can take a very long time. Finding the right battery manufacturer is no easy task, and the thinner the device, the more complex the battery design, which in turns creates some interesting project management issues — even the smallest changes to the internals of the device will have ripple effects on the battery’s geometry. This is where crowd sourcing might turn out to be a liability more than an asset, for large crowds tend to have a harder time making their mind up. So here is my advice: freeze the feature set early, and design your device from the inside out.

Sixth, assuming that you could make the hardware work, you’ll quickly find out that hardware was actually the easy part. Software is what makes a device work (or not), and the simpler the form factor (no buttons, multi-touch screen), the harder it is to get the software right. If you don’t believe me, just ask yourself why the iPhone does not support copy-and-paste yet. User interface design is very difficult, and is best handled by a benevolent dictator, which is why the Mac OS X user interface is so much better than any Linux Desktop I’ve seen. Again, crowd-sourcing looks nice on paper, but…

Seventh, once you get the user interface done, start working on power management. This is something that you have to pay very close attention to at the hardware level (every mW counts), but it’s also critical at the software level, and this is the kind of thing that can easily create a 3 to 6 months delay in the project. And remember: the thinner the form factor, the smaller the battery, and the shorter the battery life…

Eighth and last, once you’re done with all that, you’ll likely end up with a device that is twice as expensive as you originally thought, and twice as thick. It’s also very likely that you’ll end up with a smaller screen (7" vs. 8.9"), making your device not much different than the host of Mobile Internet Devices powered by the Intel Atom CPU. So here is the million dollar question: why bother?

This takes us back to the Redux Model 1, and the critical lessons we learned in developing its concept: bringing a new form factor to market is immensely difficult. It takes a lot of effort, costs a lot of money, and usually fails, for largely unforeseen reasons. At the end of the day, usability is the result of complex interactions between hardware, software, user interfaces, and you won’t know whether your design works or not until it’s done and millions (or tens, or even hundreds of them) have been spent.

Also, most of the complexity and cost involved in designing such a device lies in three areas: chipset, antennas, and software, and most new form factors require custom developments for all three of them, which makes no sense at all. This is the reason why we decided not to build the Redux Model 1 as a standalone device, but as a shell (or jacket) wrapped around a modular core called Central Networking Unit, or CNU.

The concept for a CNU is very similar to the modu, with the main difference that our original idea was not to have the CNU act as a standalone mobile phone. Other than that, the two concepts are very similar, and based on the idea that all complex and expensive parts (chipset, antennas, and software) should be externalized, built once, and re-used across a wide range of devices sporting different form factors. By doing so, you save a lot of money on hardware, but also on subscriptions to your wireless service provider (sharing one account across multiple devices).

So here is my advice to the TechCrunch team: do not try to re-invent the wheel, no matter how fun that sounds, or how cool it makes you look like. Instead, lead your crowd to develop some custom jackets for the upcoming modu. It will be cheaper, easier, and a lot faster… That being said, I wish you luck in your project, and I will certainly buy one of your gizmos if you manage to build them.

Beyond the polish of its user interface, what I like about Idea Exchange is the way it ranks popular ideas based not only on the number of promotions, but also on the recentness of those and the comments that usually come with them. I was also very impressed to see the list of features originally submitted to the Idea Exchange and added to the last Spring release when I received an email notification announcing its availability. This gave me a sense of immediate feedback loop that is highly satisfying.

I like to put my money (and time) where my mouth is, so I started submitting ideas to the Exchange yesterday. I posted seven so far, and I invite you to promote them if you have a Salesforce.com account. Moving forward, all ideas presented on this blog and related to Salesforce.com will also be recorded onto the Idea Exchange. I strongly encourage other vendors to build exchanges of their own. Dell did just that, using technology developed by… Salesforce.com.

This URL is provided by the excellent FeedBurner, and will never change:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/itredux

Thank you for your support!

EveryTrail is one of the most interesting mashups I know: it lets you upload the GPS log of your trip in order to generate a trail on Google Map. It also lets you geotag your pictures, allowing you to add snapshots along your trail. Then, it lets you publish your trip on a community website, where users can share experiences and useful pieces of advice.

For today’s lunch, we opted for Half Moon Bay (KHAF), and flew there. The map of our trail shown below clearly demonstrates the power of the tool. It shows that we took off in San Carlos (KSQL), flew through San Francisco International Airport’s Class B airspace, got asked to do two left 360 turns to avoid heavy jets taking off on runway 28 Left or 28 Right, flew over the city, made a right 360 over Alcatraz, flew over Sausalito, then went back through SFO’s airspace, because the coastline had only marginal VFR conditions. We then cut directly across the hills, landed in Half Moon Bay for lunch, then flew back to San Carlos. The system is so good that it even shows that my first attempt at landing back in San Carlos was not that great, and that we did a go around. The second attempt was a lot better, and we logged 1.4 hours of VFR flying.

Please follow this link if you cannot see the picture above.

Currently, there are 5 million portable GPS devices in circulation, which makes for a fairly limited market. But if you believe that most cellphones will be equipped with GPS capabilities by 2010, and remember that there are 900 million cellphones in use today, the opportunity for EveryTrail quickly looks a lot more interesting. I think these guys are up to something quite significant.

The company is three months old, and is quickly building a very nice user base. Moving forward, it will develop vertical applications, with different types of maps, such as topographic maps for bikers and hikers, or aeronautical charts for pilots. Joost is an all around nice guy, and a very driven entrepreneur, so I strongly encourage you to take a look at his application. And if you happen to be a blogger or a journalist, I’m sure he would not mind some free publicity.

Editor’s note: More on my flying there.

With the help of many contributors, we completed the Contacts section of the Office 2.0 Database. From the 4 players we identified, 2 are pure contact management applications (Big Contacts and Plaxo), while the other 2 are best described as professional networking platforms (LinkedIn and Xing, formerly known as OpenBC). Surprinsingly, contact management is something that everybody needs, but for which very few online alternatives are available. Microsoft Outlook is deeply entrenched in this market, and your address book is certainly one of the last pieces of information you would like to lose, making the transition to any online alternative all the more difficult.

Functionality
From a functionality standpoint, the pure contact managers differ significantly from the professional networking platforms. The former are essentially trying to replicate the features offered by Microsoft Outlook or Mac OS Address Book, while the later are designed as complements to Microsoft Outlook. In the pure contact manager category, Big Contacts takes some pages from the CRM playbook and adds task management to the mix, while Plaxo provides advanced synchronization with Microsoft Outlook. In the professional networking platform category, LinkedIn focuses — for the time being — on the tasks of finding a job or fulfilling a position, while Xing has slowly but surely morphed into a full fledged group management system. The offerings are so diverse that one has to wonder whether the best option would not be for Big Contacts to be acquired by Plaxo, and for LinkedIn to merge with Xing, then to use Big Plaxo alongside LinXing.

Ease of Migration
Initially, migrating from an offline address book to an online contact manager such as Big Contacts or Plaxo is pretty easy. All you have to do is export your contacts as a CSV file, or install a plug-in to Microsoft Outlook, and let it do the synchronization for you. Down the road, some unforeseen problems might appear if you were using a heavily customized version of Microsoft Outlook though. For example, synchronization with a mobile device might not be possible anymore, or might require that you keep using Microsoft Outlook as synchronization middleware in combination with ActiveSync. Similarly, if you used the Salesforce.com plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, you will lose the benefits of tight integration with your CRM system, which many sales people could not live without today. Ultimately, I believe that contact management in not a single feature, and should rather be provided by a larger platform, such as a CRM system, or an email client.

Price
All four solutions we reviewed for this article offer free versions as well as commercial upgrades, with monthly prices ranging from $4 to $200. Many users seem to be willing to pay for the extra functionality, as illustrated by Xing’s recent IPO or LinkedIn’s latest round of venture capital. This is good news, for it means that most players should remain around for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, I would expect some consolidation to take place, and it should be noted that neither Google nor Yahoo! have any good solution for contact management nor professional networking.

Alternatives
There are many places where you can store your contacts, but few that are really worth considering. On one hand of the spectrum, most Web-based email clients come with a primitive address book, but as soon as you get hundreds of contacts and want to record more than an email address and a phone number, you quickly feel the need for something a little bit more powerful. On the other end of the spectrum, you could view a CRM solution such as Salesforce.com as a glorified contact manager, and you would certainly not be the first to make such an analogy. While CRM does a lot more than just contact management, it does a pretty phenomenal job at it, and more and more users are starting to use free offerings such as Free CRM or Zoho CRM for this very purpose.

Top Players
Several contact management applications do make use of HTTPS, therefore the Alexa ranking is not as reliable as we would like it to be. Nevertheless, and according to this ranking, we can extrapolate a tentative ranking for the players in the space. Google PageRank goes from 4 for the newly-released Big Contacts, to 7 for LinkedIn and Plaxo, somehow corroborating the ranking.

Quick Reviews
There are only 4 applications in our database, so all of them got a review.

Big Contacts: This is the very latest entrant in the space. The best way to think of Big Contacts is as a mini CRM system in disguise. Beside allowing you to manage your contacts with as much information as you would like, it also provides fairly advanced task management capabilities that are nicely integrated with the core contact manager. It allows you to add objects to contacts, such as tasks, notes, meetings, files, photos, etc. It also provides a complete team calendar, as well as an history of your interactions with any contact. Essentially, what you get with Big Contacts is similar to what the Contacts, Activities, and Calendar views of SugarCRM give you. Granted, it’s not as extensible, but if it’s all you need, it should do the job fairly well.

LinkedIn: This one defined the space for professional networking early on, then was copied and improved upon by OpenBC, later renamed Xing. It grew to a high-quality network rich of 9 million users, and should cross the bar of 10 million sometime in Q1 or early Q2 this year. Problem is, it’s not very sticky, in the sense that it does not provide any incentive for users to login on a regular basis, like they would with Facebook or MySpace, unless you happen to be a recruiter. My personal belief is that LinkedIn is sitting on a phenomenal untapped potential, which will be realized only when it adds group management features similar to what Xing has been developing all along. I just have no idea when this will happen though. In the meantime, you cannot really use LinkedIn to manage your contacts on its own, for it does not allow you to add information to contacts directly. Instead, it’s a very good companion to Microsoft Outlook as a way to create new connections, or lookup the last working email address for a contact who recently switched jobs. If you’re not using Microsoft Outlook, synchronization with your contact management application has to be done manually, which is a royal pain. I have been asking LinkedIn Corporation to add the LinkedIn unique ID to their standard CSV export about a gazillion times over the past two years, but have failed miserably so far. Note to Reid: please…

Plaxo: This one created a fair amount of controversy early on when it literally sent billions of emails requiring people to log on to the system anytime a user uploaded their contact information, in order for it to be verified. Since then, the application is a lot less disruptive, and turns out to be a very nice contact manager all around. The company acquired the HipCal calendar last year, and will release a brand new version tightly integrated with the contact manager later this year. This should bring it up to par with Big Contacts, which should make things a lot more interesting.

Xing: This last one shares the same limitations as LinkedIn in terms of pure contact management, but adds some very interesting features for group management, such as discussion forums, newsletters, news board, and event manager. It has about five times less members than LinkedIn, and tends to be more popular on the other side of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, its recent IPO gave it the resources it needs to expand, and competition is more than needed in a space that has been largely dominated by a single player for too long.

Personal Favorite
Unfortunately, I am not using any of the applications featured in this article for managing my contacts. As of today, I have 9,157 of them, and the only way to properly handle such a large amount is with a dedicated database, which I found with an enterprise-grade CRM system. I originally started with Salesforce.com, then moved to SugarCRM, for reasons that will be explained in a later post. Nevertheless, I am using LinkedIn extensively, and got them one of their best success stories. I systematically invite all my contacts to connect through LinkedIn, and got 5,572 of them to accept the request, making LinkedIn 61% effective for keeping track of your contacts, or mine at least.

What’s Missing
First, I would like to see LinkedIn and Xing provide integration with online contact management applications, especially CRM applications such as Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. Second, similar integration should be provided with online email clients such as Gmail, which contact manager is highly primitive to say the least. Third, I would like to see better integration with mobile devices, without requiring the use of any client-side software as a gateway. The famed integration between the BlackBerry device and the Microsoft Exchange server clearly demonstrated that such a thing is possible, therefore I cannot think of any reason why we could not get it sometime this year with some online contact manager.

Best Online Contact Manager
Now that we know what’s out there, it’s time for a vote. But because the few applications we reviewed were so different, we broke down the vote in three separate ones: the first for the best online contact manager, the second for the best professional networking application, and the third to tell us where you’re managing your contacts at the first place.

Note: if you cannot see the voting forms, please follow this link.

Final results will be announced next week as an update to this post. In the meantime, please help me build next week’s roundup on CRM. You can use this form courtesy of Wufoo for suggesting new applications, or providing additional information about existing ones. I would also welcome ideas for domain-specific criteria that could be used for evaluating the players on our list.

See you next week!

I’d love to know more about you, because it would help me better understand what you might be interested by, which in turn would help me write about stuff that will be of interest to you. And because you’re kind enough to tolerate my poor prose, I’d love to get a chance to say thanks directly.

There are a couple of ways you can tell me more about you. If you want to share it with others, and give me some quotes I could use in later posts, you should feel free to write a comment to this post. But if you’d rather stay under the radar, you can also send me an email, which I promise won’t be shared with anyone but my SugarCRM instance.

And if you really like what you’re getting from this little blog of mine, I would like to encourage you to share the love and digg it, del.icio.us it, track it back from your own blog, link to it from your website, email articles to your best friends, or all of the above. And if you’re not a subscriber yet, become one today!

Last but not least: you still have 48 hours to vote for the best online bookmarking application, and I need some help for completing the Office 2.0 Database for the upcoming Office 2.0 Roundup on Calendars. In return, I’ll give you a brand new design for the blog, very soon.

See you next week!

Open Source will drive BPM adoption
The release of a complete BPMS under an Open Source license should significantly reduce any barrier to adoption. The leading Open Source BPM vendor will capture the largest market share, while more companies will start BPM projects than in the prior three years combined.

Google will acquire a complete Office 2.0 suite
Google Docs is like ThinkFree’s Quick Edit mode: it works, but the feature set is way too limited to convince a large-enough number of Microsoft Office users to make the switch. Something akin to ThinkFree’s Power Edit mode is necessary, and buying it will certainly be quicker than building it. Google, which doubled its workforce to almost 10,000 employees in 2006 would rather spend cash and stock than waste time. ThinkFree or Zoho look like perfect targets, even though convincing the good folks at AdventNet won’t be an easy task. Apple Computer might make a similar move too, significantly enhancing the capabilities offered by the excellent .Mac online service. On the mobility front, Palm will likely be acquired as well, possibly by a telecommunication service provider.

Office 2.0 will start getting adoption in the corporate world
While early adopters will continue to be very small businesses and academic users, the corporate world will start playing with the technology as well. Individual users will favor large collections of applications such as Zoho, while corporate departments will prefer feature-rich suites such as ThinkFree. This movement will be acknowledged by several Gartner reports, as well as a cover article in BusinessWeek magazine.

All top ten off-shore software development firms will have a BPM practice
The Capability Maturity Model for Software (also known as CMM) has been retired, and the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) replaced it, with a stronger emphasis on business processes. The model-driven development approach enabled by Business Process Management (BPM) technologies makes it easier to measure and improve the quality of development processes compared to traditional software development approaches based on the writing of code. Off-shore software development firms have known that for a long time — Infosys was one of the first companies in the world to develop a working implementation of the BPML language back in 2001 — and will take advantage of it, now that commercial implementations have matured enough.

Open Source vendors will grow faster than their closed source competitors
More user accounts will be created on SugarCRM and vtiger combined than on Salesforce.com. Compiere will announce the successful migrations of several large Oracle E-Business Suite customers. Intalio will sign more new customers than Lombardi, Pegasystem, and Savvion combined. The vast majority of SOA projects will be using Open Source solutions such as Axis, Mule, and ServiceMix. And the first Open Source database vendor (EnterpriseDB, Ingres, or MySQL) to release a plug-compatible replacement for the Oracle database that can support the SAP R/3 application for over 10,000 concurrent users will get the best home run in database history since Sybase, but that might take a couple more years…

Apple Computer will make online data synchronization really work
Once the iPhone — or PodPhone, or whatever Steve decides to call it — is released, people will realize that its killer feature is not that it can play tunes, but that it can synchronize contacts and events in a wireless fashion more easily than any other system. Granted, such synchronization has been working fairly well with the BlackBerry+Exchange combination for quite sometime now, but who really likes to administrate a Microsoft Exchange server? Also, a Mac-compatible version of QuickBooks Online Edition will be released, unless a competitive offering steals the show first.

SOA will get simpler
The Java Business Integration (JBI) API will go the way of CORBA and be relegated to specific vertical industries such as telecommunication services. Large corporate users demanding very high transaction volumes — think Wall Street brokers & dealers — will favor lightweight application servers with streamlined stacks for Web services such as Apache Axis, and MuleSource will emerge as the leading Open Source ESB player. Production-grade ESB functionality will come for free with all major Open Source stacks, accelerating the demise of the few propriatery EAI vendors left standing.

Enterprise 2.0 will establish itself as a sticking meme
High-profile conferences originally focused on collaboration and e-Business will adopt the moniker, Oracle and SAP will incorporate Enterprise 2.0 stacks similar to Intel’s SuiteTwo within their respective product lines, and the SEC will issue new guidelines for corporate blogging.

Standards for online services will be adopted
Enough services supporting OpenID and Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) will become available for early adopters to build a working Office 2.0 Setup that provides single sign-on and remote data storage. Open Source frameworks offering plug-compatible alternatives to Amazon’s EC2, S3, SQS will be released as well, enabling truly distributed backup strategies to be developed.

That’s it for now. Happy new year to you all again!

Disclaimer: I work for Intalio and serve as an advisor for ThinkFree and Zoho.

BPMS will go mainstream: Draw
The concept for a Business Process Management System (BPMS) has been gaining momentum, but I would not call it mainstream yet. The ground for BPM 2.0 has been laid, and the first Open Source BPMS has been announced. Nevertheless, customers are still trying to figure out what BPM really is, and which flavor for it will best address their needs initially. Gartner recently came to the rescue, suggesting that an Open Source solution might be a good way to get your feet wet initially. But a commonly-accepted compeling event for the deployment of a BPM platform — think e-Commerce for an application server — remains to be found. SOA might very well be it, but it’s losing ground as well, as illustrated on this Google Trends analysis, also mentioned in this earlier post. Like it or not, BPM is a complex concept, and it will take time for corporate buyers to get their arms around it. In the meantime, the best way to get there is to lower any possible barrier to adoption, and this is what Intalio is all about.

Industry consolidation will accelerate: Miss
No game-changing mergers or acquisitions were made in the enterprise software space this year, and IBM did not come back to the enterprise application game. Smaller deals have been stealing the show, especially Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss, which must have compelled Oracle to finally make a move on the Linux front. The real question now comes down to this: how long will Salesforce.com remain as an independent company? IBM, Oracle, and SAP would all make pretty good buyers. Another option would be for Marc to finally extend his platform with ERP functionality, which could be achieved in several ways, one of them being to acquire Compiere or Intacct. Let’s hope the later comes true.

Office 2.0 will become a reality: Hit
Within less than nine months, the Office 2.0 Database, announced on this post, grew from nothing to over 330 applications. The concept introduced exactly a year ago got its first conference, with over 450 participants, 105 speakers, and 56 sponsors. Zoho emerged as a likely winner in the space, and ThinkFree demonstrated that web browsers are now powerful enough to support most of the features that are offered by traditional Office 1.0 productivity suites today [Disclaimer: I serve as an advisor for both companies]. Google’s release of
Google Docs on the first day of the Office 2.0 Conference also gave a clear signal that things are getting serious now, and that past involvements with OpenOffice.org were just smoke and mirrors. Next year, it will be interesting to see wether Microsoft finally releases something of substance under the Office Live brand, and who gets their hands on ThinkFree. The later would be a perfect acquisition for Google, but in the meantime an OEM deal with Intuit or Salesforce.com would make a lot of sense as well. Investors might also be interested to know that the company is giving serious thoughts to the idea of raising a small round of venture funding…

Software off-shoring will go further West: Hit
If your Indian off-shoring partner made you lose sleep over high employee turn-over, you might have considered going further West. During the past year, Eastern European countries such as Ukraine became a popular destination for the off-shoring of software development projects, so much so that the unescapable law of supply and demand kicked back in full swing. And because these countries are so much smaller than India, its effects were felt stronger, faster. Down the road, it seems that off-shoring is a dynamic process rather than a singular event, for which target destinations keep changing as local markets mature. Next steps? Latin America, Northern Africa, and China of course.

Open Source business models will prove themselves: Hit
Following on the footsteps of JBoss and SugarCRM, more and more enterprise software companies went the Open Source way, including Hyperic, Intalio, and Terracotta. Learning valuable lessons from their predecessors, many commercial Open Source upstarts are being liberal with licensing terms, which compelled some industry observers to challenge their claims. Next year should see a clarification of the rules, with the addition of generally agreed-upon terms for attribution to the ever more popular Mozilla Public License (MPL), with the blessing of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) hopefully.

All software will go the service way: Hit
Alongside the emergence of credible Office 2.0 solutions, all categories of software saw the release of online alternatives, including drawing, music playing, and video editing. A year ago, guessing the next category of software to go online was challenging. Today, the game has changed, and the challenge is to identify the one that will be the last. At this point, only one application is missing from my Office 2.0 Setup: a good online accounting tool.

SOA will get more complex: Hit
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was supposed to make integration simpler. Instead, it made everything a lot more complex, and the introduction of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) did not really help. Standards for Web Services kept multiplying, and the market kept fragmenting itself, with the Java Business Integration (JBI) API on one side, and slightly more pragmatic approaches such as Apache Axis on the other. Too many options create confusion, which vendors of proprietary solutions are the only ones to benefit from. Clarity and simplicity are much needed, but I’m not sure where they’ll come from next year.

Corporations will discover the beauty of social: Hit
LinkedIn will most likely sign its tenth million users in the coming quarter, and TIME Magazine named You (and that includes Me) as Person of the Year. Most searches made on Google return entries from Wikipedia within the top ten results, while the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) usually tops official websites developed by major studios for any new movie. During this past year, the corporate world started to pay attention, and the concept for Enterprise 2.0 was born, followed by commercial implementations such as Intel’s SuiteTwo. Next year should see an acceleration of the trend, with more and more practical use cases and success stories being released.

Standards for online services will emerge: Hit
Bugs have been added to the Office 2.0 Bug Tracker faster than standards have been released to fix them, nevertheless, a couple of initiatives have been gaining some significant traction, among them JSON and OpenID. Also, and against all expectations, Amazon started to release a set of commodity services (EC2, S3, SQS) for online computing that’s giving us a very good preview of things to come. Next year should see Google and Microsoft following on Jeff’s footsteps. The creation of a full fledge standardization body for Office 2.0 is not out of the question either.

Score: 7 Hits, 1 Miss, 1 Draw
Let’s call it a 83% success rate. Not too bad… In fact, it’s a little bit too good, and the reason for it might be that my inferences for ‘06 were a little bit too open ended. For next year’s, I will try to be a little bit more specific, which should make the challenge more interesting. See you next year!

The hierarchical Inbox is a much welcomed addition for active networkers that are dealing with more than ten requests a day. It organizes requests within categories such as Introductions, Invitations, and Jobs, and makes it a lot easier to process the ones that are time-sensitive (introductions).

Regarding user profiles, LinkedIn now highlights recent changes on the page, and aggregates notifications into a single weekly email, instead of sending one separate email for each updated profile. This in turn reduces one’s workload when trying to keep up with a fairly large network, which LinkedIn defines as one having more than 500 connections.

Overall, I like the changes that have been introduced, even though they remain quite cosmetic. A couple of much-needed and often-requested features remain to be implemented though. One would be to add user IDs into CSV contact exports in order to facilitate reconciliation with an external contact database. Another would be to syndicate the content of user profiles in a format that would make it usable for publishing, as described in this post.

Among all the companies I interact with, LinkedIn has not been the most supportive with respect to feature requests, to say the least. Nevertheless, I keep the faith and must hope that they’ll finally listen. The service they offer is too good to be ignored, and there is nothing like it on the Internet today.

I am interested to hear both positive and negative feedback, as long as it remains respectful and constructive. I am looking forward to getting your comments on both the content of the blog as well as its format, whether the recent introduction of pictures in the body of some posts is a good thing or not, or whether my irregular posting pattern with occasional backdating is difficult to deal with — blog addicts might find it truly distressful.

In a general sense, I am interested by any feedback, in any form. You could either post it as a comment to this post, or email it at ismael@itredux.com. And if you really like (or dislike) what you’re getting from this blog, please feel free to write about it on your own blog, and to make sure that Technorati is picking it up. Unlike my fellow blogger Guy Kawasaki, I have no aspiration to become one of the top 10 bloggers, but a good ranking is as good an ego booster as anything I could think of. Many thanks in advance for your support!

A relative of mine recently went to work for Facebook, and discussing with him gave me an opportunity to better understand what makes this social networking service much more successful than LinkedIn, of which I am a fanatical user. On one hand, and according to Michael Arrington, 85% of all college students use Facebook, and 70% of them log in daily. About 85% log in at least once a week, and 93% log in at least once a month. That’s what I call stickiness. On the other hand, it is very likely that the very vast majority of LinkedIn members never log in more than once or twice after they created their account in response to an invitation from a regular user. As explained in this earlier post, most LinkedIn members are not active users, mainly because LinkedIn does not offer them any services they would get value from on a daily basis.

The main reason why Facebook is demonstrating so much more stickiness is because, unlike LinkedIn, it offers something of value to its users: groups, with very basic yet extremely useful features such as file sharing and message boards. Granted, Facebook and LinkedIn target very different users, therefore should offer different services, or at least package them in different ways. But the same is true for Facebook and MySpace, and I reckon that both are successful for the very same reason: stickiness as a result of daily usefulness.

For LinkedIn to increase its stickiness, it must support groups with similar features targeted at corporate users. What does such a thing look like? CollectiveX, which I presented two months ago. If both companies were to merge, they would create a corporate equivalent to Facebook, which I reckon could be quite useful to its users and quite valuable to its investors.

One such platform is CollectiveX, which I mentioned in a previous article, and for which I received my beta account yesterday. CollectiveX is a private, group-centric communication platform that stands right in between Basecamp and LinkedIn. I agree with Michael Arrington that CollectiveX could eventually become a better alternative to LinkedIn, but some modifications will have to be made to the service in order for it to get there. Among them, I would like to be able to enter my database of contacts and invite them to join the network without becoming part of any group other than my default group of acquaintances. The recipient of such an invitation would be able to build a profile similar to the one you can build with LinkedIn, and could start a group or join existing groups at a later stage. I do not know if CollectiveX will take this path, but I sure hope that such a possibility will serve as a wake up call for the good folks at LinkedIn to start adding features that will make their platform truly useful to users other than recruiters.

Out of the box, CollectiveX provides group management capabilities, calendaring, discussion boards and file sharing. RSS syndication and email notification are offered as well. The interface is very clean, the use of AJAX judicious, and the profile editor very effective in its ability to translate structured data into plain English. I have created two groups, one of Intalio to which I invited all employees and board members, and one for IT|Redux. CollectiveX is in limited beta right now, but if you send me an email request, I will add you to the IT|Redux group, which in turn will give you the ability to create your own groups. Groups of up to 10 people without file sharing are free, while I pay $36 a month for a group of 25 members. This makes CollectiveX competitive with Basecamp.

Because CollectiveX is bringing together group collaboration and social networking, usage patterns will have to be invented from scratch, so you should expect more posts on the subject as my team gets more familiar with it.

Many thanks to Clarence for the invitation to participate in the beta.

Insider note: I had breakfast with Greg Olsen yesterday morning. Greg was the founder of Extricity, one of the companies that heavily influenced my original design for BPMS, and the first vendor to implement the concept of public/private processes. Greg is now working for Versai, which will announce its first product later in the year. My gentleman agreement with Greg prevents me to write anything substantial about it, and all I can say is that it might very well be one of the coolest Office 2.0 applications to be released this year. My only advice: keep an eye open on those folks…

Flattener #1: 11/9/89
When the Walls Came Down and the Windows Went Up
The fall of the Berlin Wall made the world an open playing field. Today, Intalio does most of its business in North America and Western Europe, but we’re getting more and more demands from Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, Asia, and Australia. The Wall has been down for more than sixteen years, but as an American company, we still cannot do business with Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.

Flattener #2: 8/9/95
When Netscape Went Public
The Internet is the infrastructure that made BPM possible. It gave us web services and a Service Oriented Architecture that allows processes to be integrated with existing systems at a fraction of the cost of traditional EAI approaches. It provided the communication vehicle for the Open Source movement to really catch on and dramatically lower the cost of commodity software components. Finally, it gave us the vehicle through which we can market and sell our software, using participative communication tools such as this blog, and circumventing the physical packaging of software, thereby allowing us to conduct our business in a purely electronic way.

Flattener #3: Work Flow Software
Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application
Standards such as BPMN and BPEL are enabling interoperability across Business Process Management Systems in a way that early workflow pioneers could only dream of. Public APIs for popular online services are turning the BPMS into a mean and lean mashup machine, paving the way for truly componentized IT architectures where system architects simply assemble existing components, and software code writing is reserved for the most arcane applications.

Flattener #4: Open-Sourcing
Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities
More than 80% of the code developed by Intalio is Open Source and in the process of being donated to the Apache Software Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation. This code forms only 20% of the software we ship to our customers, the remaining 80% being borrowed from existing Open Source projects. This participative model is pushed a step further with the introduction of a Demand Driven Development model, whereby smaller communities of users participate in the funding of specific product features, which are in turn donated back to the Open Source community. This creates an accelerating factor that turns traditional closed-source development into a massive competitive disadvantage.

Flattener #5: Outsourcing
Y2K
Most functions that are not core to the business are outsourced. This includes facility management, human resources management, public relations, advertising, finances, legal, software development, quality assurance and testing, consulting, and customer support. The only functions that are kept in house are the ones that are critical to the development and distribution of a complex software tool: architecture design and customer training. Most of the engineering team that remains on our payroll is composed of highly talented architects, while we use our training group as the most technically-aware pre-sales organization.

Flattener #6: Offshoring
Running with Gazelles, Eating with Lions
Most of our software engineering is done out of Western Ukraine, where we find extremely talented developers at a rate similar to what we would pay in India, but with a yearly turnover of less than one percent. Our software quality assurance and testing is done out of Bangalore, India, where we are also setting up a support infrastructure that will be available from 9 AM GMT-1 (Paris) to 6 PM PST (Tijuana, CA). We are also working on the development of telesales organizations to be based in India and Ireland.

Flattener #7: Supply-Chaining
Eating Sushi in Arkansas
Several customers have asked us for the packaging of our BPM software into a hardware appliance. The question is not whether we will do it or not, but when. Because we want to remain a software company and do not want to manage an inventory of expensive hardware products, we’ve been discussing with supply-chain partners that can take the most recent version of our software, install it on hardware appliances, and get it shipped to customers in less than 48 hours, anywhere in the known world.

Flattener #8: Insourcing
What the Guys in Funny Brown Shorts Are Really Doing
Our decision to release our first BPM appliance will be driven by a single metric: volume. We will pull the trigger as soon as customer demand will be sufficient enough to allow us to work with in-sourcing partners such as DHL or UPS in order to provide technical support for the hardware part of our solution.

Flattener #9: In-forming
Google, Yahoo!, MSN Web Search
Intalio’s marketing budget is pretty low. In fact, for the time being, it does not even exist, and this blog is the only marketing investment we’ve made over the past three months. We do not go to tradeshows, unless we’re invited to speak there and travel expenses are paid by the event’s organizers. We do not advertise in any trade magazine, and instead work hard to get the BPM 2.0 section of this blog to be syndicated by online publications such as BPMG, BPM Institute, and BPTrends. Moving forward, the only marketing expense we are planning to make will be for Google Adwords, but we will do it in such a way that it directly pays for itself, by tracking the conversion of paid-for clicks into paying customers for our training services, using Google Analytics in combination with Salesforce.com.

Flattener #10: The Steroids
Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual
Our biggest productivity enhancer is called Office 2.0. All our customer information is managed by Salesforce.com, our software documentation is developed through Confluence, an enterprise Wiki platform, and our internal communication is conducted through blogs, email and Skype.

Looking at it from that angle, the world seems pretty flat indeed…

Many thanks to Alex for recommending Thomas L. Friedman’s great book.