I had a video made from the visualisations in Trampoline’s products for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference party. The party played with the theme “No man is an island”, for which we had this video showing, blow ups of Charles’ photography from St. Agnes (the tiny island on which he did the ethnographic research into information distribution that led to Trampoline) and little photos as gifts. We had funky furniture and great tunes too, but I can’t find even a tenuous way to link them to the theme. Most importantly, it provided a venue for folks to meet each other, chat and make connections, hopefully resulting in each of them being a less of an “island” in the sea of conference attendees.

Trampoline visualisations video from rebecca kemp on Vimeo.

I wanted our product to look like art, and we did a pretty good job, if i do say so myself. It was made so fabulous by Eddie Codel (editing) and Trampoline Dev (product)! The content is taken from SONAR Dashboard, SONAR Flightdeck and Metascope.

It’s Wednesday afternoon at Enterprise 2.0. In spite of a few frustrating failures in infrastructure, it’s been a really great two days here at E2 for Trampoline.  

Right now I’m sitting in the EMC booth stealing their hardline because WiFi is down (again) and our hardline is down (again). Evidently Enterprise 2.0 still doesn’t mean reliable internet connections or badge readers which, like, read badges.

Ironically even the toasters on the breakfast bar this morning were teh fail and I had to steal one and jack it into a power strip inside one of the breakout rooms to toast my bagel. (Which, by the way, was artfully sliced to look like the victim of a drunken accident with a chainsaw. Not that I am in the least bit picky about my toasting. Oh no, not me.)

The deepest irony about the toasters was that during the “Evening in the Cloud” event several speakers likened cloud computing to needing to be as predictable, reliable and standards-driven as our electricity supply, clearly tempting fate and cursing the event and my breakfast toasting.

New England is in the middle of one of the weirdest early June weather fronts in history with temperatures in the high 90’s and huge thunder-storms and even tornado warnings, and really, there’s only one company on the planet to blame all of this on…

I blame google, of course.

I hereby declare that cloud computing evangelists are no longer to be taken seriously if they liken their services to electricity. In fact you should probably immediately take proactive de-cursing actions lest you find yourself suddenly in a region-wide freak weather phenom, total blackout or starring in a real-life version of I Am Legend.

Adrian, Steve Ardire and I worked the booth yesterday (with occasional support from Rebecca and Jules, who had lots to do on the party and so were constantly jetting about the hotel alternatively solving herculean problems and looking wistfully out the window at the sailboats).

The booth experience was very, very interesting. As always Adrian was the companies greatest low-key evangelist and gave great demo while Steve managed little micro-demos on his mac off on the side. (The people Steve talked to all left with a very pleased but somewhat dazed look in their eyes.) We were 2 or 3 rows deep for most of the day, even when all we had was Rebecca’s awesome slide deck because our hardline to the internet was dead (as were most booths) Tuesday morning.

The people who have visited us at the booth have been uniformly smart and enthusiastic and ask really great questions. While some folks are clearly still just looking and thinking (which is fine) the interest level at this show in real solutions to current enterprise problems is very high. So ++ on SONAR Server, Dashboard and Flightdeck.

When I joined Trampoline we were still supporting a product called “Collaboration Engine” which dated back to the earliest days of the company. It did what our customers wanted it to and it was also decent revenue, however when I looked at the product, talked with the team about it and then looked around at the marketplace and compared it to where other folks seemed to be headed, I recommended that we should cut it completely.

Why? Because I thought then that everybody would be doing “collaboration software” and it would become increasingly difficult to clearly differentiate our collaboration offering from others in this space. Collaboration in an enterprise means getting many many things right and it means potentially competing with experienced and/or entrenched competitors. There are clearly vendors here who are doing this well (IBM Connections is looking very slick, while Jive is here as well) and others who are highly entrenched (MS is here with SharePoint).

Most of the people I’ve spoken with told me “wow. Everyone else showing here is doing the same thing as eachother except for you. Your stuff is cool!” This was a really important bit of feedback and was very rewarding to hear. It’s nice to be told that you don’t look exactly the same as everybody else and to be appreciate for what you think you are doing well. People seem to really appreciate that we don’t build wiki, group, IM, email, workspace and blogging software but that we do make it much easier to build profiles to find people, skills and interests across large groups of people, and to visualize networks in interesting and engaging ways.

Wikis are clearly hot and there are lots of wiki companies here doing some neat stuff and again, glad they are doing it and doing it well, also very glad to not be “another wiki company”.

I don’t think that anyone one else at this show is eating email and automagically producing and maintaining user profiles of themes and connections, and lots of potential customers are noticing that this is what we do and they like it. It’s really refreshing.

Many of the vendors here at the show have come by and asked us about our upcoming API as they see what we are doing as very complimentary to their offerings. We can make collaboration tools like email and wikis work better. All cool.

The party last night was very good. Massive props to Rebecca; she kept her cool and created a really nice event. It was probably the nicest conference drinking event I’ve ever been to (and really, I’ve been to LOTS. Like, way more than 100), and that’s in spite of having to “work it” in the sense that we paid for it and so it was clearly soft marketing for us. It was really chill and fun and intimate and the music was good and people really seemed to be having a good time. Charles did a neat presentation on St. Agnes that was as interesting and low-key as the rest of the party.

As near as I can tell folks had lots of fun, and when Boston’s finest came they didn’t see the burned furniture or the donkey, so it was all good. (Okay, just kidding about some of that.)

Note to conference party planners – more money and more drinking and famous bands don’t always make for a better party. Try for intimate and fun and get fun smart people to show up. Think of the best non-work parties you’ve ever been to – they probably were way less over the top than the next conference party you are planning.  

So – despite the hiccups it’s been a great event. I’m really glad we are here.

We’ve all been on our feet all day again, but for the booth at least we are in the home stretch – just one more session on the demo floor for of boothy goodness! W007!

I’ve now been a Tramponaut (er, Tramp? Trampoliner? Trampo?) for a week, and it’s been an amazing start. Everyone here is as smart as I hoped, even nicer than I thought, the stuff we are working is actually MORE important than I thought it was originally, and boy, do we have a lot to do.

All in all, a truly fantastic time and place for a start up to be.

I’m thinking about lots of things, and I’ll write more on them later. Here’s what I’m thinking about this morning.

We’re very hard at work nailing down the last chunks of functionality on SONAR, and this gives a few of us the luxury of spending a little more time thinking further out than “bap or ciabatta?” when we go down to Franco’s to get lunch (takeaway back to the office, of course – must multitask! Eat and solve world hunger… or maybe just spend more time obsessing over FaceBook).

This is extremely cool because we get to imagine what happens in a world where we make our customers data available to them in profoundly new ways. But it presents some interesting challenges.

With SONAR 1.0 we are solving a problem that I think almost every Enterprise on the planet has, however they either don’t really know it, or they are ignoring it because they have no way to address it. The most efficient expert networks usually run below the formal infrastructure of an enterprise. They are organic structures that don’t use “modern” protocols for communication. There are exceptions, most notably in labs or widely disparate disaggregated online communities (WoW raids, anyone?), but these aren’t the general rule.

I can’t recall “subject matter expertise requisition forms” in any of the enterprises I’ve ever visited. Mostly things boil down to who you know and how well you get along. That’s how things have always worked. So what’s going to happen when our customers embrace our technology? What more will they want? How will they use the product? What new things will they do to it that we can’t imagine yet? We WILL have “OMG you did what to our poor sw? that is soooooo cool!!!” moments. This could be followed by Al telling me “woo hoo! We can have that done in a quarter!” or by Craig saying “oh… no… that will pretty much completely blow our architecture up”.

We can’t really ask the enterprise this kind of stuff, because we’re not even fully at the “prove to me this thingy does anything useful” stage. We haven’t even really developed the right language to describe things, frankly. And our customers probably don’t really understand how big of a problem they have, no less tell us about new problems they will see once they are past the first set…

There’s a scale of product-fu:

1) Starting out prod fu: wait for RFP, submit bid, build solution. Wait again.

2) Experienced prod fu: ask a bunch of customers what they want, validate the problem set, boil it down to something smaller than “everything”. Build that. Repeat.

3) Elite prod fu: Work with customers to understand their problems. Work with analysts to understand the space. Work with technologists to understand what is possible. Combine and make your best fit solution to solve one or more problems that most customers either don’t know about or have no solution for so they ignore it.

Right now we do elite prod fu. Not only must we engineer product to solve today’s problems, we have to be super smart and dig even deeper into the space and identify the additional problems the introduction of our SW will uncover. We have to understand the way enterprises work so well that we can see past the introduction of SONAR to a future where it does what it’s supposed to do, and thus uncovers existing-but-unrealized problems.

We predicate this on the fact that we don’t understand all of the problems that Enterprises face. Der. We can’t, but we assume that the problems are there. We, and our customers, don’t have the tools to uncover them yet. HOWEVER there’s stuff even beyond this, and for that we need ultra-major-cosmic-black-belt-prod-fu.

There will be brand spanking new problems – ones that truly don’t exist at all yet because they can’t, because the things that create the baseline to make them even possible don’t exist yet. Our customers will have them. We have to figure those ones out, too.

4) ultra-major-cosmic-black-belt-prod-fu: Build solutions to problems that TRULY don’t exist yet, but which will be, at least in part, based on things we (and this is the BIG we – it’s all of us in technology) are going to do to create them in the future. NO ONE can tell you about them.

In some cases, once you’ve figured them out yourself, just talking openly about these things will get you a PhD, arrested, committed, branded a heretic, or all of the above. When you get this one right, you have to be careful as you can actually spook people. It’s like being a really really really good fortune teller. From the outside it looks like magic.

This is one thing that makes the state of play here so interesting – we have the opportunity to anticipate the future invention, in the truest sense of the word, of problems created by systems that don’t exist yet.

How cool is that? Very cool.

Peter

Since we started using our own internal Sonar deployment as a test bed, we’ve been noticing a subtle but distinct shift in the way we compose emails. We’re taking just a little bit more care to write informative subjects and supply more context, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not.

One of the main characteristics of the email noise that pervades the enterprise is a lack of persistent context. I long ago lost count of the number of hours of lost on fruitless trawls through my inbox for some nugget of information that I *know* is there, languishing in some long-forgotten recess of my mail client, but I just can’t find it because it’s lost in a morass of meaningless subjects, like “meeting notes”, or “tomorrow”, or – everyone’s favourite – “Re:”. A communication medium such as email, without the situational or emotional context that is generally inferred from ambient knowledge such as a previous verbal conversation followed up with an email, or from the non-verbal clues that provide up to 80% of our meaning, can inevitably lead to serious misunderstandings or just….. noise. A potential goldmine of crucial information – somebody’s inbox – quickly becomes a black hole of knowledge that can never be found again.

What we’re finding since implementing Sonar is that the knowledge that our emails are going to be processed and have themes extracted from them is making us – consciously or subconsciously – put that little bit of extra thought into providing that context in our sentence construction. It only takes a second to change a subject line like “meeting notes” to “notes from production meeting”, or change “tomorrow” to “tomorrow’s development tasks”, but that extra context makes the world of difference when you’re dredging back through your inbox, months down the line.

It also means that the picture of organisational expertise that Sonar can build up can be rich, informative, and ever-evolving. It’s changing the way we communicate, in subtly varied ways, making us provide more relevant information and, frankly, cut out the crap – and that, to my mind, can only be a good thing.