Hey all,
Hope everyone had a good turkey-day weekend. Now that I've got through our Small Bus. presentation in Jim Nolen's class (highly recommended) I should have a bit more time to post. The first thing I wanted to do is follow up with our call with Mike Maples.
We spoke with Mike a couple of weeks ago (11/9). Mike had found our blog on the web. As I mentioned in the initial announcement about the call, Mike recently moved from Austin to Silicon Valley, where he is testing the waters of the VC world.
The reason Mike contacted us was because he wants to maintain contact with the Austin entrepreneurial community -- especially software. Mike feels that there is a lot of opportunity in applying "Web 2.0" concepts that are currently mainly showing up in consumer-facing software to enterprise software in a bottom-up approach that doesn't require the buy-in of the CIO. He thinks that the commoditization of a lot of software functionality will accelerate this.
What Mike wants to do is simply stay in touch with Austin. He wants to keep his finger on the pulse of what we're doing out here.
For all you software folks out there - this is a great opportunity to stay in touch with Silicon Valley and a very accomplished industry professional. Mike gets down to Austin a lot. He is interested in meeting up with those of us who are passionate about software and new ideas and discuss real opportunities. If this is something that interests you - let me know. But also - you should participate in this blog! I think that the people who are really interested will be a self-selecting group, based on their involvement and engagement. So select yourself!
So what do you all think about applying current consumer-facing web trends to enterprise software? What ARE the opportunities in enterprise software right now? One hot topic, for example, is the idea of using WIKIs for enterprise knowledge management.
I recently started a WIKI at www.jotspot.com for the Information Management Association. It's AWESOME. And it's FREE (or practically free). It allows anyone to easily create pages, attach files, etc. It's really added a lot of value and made it much easier for us to preserve institutional knowledge, especially in an environment where the entire organization turns over every 2 years! Is thaat what Mike was talking about?
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