Enterprise 2.0: Town Hall wrapup

The conference finished with a general “town hall” session with Jessica Lipnack of NetAge and Stowe Boyd of Blue Whale Labs. I had thought that there was too much preaching to the converted going on here, but I sat with Eric Hoffert of ShareMethods during the session and as a vendor, he’s talked with a lot of customers here and saw many who are just getting started or looking at how to start. I stand corrected. 🙂

They redid the same survey (by SMS) as to whether the attendees felt that incumbent enterprise applications would add on Web 2.0 functionality and remain dominant in that area, or whether new Web 2.0 applications would take precedence; Web 2.0 went from 55% to 75% of the vote since the original vote during the Tuesday keynote. The IT versus user control question saw user control gain in popularity from 77% to 85%, and in the hype versus reality showdown, reality went from 69% to 89% popularity.

Boyd saw that the enterprise people attending are eager to adopt the best of Web 2.0, but still maintain the things that work for them from the older technology; unfortunately, they’re having difficulty figuring out which is which, and which is likely to be valuable in the future. The enterprise software vendors, on the other hand, are very clear about the fact that not only do they have the answers, but they’re going to make the decisions for you. He feels that the Enterprise 2.0 moniker is being misapplied in many cases: that it is really radically different, and that many of the vendors (especially the older enterprise software vendors who are positioning Web 2.0 as “old wine in new bottles”) just don’t get it yet. He gives no passing grades to any of the parties involved (watch McAfee’s keynote to see what he’s grading), except to give the users a B- for effort. There’s a lot of things going on, but not a lot of understanding of how to apply those in a practical fashion.

I had to duck out a few minutes early to catch my flight, in the middle of audience members telling about their “veil lifting from the eyes” revelation during the conference:

  • Allow the users to define what they need (“if they come, we will build it”), rather than having IT decide (“if we build it, they will come”)
  • The value of folksonomies over taxonomies
  • Software-as-a-service on the way to becoming a utility rather than being considered a business risk
  • The blogosphere is an incredible source of information, both about the authors and the content

Enterprise 2.0: Thomas Vander Wal

The last breakout session was with Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud, talking about tagging in the enterprise. He started out defining tagging and its uses: simple data/metadata externally applied to an object, which is used for sorting and as a hook for aggregating; tags provide an identifier or description of an item, or are a personal marker. He then looked at how the shift occurs from a top-down taxonomy to a bottom-up folksonomy: the result of personal free tagging by the consumer of the data, using their own vocabulary and viewpoint, for their own retrieval, but shared so others can use it. This is not so much a matter of people categorizing in a taxonomic sense, but in finding ways to connect information.

As I saw demonstrated at a recent conference, all of this makes librarians and taxonomists nervous, because they think of this as a specialized science that only they can do, and that the little people will just screw this up if you let them do it themselves.

Vander Wal showed how del.icio.us extended the tagging basics of object and metadata to include identity: you can track the tags of people whose opinions that you value. By looking at the object-metadata-identity relationship, you can now see, for example, what other people tagged with the same tags that you use in order to find new information that may be relevant.

He then moved on to what happens when you add community into the mix, which tends to apply some structure to the metadata because of the common vocabulary and understanding within the community or enterprise. He sees taxonomy as more more likely to be driven internally by a company, whereas a folksonomy is driven by the customer: folksonomy is emergent and fluid.

He discussed the business tensions between taxonomy and folksonomy in the enterprise: the balance between naming control and people’s vocabulary; using sample groups versus allowing every perspective to contribute; create in-house versus an outside service; the high cost of developing a taxonomy for a pre-determined value versus a low-cost taxonomy with an unknown value; consistency versus the emergent. In general, organizations spend a lot less money on their intranet than their customer-facing sites so it’s usually harder to find things; adding tagging to an intranet can hugely add value by allowing people to find information on the intranet. There’s also opportunities for business-to-business tagging, which can be used to align the vocabulary between two companies, and for customers to use tagging on an enterprise’s community-facing sites.

For an enterprise’s external sites, tagging can provide an improved understanding of the customers and market by looking at what terms that people are using to tag certain objects and pages — this could be an incredibly powerful yet inexpensive market research tool. It allows an organization to capture all of the current terminology around their products and usage to more easily target messaging around the products, and even develop market segmentation. In general, it provides a much better perspective on the customer base, or at least that portion of it that tags.

For an intranet, tagging can help improve findability and improve the context in which pages are understood. It allows for easy sharing of resources, and a cost-effective method of building a taxonomy so that vocabulary becomes shared across silos for disambiguation within the corporation.

In order to do all this, there needs to be some monitoring and analysis tools: what tags are being used, inbound and outbound traffic levels, if spam is occurring, and what’s happening in external tagging sites as well as any internal tagging systems. Analysis of all this allows you to look at usage patterns, build synonym repositories, identify people with common interests, and build some order and structure.

As tagging scales up in an enterprise, it always starts for reasons of personal productivity, then moves on to the serendipity of finding things with related tags, then a more mature social tagging where people are more aware of what’s happening in their community, and finally becomes a complex social system. I find interesting analogies to how my usage of del.icio.us has changed over time: I started using it just to get control of my browser bookmarks, and eventually moved on to using it to auto-generate daily blog posts of the new pages that I tag, along with my comments on each link.

Vander Wal walks us through the phases of interaction — this guy talks at light-speed, and I’m completely unable to capture all of this, which is unfortunate since it’s really, really interesting — and discusses the viral nature of it, especially within enterprises where the value of shared tags is usually much more obvious than in the wild.

He looks at the reasons that people tag, which are primarily for their own use and for re-findability. He touches on the social aspects of tagging, such as the categories that I use for posts on this blog, or tags that I add to my friends’ Flickr photos if I can add value with my unique metadata. There’s always issues of privacy, and in fact, del.icio.us now allows for private tagging in addition to publicly-visible tags, although many social networking sites don’t provide any privacy around the tags that you add to objects. Ma.gnolia, another social bookmarking site, also allows for private groups to be created, which is a great way for enterprises to get started with tagging without having to bring it in-house, but still providing privacy of those tags to just the group.The concepts of tagging are moving into many other areas, such as Microsoft Vista now allowing tagging of files.

There’s some interesting clustering that can be done with tagging as well, looking at the common co-occurrences of tags, which Flickr is doing now so that you can look at a group of photos that have common tags that are of interest to you.

Vander Wal stated that he doesn’t find tag clouds to be particularly useful for most applications, instead preferring a flat list of tags, but sees that tag clouds can be good for understanding the essence of an object or page.

If you want to see an example of tagging at use to great effect in a consumer retail environment, go find Kevin Federline’s CD on Amazon and check out the tags that customers associated with the product (about halfway down the page): “talentless” floats to the top.

He finished up with some thoughts on interoperability, which I see it going to be an increasingly important issue as the use of tagging proliferates, and multiple platforms are used.

Enterprise 2.0: Group Intelligence Panel

Luis Solis of GroupSystems moderated a panel on Group Intelligence Across the Enterprise: 5 Keys to Success, with David Marshak of the Unified Communications & Collaboration group at IBM, Alex Pentland of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and John Abele of Boston Scientific. One interesting thing was that Solis invited us to SMS him with questions during the presentation; not sure that that’s all that efficient, but maybe will pull a few of the introverts out of the closet.

Solis stated that personal productivity is (so) yesterday, even though that’s what a lot of this conference seems to have focussed on, and that we need to focus on group intelligence. He feels that collaboration is a too generic concept, and breaks it down into ad hoc (socializing, and 2 peers notifying or discussing) and structured group collaboration (lecturing, and many-to-many exploration/innovation). He sees the many-to-many exploration/innovation is the interesting part of collaboration for enterprises, since that leads to problem-solving, but that it’s hard work because it relies on trust within the group, a supportive culture, and confident leadership. Interestingly, he sees that American culture can be anti-collaborative because of a natural command-and-control mentality, whereas other countries (he mentioned Sweden in particular) have a more inherent bent towards collaboration in their national culture that spills over into their corporate culture. It would be interesting to see where Canada lies on this spectrum.

Pentland spoke about sensor networks, and the management of face-to-face communications. Using an on-body sensor (a sort of smart name tag), they measured who interacted with whom over the course of a project (which happened to be a banking marketing campaign) by detecting proximity as well as who was speaking. Rolling this together with the email traffic that went around for the same project, they were able to look at the total communication model and correlations between face-to-face/email traffic and factors such as the quality of the group interactions; the final result is that face-to-face communication communication is better than email. Okay, we really already knew that, but for the gadget geeks, there’s now a way to actually measure it. Apparently, these smart tags can also measure things such as physical gestures, which can have an impact with things such as animating an avatar in an environment like Second Life.

Marshak discussed IBM’s internal community tools, which I’ve heard about from friends of mine who work at IBM. With more than 300,000 employees, IBM has a few internal communication issues, especially around having people with common interests or complementary skills find each other. Their intranet allows people to join groups that are geographic- or interest-based, then use that to harness the community knowledge. His example was about when he upgraded to a new version of Lotus Notes and his Blackberry no longer worked, and he wanted to find out what to do (I resisted the urge to shout out “Buy Microsoft Outlook”); he pinged the internal Blackberry group and was soon in an interactive text chat with others who either had the same problem or who had a solution. The nice thing is that there’s no anonymity: everyone is accountable for their internal communications, and those involved in the communication can rate responses and even report someone else if they are using that communication method improperly. Even their Second Life group requires that you register your real identity in order to join. There’s an ongoing debate about many social networking sites about using your own identity, and I strongly feel that you should use your own identify if you want to engage in a public conversation, since hiding behind a pseudonym often results in completely inappropriate behaviour (I notice that those who oppose this view are almost always the ones engaging in such behaviour).

Abele discussed methods for creating the right environment for group collaboration, which he sees as requiring diversity (in culture, experience, bias, age, geography), a means of gathering input from everyone, and a means of aggregating information. He discussed impediments to collaboration: silos and different cultures, strong egos, messenger killers, pontificators, group think, off topic time wasters, diverse levels of understanding, a range of bias (although he also listed this as part of the diversity that was required), lack of leadership, and poor organization. Many environments actually reward silo behaviour, which manifests in enterprises and academia as information or skills specializations: the better that you get at a particular specialization, the more you get paid; unfortunately, focus on a specialization usually happens to the detriment of other knowledge and skills.

We ended up with audience questions, which started some interesting discussion threads. Marshak said that he doesn’t think that the goal of online communications should be to emulate face-to-face meetings: it’s just different, and those differences can be leveraged.

They also discussed the problems of group-think that can occur both from cultural/gender biases and when corporate organizational structures are allowed to influence how people interact, and how anonymity can be useful in some cases to allow people to ask questions or voice an opinion more freely. However, ultimately, its much more effective to actually know who has which concerns and asks which questions. This moved to a discussion of collaboration (which typically requires that you know who’s who) versus the broader area of group intelligence (which can include anonymous contributions).

Pentland has some interesting comments on how people’s personal goals are no longer fully aligned with that of their employer: when people worked for the same company for life, there was near-perfect alignment, but now, almost everyone has their own career interests that may go in different directions. This can impact people’s willingness to share in a variety of ways, depending on the particular corporate culture: they may be rewarded for bringing forward innovative ideas by being assigned to “cool” projects, or they may be punished for not toeing the company line.

Solis ended up with five keys to success to group intelligence:

  • Be sensitive to what nature of group work you wish to improve/optimize, e.g., many-to-many
  • Leadership commitment
  • Measurement of collaboration and its impacts
  • New tools create new behaviours, so make sure that the tools that you choose are likely to create the outcomes that you want in terms of behaviours
  • Beware obstacles: think back to the list of impediments above and which are likely to occur in your organization

I’ll be running a collaboration group process design session next week for a client, and you can be sure that I’ll be watching for a lot of the things that I’m hearing here today.

Enterprise 2.0: Sam Weber

Last day at the conference — half-day, really — and the first breakout session is with Sam Weber of KnowNow, discussing “RSS: Bridging the Gap Between the People and the Information that Drive Business”. I’ve been looking at ways to bring RSS into the enterprise for quite a while, mostly by nagging the BPM vendors to include it in their products.

Weber starts by saying that they are now completely an RSS company (actually, they also support ATOM), and previously did system-to-system integration using techniques such as REST: essentially, lightweight SOA. It makes perfect sense to me that moving to a focus on RSS is a logical progression from that. They make an RSS reader and a desktop alert tool, and their server is available as a hosted or on-site solution.

In a case study, he discusses a company of 30,000+ employees that has operations in the US and India, with 30 intranets, portals and knowledge bases, and thousands of internal blogs. Their challenge was internal communications across their employee base, and by using RSS for information distribution they were able to deliver consistent communications in a timely manner, without the information being lost in the employee’s email boxes. In other words, as I’m starting to see, RSS is becoming a sort of high priority email replacement, and to avoid clogging up internal email systems with broadcast emails.

He restated his main points from his 6-minute Launch Pad presentation yesterday: email is overused, with over 50% being junk; static portals are useful to less than 20% of users since they require too much action on the part of the user to find the information that they required; search has only about a 50% success rate and also relies on the user to have the skills required to find what they want. In fact, an IDC study showed that the average employee spends 9-10 hours per weeks searching for information, and is only successful half the time (it sounds like a lot more people need a tool like Google Desktop Search, or X1, which I use all the time), and that a 1000-person company wastes $48k per week on the inability to find information.

The solution, according to Weber, is RSS in the enterprise, or what they call live information management. To do this:

  1. Access and monitor information sources, rather than replicating data for the purposes of syndication; this includes monitoring information sources that don’t have RSS feeds.
  2. Automate relevancy, by leveraging this “newly freed content” to allow the system to try to determine what is relevant to a particular user and push them that information.
  3. I blinked, and missed step 3. 🙂 I think that it was more about pushing the information, that is, transform and deliver the data.
  4. Capture user behaviour so as to refine the relevancy algorithms.

With all of this, there needs to be some core system capabilities such as aggregation (to avoid unnecessary duplication), filtering to meet relevancy requirements, data transformation to allow access to sources that don’t have RSS feeds, security, alerts and notifications, and content-based routing of the feeds to those who need them. After that, the information needs to be delivered to the end users, which is done via RSS.

Weber sees the following minimum requirements for a live information management system: monitor all sources inside and outside the enterprise; match content to users based on relevancy; leverage the network effect; deliver information to users as available; provide enterprise security and management; and enable end-user personalization and control. This seems to be a bit redundant with the last two slides, but is a good summary.

His next case study is Wells Fargo, which uses Teradata for collecting information in six major data warehouses; their challenges were around synchronizing metadata and ensuring that data and schema errors were corrected quickly. They’re now using KnowNow (in a customized solution) to monitor parts of the ETL process related to a risk dataset, and push notifications of any problems to the appropriate people via RSS.

Next, he discussed another banking case study (unnamed) where the central organization was sending out more than 80 internal newsletters and alerts each week to all employees; when this bogged down their systems, they moved it to SharePoint, where people actually found that it took more time to find things than in their old Lotus Notes email system. Now, they’re moving to an RSS model for distribution, and find themselves saving $750k per year.

He finished up with options for the enterprise to adopting RSS:

  • Wait, and just use RSS in the systems that offer it today; the big vendors will likely take 2-5 years to bring in RSS formatting.
  • Continue to (over)use email as the main collaboration tool, and bet on portals and search technologies.
  • Implement an enterprise syndication solution, which leverages the information that you have now and allows information to be selectively pushed to people, or allow them to select their own subscriptions.

I have no idea how well KnowNow’s product works, but the concepts that Weber discussed really hit home for me and many of my clients. There’s a Forrester white paper about Enterprise RSS available on the KnowNow site if you want to learn more.

Enterprise 2.0: Hot Videos

No, not that kind of video — these are hot-off-the-press videos of the keynote sessions at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. I stopped by the Altus display at the trade show after the sessions completed today and saw a bit more about the technology behind what’s serving these up. First of all, less than 24 hours after a live session, they have the video up here, complete with a fully searchable transcript, the “talking head”, and the slides, all synchronized. If that weren’t hot enough, note that there’s an RSS feed icon on the page; click on that, copy the URL for the vodcasts, paste it into iTunes, and you’ll be watching the slides with audio on your video iPod.

Enterprise 2.0: Tapscott Panel

Following on directly from his talk, Don Tapscott moderated a panel including Ross Mayfield of SocialText, Kim Polese of SpikeSource (who I saw speak about open source at the CMU West New Software Industry conference in April) and Joe Schueller of Proctor & Gamble.

Mayfield started off with some ideas about the complexity of social networks, and how some vendors attempt to translate that complexity into the software rather than providing simpler tools that encourage emergent behaviour by leaving the complexity with the people part of it. He illustrated the power law of participation, making the distinction between collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence, before moving on to a discussion of what to wiki. First, focussed on people, you can do an internal equivalent to Wikipedia, such as a part of your intranet; the challenge is that there may not be a specific goal associated with this. Second, focus on practice, and create a global glossary or how-tos which provides a practical but non-political reference application. Third, focus on project by creating a forum for project communication and lightweight content management. Fourth, focus on process by using a wiki for handling process exceptions. He finished up by announcing that SocialText launched WikiWidgets today, although I’m not clear at this point what exactly that is.

Polese talked about the enterprise benefits of Web 2.0, but also covered off some of the concerns: cost of the administration of point solutions, security, importing/including data from current information sources, and enterprise content management. She discussed their products, some of which provide testing and support frameworks for using open source in the enterprise, and one which appears to be an enterprise collaboration platform. I’ve seen so many things called “enterprise collaboration platforms” in the last two days, this is starting to be a bit meaningless.

Schueller was up last, discussing how P&G has relabelled their product R&D department to C&D, for Connect & Develop. They see the advantage of collaborating not just to harness technical ideas from all over, but cultural issues that might be relevant to a consumer products company like P&G. He sees this as a key part of business agility, as well as reducing product development costs and just creating better products from better ideas. They’re focussing on their core competencies rather than having to do everything themselves, which is something that’s happened in many industries such as manufacturing, but the idea that you can outsource your ideas is pretty innovative.

It’s like a sauna in the conference room and we’re now at 4:30 on a day that started with 8am sessions; and as we tail off to general questions on the panel, people start to trickle out of the room.

There was a good discussion on the potential for replacing email within the enterprise; Schueller said that he once made a bold statement that they’d just get rid of it, then had to eat those words as he discovered the (current) futility of declaring war on email. I think that there’s great opportunities to reduce email, using things like wikis for collaboration, and RSS feeds for one-way information dissemination (as we saw in the Bank of America presentation this morning), but we’re not going to see a significant decrease in email until more of the boomers retire and more of the MySpace generation gets into corporations to help shift the culture.

Enterprise 2.0: Don Tapscott

Don Tapscott talked about the concepts from his book Wikinomics, which I finally got around to reading recently (okay, I confess, I didn’t read the whole thing…). He states that the web is becoming the new mode of production, and is facilitating the move from the old closed hierarchical corporation to the open networked enterprise. He sees four drivers for change:

  • Web 2.0, which changes the way that we interact with computers.
  • The net generation, who grew up digital and also are much more used to multi-tasking across multiple channels: reading, watching TV and surfing the internet at the same time. They see email as a “formal technology”, suitable for sending a thank you letter to one of your parents’ friends, for example.
  • The social revolution, characterized by the rise of sites like Facebook.
  • The economic revolution, including new business models to take advantage of mass collaboration.

He covered his four major principles of being open (as an organization): peering, being open, sharing, and acting global. I did like his quote about being open: “if you’re going to be naked, you’d better be buff”, namely, you probably want to have your company in pretty respectable shape before exposing it to your business partners and customers.

He closed with the new business models that he discussed in the book: peer pioneers (e.g., Spikesource, who is up speaking later this afternoon); ideagoras (open idea markets, e.g., Proctor & Gamble, who will have half of their innovations come from outside of the corporation by the end of this year); prosumers (where customers become producers, e.g., Second Life); the new Alexandrians (e.g., Google Earth Avian Flu mashup); open platforms (e.g., Amazon API); the global plant floor (e.g., Boeing creating a peer-produced aircraft with their suppliers); and the wiki workplace (e.g. Geek Squad product management within Best Buy).

In direct relation to something said in the collective intelligence session this morning, Tapscott said “don’t fear theft of your intellectual property, fear obscurity.”

Apparently this presentation is pretty well-worn: Martin Cleaver, who’s sitting next to me, has heard it three times, and Mark Kuznicki, who’s chatting with us on a group Skype chat from Toronto (I think) says that he can recite it by heart; in fact, he described it as “peer production, blah blah blah, user-generated content, blah blah blah, crowdsourcing, blah blah blah”. This the first time that I’ve heard it, and it’s pretty good the first time around, but Tapscott may want to get himself some new material to keep the repeat attendees happy.

Enterprise 2.0: From the Labs

David Coleman is hosting a panel that includes Bob McCandless and Chad Ata of BrightCom, Irene Greif of IBM, and Denis Browne of SAP of what’s happening in their experimental environments right now, which may not be anything that’s going to become a product. Each has 10 minutes, so this is more like a standard panel than the speed-dating vibe of the previous Launch Pad session.

McCandless started out talking about BrightCom, which makes telepresence products, and some of the work that they’re doing in gaze correction and perspective-corrected viewing so that it appears that the people on the other side of the conference are both at the table with you and looking at you. He’s talking about immersive telepresence, where you’re in a fully rendered environment that appears truly seamless since you appear as a photo-realistic avatar rather than using a literal video of you, and how new display technologies are going to have to improve in order to support that. He’s demonstrating the ideas by using Second Life, where he’s popped his telepresence avatar directly in instead of his normal Second Life avatar. He claims that this has the potential to become “indistinguishable from reality”, and that immersive technology is the next generation after telepresence.

Greif talked about IBM’s Many Eyes, a social data analysis site. She started by showing the Baby Name Wizard data visualization, which somehow reminded me of the Hans Rosling TEDtalk and his company GapMinder; as she got into Many Eyes itself, it’s very much like GapMinder. The vision, however, is to use tools like this for enterprise data, including that which is residing on people’s hard drives.

Browne talked about what SAP is doing with enterprise widgets. He makes a great point that IT departments are still in reaction mode with respect to Web 2.0 applications, and that in many cases, the business side is bringing them in. He sees three ways to implement Enterprise 2.0: extend existing applications, build new applications, and facilitate enterprise mashups. He also makes an analogy of Enterprise 2.0 solutions to iTunes, where they need to provide end user experience, distribution, security and development tools. He showed the SAP widgets, which is a Google gadget-like toolbar of widgets, such as drilldowns into sales prospecting data.

Enterprise 2.0: Launch Pad

Michael Sampson of Collaboration Success Advisors chaired Launch Pad, where four companies each had six minutes to talk about a new product that they’re launching. David Coleman and Stowe Boyd each provided a minute of critique, then at the end we voted via SMS for our favourite.

Franco Dal Molin of Collanos: team collaboration across the corporate firewall, so that it can include outsourcers and contractors. They have a synchronized peer-to-peer workspace solution which is server-less, allowing for sharing information both real-time and asynchronously. You invite others to your workspace, and what you’re doing synchs with what they’re doing. It can include any types of content or file types, but also structure content such as tasks and links. There’s versioning of the content. Each project is presented in its own tab for organization, and presumably you can share different different tabs with different people. Workplace was released about six months ago, and today, they’re announcing a voice calling add-on to allow for voice and video calls, including voice mail and call forwarding. He invited us to join the Collanosphere. [I’m wondering if you’re just looking at the product, is that a Collanoscopy?]

One of Stowe Boyd’s comments was that the problem with P2P is that if you’re never online at the same time as your collaborators, then you never synch with them; I see that in the Skype group chat that I belong to, where the chat history is actually maintained through P2P synchronization and I’ll suddenly get a big chunk of missing chat history come flooding in when someone comes online.

Avinoam Nowogrodski from Clarizen, who I’ll be interviewing later today: on-demand, collaborative project management. He had a lot of great marketing graphics that talked about collaborative project networks, but I’m not left with much of an overall impression of what their software actually does (aside from the fact that it’s called “project management”, so I assume that it does some sort of, um, project management).

Dave Peak of LiquidTalk: some of the challenges in business today are that an increasingly remote workforce limits collaboration; the Web 2.0 generation enters the workforce and have higher expectations; and roles are getting tougher, leading to higher turnover in employees. The result is a disconnected, disengaged workforce, and LiquidTalk counters this with mobile workforce engagement: create, find, organize and push audio/video business content to mobile devices. Personally, I’m not sure that I want to consume a lot of information via voice; although I listen to podcasts a lot, if I’m just trying to extract some key data, text is way easier.

Sam Weber of KnowNow was up last: his title slide claims that they’re the Live Information Management Application for Today’s Enterprise. He states that email is overused (and has become a storage device rather than a communication platform), static portals are broken, and search isn’t the answer. They monitor a wide variety of information sources — blogs, wikis, web servers, email, portals and more — and aggregate it, apply filtering, then push it out the critical information via RSS to create channels in a user portal environment similar to Netvibes. I agree with the critics that aggregation and RSS feeds are the way to go for information consumption in the future, so this one may have some legs.

The audience vote on which of these has the game-changing proposition: KnowNow.