Mindquarry RH Spring interview

In May I’ve attended the Red Herring Spring in Monterey, and during that session I’ve got interviewed. Now the video became available. Unfortunately wordpress-online doesn’t support video-linking to others than Google Video, Youtube, DailyMotion, Grouper, Odeo, and SplashCast. Therefore I cant show it here. Just follow the link above.

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Faceted Metadata Search – an new approach to user experience

Lars wrote a post about his faceted search option for Mindquarry tasks in version 1.2. By his description you may get easy a glue how it works. That seems to be a simple (but useful) step to the task feature.

But faceted search is a solution on top of technologies. Microsoft is developing that right now as a solution to compete to other search engines like Google.

Faceted search is an option to the general search dilemma, that you (the searcher) must have exact knowledge about the search content description to find exactly what you search. For example if you search a suitcase with tiger pattern you would get the operating system “tiger” (Mac OS) , the animal “tiger” and much more overwhelming information.

Even plain full text search is not a perfect solution. try to search a telephone-No, like 777-6330, you’ll get results with telephone-, article- and stock- numbers.

Faceted search is different,

Collaboration 2.0

I was writing some huge posts about collaboration 2.0 with Mindquarry at the Mindquarry blog. Start reading here.

First Mindquarry screen cast

Today Sando Groganz finished the first part of his Mindquarry screen cast work. Although still without sound, it looks cool and professional. Can’t wait to post this and hope to see the final version soon.

Hasso Plattner

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Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place.

Today Hasso Plattner held his (usual) keynote speech at this years HassoPlattner Ventures/HassoPlattner Institute event, the DesignIT conference at the university campus in Potsdam. For an IT guy, his part was the most remarkable speech at the conference. Very stylish too, since everything was about design. For extreme-sport fans there was an other interesting presentation too about mountain climbing.

Mr. Plattner was lecturing about his claim: “Software is all about design and usability, even or especially in the ERP market too”. He admitted, that in the past usually software producers claimed to know all about the business process, the so called “best practice”. Users had just to learn how to use their software. Today the world is driven by a process which Gartner analysts call “consumerization“, claiming that this will be the most important trend for the next 10 years.
So even Mr. Plattner told the audience, that this world of software vendor behavior is over .Today software has to be designed according the real needs of the clients, of the consumer. And a mayor point is simplicity and ease of use.

Anyway, for such a full day conference I’d like to see at least one or two other famous speakers too. David Weinberger, who spoke recently at the Enterprise 2.0 in Boston about social software, would have nicely fit in that conference. And Mr. Plattner wouldn’t have been the only “lighthouse in a desert”. 😉

Struggling with the lead retrieval device

scan the visitor
Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place.

It’s a widely adopted standard at US trade shows to use lead retrieval scanners. Our booth neighbor used one and it took often some time. We did not, because Sandro (our marketing VP) said, it’s cheaper to collect a business card. I agreed, but there have been a lot of visitors without business cards, perhaps calculating that there are those devices. If I would have known, how many business cards we totally collected (I was guessing less) + how much we missed, I would have taken it too. Lesson learned. 😉

Lars on the red line

Lars on the freedom trail
Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place.

Yesterday we arrived late in Boston, were we’ll attend the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Today we took some time to have a condensed city visit. Lars discovered the red line, which leads to the most important historical places in a kind of loop road. So we followed the line. Finally we saw a lot (check out my flickr pics), but we’ve been really down after all these miles in the heat.
In the afternoon we worked on the presentation and Lars wanted to start some coding work. Now I’ll gonna pick him up for a light evening meal and tomorrow we start the 4 day conference marathon.
Many people already arranged a meeting with us, therefore we are very snoopy for tomorrow. I’ll keep you informed.

First day in Monterey

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Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place.

The jet lag effect kicked us out of the bed around 6 in the morning, so after a so called “continental” breakfast we had a walk through the town to the beach. lather the weather became cloudy, so we headed back to the hotel to work on our presentation. Sandro tried to finish e white paper and finally we tried to sharpen our elevator pitch. At 7 p.m. we headed to the Monterey Aquarium, were the formal greeting reception took place. So we had plenty time for a first networking.

Flight to LA, CA

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Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place.

On Monday I was flying from Berlin to Frankfurt to meet there my collegue Sandro (VP Marketing at Mindquarry). Together we took the Air India flight to LA. Sandro was backbiting a little bit about bloggers who often write about all the trouble happens during a flight. “There is usually trouble at almost every flight” he said. He had right. But to avoid his backbiting on me, I’ll stay quiet at that point. Perhaps Sandro will blog about the flight. 😉
Anyway, nearly everything worked out fine at the travel. The photo on the right is taken from our car at the Hwy 5 north. At that point, we just had left the LA suburban area and still 4 hours to travel to Monterey. At that time we still had not considered jet lag effects, on which we should suffering soon.
It was a hard ride to Monterey, were we arrived at half past midnight local time. We’ve been really down and happy to be able to go to bed immediately.

Understanding Collaborative Workspaces

Me and my working team
Originally uploaded by Paolo Ferrari.

 

Collaboration is the essence of the modern business era. More and more work is information work. More and more work happens between local distributed teams. But more and more working efficiency is reduced by the increasing overhead.
The topic of „understanding performance and collaborative workspaces“ becomes significant importance to every business in our global networked world.
According to a IDC study about the hidden costs of information work, the annual costs to an Enterprise with 1.000 information workers ( / annual payment of $60,0000 each) are $30M for wasted time.
Assuming the reduction of 1/3 of the overhead by better concepts and tools for teamwork, they could save about $10M each year.
So I think, the introduction of better concepts is just a matter of time and it will happen soon.
At Mindquarry, we believe that we will play a major role in that process of changing the collaborative workspace into a better place for team workers.