PC Forum

I just got back from Esther Dyson’s PC Forum where JSB and I had an opportunity to talk to the group about our new book The Only Sustainable Edge in a session provocatively titled "Friction Can Be Good!". Some notes on that session can be found here and here.

As always, Esther did a great job of bringing together a very interesting group of people and creating ample opportunity for connection and interaction with new people as well as many old friends. To me, the most interesting paradox was that Chris Anderson from Wired was in the audience but was not a featured speaker even though virtually every speaker made at least one reference to The Long Tail. In fact, toward the end, it became a bit of a game to see how soon the speaker mentioned the topic.This is clearly a theme that has been widely adopted, at least within the tech/media industry.

Some of the interesting companies featured at PC Forum this year included Rearden Commerce, Grouper Networks, Jotspot, StreamBase Systems and SpikeSource.

Rearden Commerce, formerly known as Talaris, is a really great company that has only recently started to get some real coverage.  In the spirit of full disclosure, though, I should mention that I am on their Board of Advisors. Rearden Commerce has deployed a service-based application designed to help enterprises manage employee business services (spend on services like travel, package deliver, teleconferencing).  But the real story about Rearden imho is about the SOA based delivery platform they have created – it represents a great example of the service grid concept that JSB and I have been evangelizing for years now.

Grouper Networks launched late last year a new generation of peer-to-peer file-sharing network that emphasizes community and privacy – two favorite themes of mine. It is particularly designed to facilitate the exchange of large files among small groups of friends. One limitation: groups cannot exceed 30 members – a limitation the company established to avoid potential legal liabilities encountered by larger peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

I have written about Jotspot before in my blog. It’s a next generation wiki company focusing on helping work groups to create tailored application platforms to support collaboration.  What is particularly interesting to me about this platform, the brainchild of two co-founders of Excite, is that it seeks to help participants design their own applications, including integrating information feeds from third parties, data feeds from other applications like salesforce.com and even application modules designed by specialized third parties taking advantage of Jotspot’s intent to publish its API’s.  I believe that for social software to really take off we will need to develop and commercialize truly open collaboration environments that can effectively integrate a lot of point solutions emerging in this space.

StreamBase Systems tackles the problem that exists in financial markets today but will soon pervade a broad range of other markets – especially markets that deploy RFID technology. Torrents of information are generated by RFID tags. Most of it isn’t worth keeping but the challenge is to quickly isolate the information that is meaningful and deliver it where it matters. This will potentially become a powerful tool to spot exceptions and provide information necessary to handle and resolve the exceptions.

Kim Polese talked about her new venture SpikeSource, a company she joined as CEO in August of last year. Think of it as a testing and certification  infrastructure for open source software. One interesting feature of the company is the relationship it has established early on with Cognizant to access offshore capability.  My sense is that SpikeSource will be a key player in helping to move open source methodologies more broadly into the application realm, unleashing a large number of narrowly focused applications. It’s a great example of a specialized infrastructure management business.

I could go on, but these were some of the highlights of the conference for me.  I should also mention Emily Levine who gave us a great after-dinner talk that was both extremely funny and thought-provoking at the same time.  If you get a chance to hear her talk, take it.