Last week I was fortunate enough to go to the Defrag conference in Denver. Eric Norlin and his crew put on a great event. I was overly impressed with the quality of the attendees and their interest in new communications technologies. The Twitter streams were flying all day long and well into the night, and hearing guys like Stowe Boyd talk about “flow” and Charlene Li (formally of Gartner) give her thoughts “harnessing the implicit social graph“, I knew I was hanging out with the right crowd.
Chris Wand of Foundry Group set up a great pre-event dinner with the “email dudes” which gave us a chance to meet each other and compare notes on what we are seeing out there. Chris has done some great thinking and investing in and around email and the evolving “communications” space. Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team ( Dave Drach) sponsored the dinner, and it was nice to catch up on the latest from EBT since I used to do so much work with them during my time at Microsoft.
I participated on a panel discussion with Tom Keller, IntenseDebate, Daniel Ha, Disqus and Avinoam Rubenstain, my6sense, which was moderated by Deborah Schultz. We talked about the “dis-aggregation and re-aggregation of the web”, which was very appropriate given what we are doing at Gist. Deborah asked some very good questions about “focus” and “priority” as well as putting these “filters” on a mobile device. It is fair to say that most people agreed about the need for better systems to provide this focus by leveraging either past history or related end-user actions, leading to better “context”. Lots of good ideas and discussions after the panel discussion as well.
There was also a very good panel discussion about the future of email and the inbox, including Deva Hazarika from Clear Context and Pete Warden from Mailana. Both are working on products that help unlock the value trapped in the “Outlook/Exchange inbox”. I really respect their thoughts and ideas, so it was great to hear both of them describe Gist as “one of the coolest and most interesting companies they have seen at Defrag”.
I also got in a few good hours of running with Brad Feld (also from Foundry). He was instrumental in setting up Defrag with Eric and his thoughts on the “next inbox” also really resonated with what we are thinking here at Gist.
I am already looking forward to attending next year. Great work Defrag team!
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Cameron Reilly of The Podcast Network and walk him through Gist. In this video posted on his G’day World blog you’ll see how simple it is to get started with Gist.
Thanks Cameron for coming to see us while you were in Seattle. If you don’t know Cameron, his home base is in Melbourne, Australia and we’re excited to be ‘going global’ so early in our company’s history!
I had the opportunity to sit down with Robert Scoble of Fast Company TV last week during a visit to the Bay Area. We had a great conversation and I appreciate Robert giving Gist some air time. Here’s the link and video of our chat posted below.
We continue to spread the good word about Gist and I’m excited to get out and about in the next couple of months at a few events. If you are going to be at any of these, drop me a note and we can connect before or after.
Friday, Oct 24 – Fast Company TV with Robert Scoble
10:35-11:00AM Pacific http://www.kyte.tv/scobleizer - We will be set up for interactive chat so you can join the conversation
Monday, Nov 3 - I’ll be speaking on a panel at Defrag in Denver
“Dis (and Re)-aggregating the Web” with Tom Keller of IntenseDebate, Daniel Ha of Disqus, Avinoam Rubenstain of my6sense and moderated by Deborah Schultz
At Gist we are busy using the latest and greatest technologies and algorithms to provide the ultimate user experience. Our focus is to provide a wealth of data aggregation across both structured and unstructured data sources and to provide a resource sharing model across our community base for more enhanced ‘user driven’ data aggregation. While we work hard to deliver all of this in a super user interface on multiple platforms (Web, Outlook, iPhone) we are investing in semantic analysis of user data and communication data. We believe we can surface certain semantic properties to the application layer of Gist to fuel some very innovative and valuable features to our users. In Gist, you will find real utility and value, bundled with creative features that we hope to enhance and truly ‘wow’ our users. All of this is coming together rapidly and we are focused on building on the private beta over the coming months and unveiling the product rapidly as we turn the corner into 2009.
Our implementation technology is based in Ruby and Java…both industrial strength languages that promote our need for rapid development and deployment. Bundled with these language sets we utilize Lucene and Solr for news indexing and searching, ActiveMQ for our message broker, and a number of technologies such as Squid, Mongrel and Jetty on our backend infrastructure. In the weeks to come, I hope to elaborate on all our efforts in these areas and welcome any feedback you have.
Thanks for being an early adopter of Gist. We are excited to bring you much more.
TechCrunch (France) - We really enjoyed trying to figure out what the French thought of what we are doing.
And congrats to our design guys as we were mentioned on CSS Mania and Webcreme which garnered new users from Italy, France, England and Australia. Gist is going global!
We are very excited about the road ahead and are working through all the beta invite requests. Our focus now is on a very small beta group and having direct dialog about ways we can improve, so if you have not recieved an invite yet, be patient as the experience you will ultimately have will be much better. If you are on the list and really want to get in to help us shape the product, send us email (info at gist dot com) or comment on this blog with your reasons. Keep spreading the word about Gist!
Today, we are making Gist available for invite-only beta. We pushed the big red button at 2:30pm PST after countless hours of brainstorming, coding, cutting and testing. Thanks to everyone who helped us get to this point and we hope you will join us on our mission.
Welcome to the next generation of business communications whereyour inbox meets the web. Because it’s not what you know or who you know, it’s both.
