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equest, he or she can use all the rich-media tools – from basic text chat to full-power
video conferencing – to demonstrate a product or make a presentation.
Does Digate eat his own dog food? Yes, he does. This interview was delightfully easy
to arrange, since Digate’s blog and e-mails display his dynamically updated online
presence via an ASAP personal link. To prevent excessive interruptions, he makes
this personal link appear or disappear on his blog based both on his current presence
state and on his predetermined “office hours.” He has found that presenceenabling
his e-mail encourages people to respond in real time and permits them to
engage with him in productive live video sessions as well as via e-mail or by phone.
He says his business has been accelerated, because when he’s around to work with a
co-worker or customer, they know it.
Johannes Ernst, NetMesh: Only when I’m ready
Johannes Ernst has a vision of information technology that goes beyond the established
concept of applications on the one hand and separate data on the other. He
says that as technology becomes pervasive and work habits change, the context of
where people are, what they are doing, and whom they are interacting with is
becoming central to getting work done. So he’s creating “situational software” to
meld context into the legacy IT infrastructure and to get the right application (and
data) to mobile users proactively instead of waiting for them to ask for it.
Ernst came up with this approach at BMW in Germany, where he was working on
the collaborative engineering and design systems that the automotive engineers used
to work with each other. He realized that there was no chance that all of them could
ever reach all their design information through a single centralized application.
What they needed was a way to aggregate information from multiple, incompatible
applications in real time, so it would be immediately visible to the right people what
impact a proposed design change would have on all parts of the project.
He took his vision with him to Silicon Valley ten years ago, to work for an embedded
software company Integrated Systems (since merged with Wind River Systems). He
left in 1998 to found Aviatis, a firm based on his vision for seamless real-time engineering.
Aviatis didn’t make it, but in 2001, Ernst bought back the IP and started
NetMesh (formerly R-Objects), with funding from Nokia Innovent. Unlike his previous
company, NetMesh doesn’t serve the engineering markets; his first customers
are in health care.
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