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JOTSPOT INFO Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA Founded: January 2004 Employees: 12 Funding: $5.2 million from Redpoint and Mayfield Ventures Key metric: thousands of beta users; about 25 apps in user “application gallery" URL: www.jotspot.com Colleran says that revenues from Impinj’s RFID products were less than $1 million in 2004, but he expects that to grow several hundred percent in 2005: He says the company has a $21-million revenue backlog for the next 18 months or so. That’s not surprising in light of Wal-Mart’s mandate that its 100 largest suppliers begin using RFID by this past January. Although some schedules have slipped, the demand is there. JotSpot: Do-it-yourself personal apps JotSpot is not “just” a wiki company, insists founder and CEO Joe Kraus. “It’s the long tail of software,” he says. “The Long Tail” is a concept introduced by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson to describe the enormous but fragmented market for niche products and services, and refers to the long, descending curve on the right side of a power-law distribution curve tail. “So far the long tail has been applied to consumer-oriented stuff: Amazon for books, Netflix for movies, Technorati for blogs,” says Kraus. “JotSpot brings it to applications.” Kraus and co-founder and CTO Graham Spencer previously co-founded Excite, the portal and search engine they sold to broadband provider @Home Network for $6.7 billion in January 1999. After leaving Excite@Home, the pair co-founded Digitalconsumer.org, a nonprofit that protects consumer fair-use rights to digital media, before starting JotSpot last year. (Kraus and Spencer also spoke at the 2001 PC Forum.) JotSpot (FORMERLY WIKIPAD; SEE RELEASE 1.0, JUNE 2004) includes all the usual functionality of a wiki – a sort of mini website on which it’s easy for any (authorized) user to add and edit pages and to track any changes with seamless background version management. But it also offers standard functional workflow and light data tools such as forms, the ability to attach documents or to send and receive e-mail messages to a page, calendars and integrated Google search results. JotSpot users can combine its integrated tools, applications from the JotSpot user-generated “application gallery” and their own personalizations to build simple, easy-to-adapt mini-applications designed for a specific purpose. “Right now, people build small applications [such as a spreadsheet to manage a project] in Excel and e-mail it around” to the people that might find it useful, says Kraus. “You do it in Excel because no [software developer] is going to build that little app. Anyone can do it. It’s incredibly easy, so it’s disposable: You make it and throw it away. But you would never do that with so-called real software.” 72 RELEASE 1.0 WWW.RELEASE1-0.COM
Instead of throwing away Excel mini-apps, JotSpot allows users to re-use, re-purpose and even share applications. “You can even take an Excel sheet you already built, suck it in [to your JotSpot wiki] and make it an app,” says Kraus. “You don’t even know that you’re building an application.” “The first phase of Web was building data,” explains Kraus. “Now it’s integrating that data” to build personalized experiences and applications. “Not customization,but personalization,” he stresses. Unveiled in October 2004, the company raised $5.2 million and has “thousands” of customers for its free beta accounts. Customers are using JotSpot for “anything from managing the launch of a product, to coordination of its foreign talent pool by a Chinese TV station,” says Kraus. JotSpot currently is in open beta. In the coming months it will officially launch the service, which will cost customers about $5 per user per month. But before that, it will launch another product (that’s as specific as Kraus would be!) at PC Forum. Opera Software: Screen harmony Opera is slightly different from the companies we normally invite to present at PC Forum. It’s not a start-up: It was spun out of the Norwegian telecom company Telenor back in 1995. But another major criterion we use to choose companies is that they are starting (or represent) a new trend that we believe will have a great impact on the IT industry. With mobile service providers moving quickly to introduce to the underdeveloped palates of US consumers the kinds of services that their counterparts in Europe and Asia take for granted, Opera has a lot to teach us. Opera develops Web browsers for PCs, mobile phones, PDAs and home-media devices. While its PC browser is well regarded (PC World voted it best browser in 2004) and a key part of Opera’s business, its mobile browser business may be the most interesting going forward. The development of the original Opera browser began in 1994 as a research project at Telenor led by employees Jon von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy. In August 1995 von Tetzchner and Ivarsøy negotiated to spin out further development to Opera Software, the company they co-founded. “The first version of the software was developed on Sun OS, though the development quickly moved to Windows,” says von Tetzchner, now CEO of the company. “We were thinking about making it crossplatform from the beginning, but focused on the PC at the time.” By 1997, the com- MARCH 2005 RELEASE 1.0 73
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ESTHER DYSON’S MONTHLY REPORT Rel
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SUNDAY, MARCH 20 PRESENTATIONS - Th
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Meanwhile, with his title of Chief
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CEO-designate of Lenovo, faces the
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ventures, marketing, software devel
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division that will be mostly the fo
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for Searching and Seizing Computers
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Page 37 and 38: Schwartz says the idea started from
Page 39 and 40: INTERVIEW - Ann Livermore, Hewlett-
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Page 47 and 48: users’ clickstreams. “People do
Page 49 and 50: did her two new bosses. “Larry an
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Page 55 and 56: AFTERNOON SESSIONS THE GALLERY BY C
Page 57 and 58: Persuadio: Finding plankton in an o
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