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Adding the hierarchical information takes longer than simply setting up the faceted
system, so Siderean sometimes delivers a purely faceted system first and then incrementally
adds hierarchical elements. “Either or both can be effective in helping people
focus their results,” says Allen. Although the company occasionally goes head to
head with Endeca, Allen does not see the companies as direct competitors. Much of
Endeca’s business comes from large e-commerce sites, while Siderean focuses on
sales and marketing applications within retail, manufacturing and financial services,
as well as applications within publishing, government and education. Less than 20
percent of its revenue comes from consulting.
Trumba: Capturing time
EVDB (PAGE 62) plans to help users discover events they might be interested in: a
meeting, a reading by a favorite author, a competitor’s event. Trumba is a personal
tool that will help users schedule and manage those official events as well as things
they already know about and should remember – the micro-events in their personal
lives such as babysitters, doctor’s appointments, PTA meetings, business meetings. It
also enables users to share their schedules with family, friends and colleagues. Just as
photo-sharing sites help users organize and share photos of the past, Trumba will
help users organize and share their time in the (near) future.
The company was co-founded by CEO Jeremy Jaech, VP of product development
Ted Johnson and chief software architect Peter Mullen. All three previously worked
together at Visio, which Jaech and Johnson co-founded in 1990 and sold to
Microsoft in 2000. A few years later, Jaech and Johnson decided to get the team back
together for a new project. “We both came out of corporate environment, where we
had good administrative support,” recalls Jaech. As independent entrepreneurs, “we
no longer had it. So we hit upon calendar management as a need that was probably
more pervasive than just for the two of us.”
The basic premise is not new: Companies such as When.com (acquired by AOL in
1999) and services such as Yahoo! Calendar offer much of the same functionality as
Trumba. But Trumba is taking those early efforts and building a more sophisticated
and flexible tool that takes advantage of broadband connectivity, mobile-device
applications and the Microsoft .Net framework. “Just as we did with Visio, we are
taking technology that is ready for prime time and making it happen,” says Jaech.
Trumba’s central strategy is to pull as many events as possible into a single place
(Trumba’s hosted database), and then help users find the events, add them to their
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