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Tags: Flock

We do have the power for this (testing internally now) so I just wanted to put the feelers out there for more comments. Who wants to see tagging in Outlook 2007, Windows XP files (Explorer), and Gmail? Which one would you like to see the most?

Mark

This is cool. It totally fits in with our philosphy of NOT changing the UI’s of apps people already use, and instead making the applications work better. Since our plan is to integrate SideFinder tagging into any application, we’re going to be watching these guys closely to see how we can integrate with Teqlo. Nice!

http://www.teqlo.com/

Calgary Barcamp is coming this fall so bring out your demo software, product ideas, or investment cash.  If the first democamp was any indication there is a lot of Entrepreneur/VC networking going on.  Check it out!

Mark

Check out the latest demo video posted on youtube.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSwliFTuAKA

We’re still working on the official beta release because we’re now experimenting with Gmail tagging.  It’s working with Gmail’s existing labels using the SideFinder interface, but we want to be able to combine the Outlook tags with the Gmail labels so you can tag with both, in either email app.  I know that many here use Gmail, so please comment on what you think of this idea.

Mark

Many thanks to Kempton Lam, Patrick Lor, Shekar Kadaba and Sarah Blue for organizing the first democamp in Calgary. This is such a great venue for networking because it’s so relaxed and we always end up going to a bar afterwards.
Check out the video if you want to see it live in action. Cheers!

A few people here in Calgary have started this thing (actually imported this thing) called Barcamp. It’s a recurring event where fellow entrepreneurs, VC’s, techno-philes, etc just get together in an informal atmosphere (like, uh, a bar) and rap about the cool things their doing.

I attended the first one in March and it was great. It’s nice to be able to talk to VC’s in a relaxed atmosphere instead of some pressure cooker office. I was surprised to hear from Patrick Lor how very few people actually pitch their plan to VC’s. Apparently there are a lot of investors out there who are just dying for opportunities and receive very few, even when asking for them. Maybe it’s like “hot chick at the bar” syndrome and there’s a fear of getting shot down.

Well, SideFinder is coming along nicely, albeit a bit delayed on the beta release - sorry beta testers, it’s coming - so we’re starting to work up the courage to ask the hot chick to dance. We’ve decided to take part in Democamp and, yup, do a demo.

Some good ground rules here; max 10 minutes and no Powerpoint slides. The bad news is this isn’t very long to explain a product, but the good news is that I’ll be done early. Here’s my demo agenda.

Introduction:

SideFinder makes it easier to find and file your stuff.

There’s a lot of stuff in inboxes, most of us can’t find it and gave up on filing it, so the first SideFinder plugin we decided to build is for Outlook.

Key points:

1. Unobtrusive interface - sidebar, no change to Outlook.
2. Tags instead of folders
3. Integrated search for both messages and tags
4. Unify information stores (PST files)
5. Mnemonic Search - use data to find meta to find data
6. Business process examples; a) bug reports, b) email annotation
7. Our vision - first Outlook then…

• files
• web favorites
• gmail, webmail
• Picasa
• blogs
• mp3’s
• social tagging integration - delicious, flickr, StumblUpon, etc

………………… unify information islands, all using the same interface.

If you’ve applied to be on the Beta Test Team and haven’t received the last few email updates regarding the Beta (or any updates for that matter), please ensure that you do not have any of our messages in your junk mail folders and set your filters to allow the cnxn.ca domain through. Thanks.

Last week one of our Beta Testers from a large corporation sent us a note to discuss their needs for SideFinder and he mentioned the volume of email he receives in one day. I replied back to correct what had to be a typo of as it was a completely unrealistic number of 7000.

It was no typo.

Apparently Jody works as a Systems Administrator and gets a - cough - “lot” of auto-generated email in the form of server trouble tickets on top of the torrent coming from managers, colleagues etc.

None of us here have ever seen or heard of an inbox of this size and we’ve worked at some pretty big companies. In an 8 hour day there are 28,800 seconds which would allow an average of 4.1 seconds to read every message. This is staggering.

If SideFinder can help Jody manage his email, it can help anybody.

If anyone cares to top this story please feel free. Here’s a screenshot of the message count in his inbox in case you think this message contains a typo.