defrag - ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/feeds/tag/defrag en Copyright 2009 Richard MacManus readwriteweb@gmail.com Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:00:00 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=4.23-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sponsor Announcement: Defrag RWW is the Premiere Media Sponsor for the Defrag Conference, happening 3-4 November in Denver Colorado. You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $200 off of the early bird price.

Highlights from Defrag this year will include a discussion about Strategic Intuition, a presentation from Esther Dyson called 'The Quantification of Everything', a discussion about whether collaboration is changing how we consume and interact with analysis, and much more.

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]]> Other topics Defrag will be exploring include:

  • Enterprise 2.0
  • Online Collaboration
  • The Implicit Web
  • Collective Intelligence
  • The Semantic Web
  • Mash-ups
  • Social Networking in the Enterprise
  • Next-level Discovery
]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sponsor_announcement_defrag_6oct08.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sponsor_announcement_defrag_6oct08.php Sponsors Sun, 05 Oct 2008 12:42:57 -0800 Admin Sponsor Announcement: Defrag RWW is the Premiere Media Sponsor for the Defrag Conference, happening 3-4 November in Denver Colorado. You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $200 off of the early bird price.

Highlights from Defrag this year will include a discussion about Strategic Intuition, a presentation from Esther Dyson called 'The Quantification of Everything', a discussion about whether collaboration is changing how we consume and interact with analysis, and much more.

]]>Sponsor

]]> Other topics Defrag will be exploring include:

  • Enterprise 2.0
  • Online Collaboration
  • The Implicit Web
  • Collective Intelligence
  • The Semantic Web
  • Mash-ups
  • Social Networking in the Enterprise
  • Next-level Discovery
]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/defrag_22sept08.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/defrag_22sept08.php Events Sun, 21 Sep 2008 18:25:00 -0800 Admin Sponsor Announcement: Defrag RWW is the Premiere Media Sponsor for the Defrag Conference, happening 3-4 November in Denver Colorado. Event organizer Eric Norlin has published a list of things that will be happening on Day 1. They include a discussion about Strategic Intuition; an 'Around the Horn' session led by with Paul Kedrosky; 'The Quantification of Everything' from Esther Dyson; "flow" apps; Knowledge Networking and Ambient Intimacy; a discussion about whether collaboration is changing how we consume and interact with analysis; Appfrica: the growth of information overload in Africa; Social Computing and the Enterprise.

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]]> Other topics Defrag will be exploring include:

  • Enterprise 2.0
  • Online Collaboration
  • The Implicit Web
  • Collective Intelligence
  • The Semantic Web
  • Mash-ups
  • Social Networking in the Enterprise
  • Next-level Discovery

You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $200 off of the early bird price.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sponsor_announcement_defrag_sep08.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sponsor_announcement_defrag_sep08.php Events Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:30:20 -0800 Admin How Web Technology is Boosting Productivity in Organizations ReadWriteWeb is a partner with Defrag, a conference about web innovation. Defrag's Eric Norlin has lately been blogging about enterprises and organizations starting to move beyond mere 'cost containment' (although that's still a big driver) and into using web technologies to boost productivity. Eric points out that "taming the data" is one of the challenges of this shift, because there is so much information online which workers need to process. And it's not just taming the data, but gleaning 'intelligence' from it. He mentions a number of buzzwords: enterprise 2.0, semantic web, business intelligence. Eric's main point is that this space is wide open for innovation - going beyond Webex, social networks and so on.

Part of the problem in the enterprise/business market is the predominance of big, bulky software from large IT vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Oracle. Although most of those companies are slowly evolving into offering web-based software (Cisco owns Webex for example), it tends to be slow progress from all the bigcos except for Google. But nowadays we're seeing startups making a significant impact in the enterprise. There are two main ways this is happening...

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]]> One is through integration. For example this week Atlassian announced Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration in the latest release of their enterprise wiki solution Confluence. As we reported, this means that users no longer need to know the technicalities of using wikis (which has long been a factor in wikis not being adopted en masse in the enterprise), Confluence users can now use Microsoft Word. This will clearly boost productivity and usage of wikis, which in turn makes knowledge management easier to manage in organzations.

The other way startups are adding innovation to the enterprise is through new types of products that are tackling problems such as information overload. An example that we've been wanting to mention for a while now is Cognition Technologies, which is licensing its semantic web technologies to various organizations. Cognition's Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology is being used for a number of different applications, from health to law. While not so much enterprise at this time, it's easy to see how Cognition's technology could be used to filter information where ever there is a large data set - which is many businesses these days.


Graphic from Cognition's website

What other startups and products have you noticed lately that are tackling the 'info overload' problem - and so boosting productivity - in organizations?

Defrag is being held November 3-4 in Denver, Colorado. You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $100 off of the early bird price, which ends this Friday.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_web_technology_is_boosting_productivity_in_organizations.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_web_technology_is_boosting_productivity_in_organizations.php Analysis Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:00:00 -0800 Richard MacManus Defrag: Fixing Foundational Information Channels One of the conferences we're supporting this year is Defrag. The topics that Defrag explores are very close to our hearts - OpenSocial, Attention, Next-Level Discovery, The Implicit Web, and more. One of this year's Defrag sessions that caught my attention is entitled: Fixing Foundational Information Channels -- Email, Calendars, RSS, etc.

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]]> On the Defrag blog, my eyes could cope with the stark white text on pitch black background just long enough to read this description:

"...this session starts with the premise that something is broken in our foundations. Email imagines every message as a letter (a discrete object vs. a thread or networked send). Calendars are silo'd islands of non-interoperability that hearken back to days of paper and the rolodex. And RSS, new as it is, is still delivering us "object-oriented" feeds, and not contextually-driven usefulness."

Defrag has snagged some interesting folks that "you don't normally hear from": Ilya from AideRSS, Yori from Timebridge, Deva from ClearContext, and Pete from Mailana. The moderator will be Jeff Nolan.

This sounds like a fascinating session. I still struggle with email overload, even despite my love of Gmail. Calendars are a mix of paper and web for me, which is an indication that I'm not fully satisfied with existing web calendars. And the point about RSS delivering us "object-oriented" feeds is a very good one - and an issue that we at ReadWriteWeb are intensely aware of and wanting to solve on our own blog.

We certainly don't have the answers, but the panel members are well informed with this issue of "foundational information channels". Perhaps our readers can suggest, in the comments, things for the panel to discuss.

Defrag is being held November 3-4 in Denver, Colorado. You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $100 off of the early bird price.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/defrag_fixing_foundational_information_channels.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/defrag_fixing_foundational_information_channels.php Events Thu, 31 Jul 2008 05:30:00 -0800 Richard MacManus Defrag: The Implicit Web and More There are a lot of tech conferences these days and we at ReadWriteWeb get many emails asking us to promote them. We've happily done so in the past, but there are now too many events to keep up with. So this year we've decided to partner with a couple of conferences in particular: Defrag and DEMOfall 08. Defrag is a conference that a few of our writers attended last year, and came away impressed by. With topics such as OpenSocial, Attention, Next-Level Discovery, The Implicit Web, and more, we think this event is right in the sweetspot.

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]]> This year Defrag will be exploring the following topics:

  • Enterprise 2.0
  • Online Collaboration
  • The Implicit Web
  • Collective Intelligence
  • The Semantic Web
  • Mash-ups
  • Social Networking in the Enterprise
  • Next-level Discovery

Defrag is being held November 3-4 in Denver, Colorado. You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $100 off of the early bird price.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/defrag_the_implicit_web.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/defrag_the_implicit_web.php Events Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:50:00 -0800 Richard MacManus Defrag Coverage: OpenSocial, Attention, Next-Level Discovery, More... Charles Knight from AltSearchEngines is blogging up a storm at Defrag. Here are his latest posts from the conference:

There are more posts over on AltSearchEngines.

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]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/defrag_coverage_2007.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/defrag_coverage_2007.php Events Tue, 06 Nov 2007 11:34:29 -0800 Richard MacManus