The Baydin Blog | Email, Startups, and Search

Baydin participated in the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad this year, announcing availability of our email-based automatic knowledge discovery tool, Unsearch.

I felt like we were preaching to the choir, because the keynote speakers who talked before us, including Tony Zingale from Jive and Jamie Whitmoyer, who implemented Sony’s E2.0 infrastructure in SharePoint, showed data about how much room there is for email and search to improve inside the organization. We were thrilled to be able to announce a product that makes email collaborative, for everyone in the enterprise, just a few minutes later.

We had several large/medium companies approach us about setting up pilot programs, so I would definitely encourage other startups in this space to apply to be part of the LaunchPad at E2.0 San Francisco in November. If you weren’t able to be at E2.0, but are curious how Unsearch’s email integration can get 100% of your coworkers involved and collaborating using the systems you already have, like SharePoint, please email us about setting up a demo.

Below are a few thoughts about the conference.

Major Themes

Collaboration and Social Software is back again in 2010. After a couple rough years because of the economy, it looks like companies are again making major pushes to find and deploy software to try to get people talking, collaborating, and connecting with their coworkers again.  There were several major themes that appeared throughout the keynotes, across the Expo, and in the panels.

The Rise of Feeds
Everyone has a “News Feed” view now. It’s clear that vendors have discovered value in bite-size pieces of information, delivered in chronological order, from people you already know (or groups you are already part of). This is a major part of practically all the new E2.0 products. The big value in these feeds is that they are public and somewhat customized, but unlike email, they are not directed specifically to you, so you can read just part of the stream and not worry about missing something.

There’s a lot of value in being able to filter information this way, even if the filter is “I don’t have time to look at this today.” The software demos looked like they would have a lot of irrelevant information in the feeds, though and there was a large number of unread items in most of the demos. I tend to feel stressed by unread counts, so I’m not sure the ability to come and go through the feed, without worrying about missing things is as strong as in the consumer News Feeds.

I worry that these systems will continue to create more information overload, but I think there’s a lot of potential here. Especially since most of the feed systems allow comments and discussions to form around news entries as they catch people’s interest.

Innovation in Search
Between the “Search is Not Enough” panel, the keynote speeches describing information overload, and the cool techniques presented for incorporating more serendipitous information browsing (like DarwinEco), I think the big technological shift over the next couple years will be in changing the way search works. Of course, I’m biased. But the panelists made it clear, over and over again, that searching through these new systems is going to require more intelligence on the part of the system.

The amount of information getting shared, through microblogging and social collaboration systems, continues to increase. Files are still important, but most of the new shared information is showed through searchable, non-proprietary-file-format HTML, which means that all the Web 2.0 tools for navigating this information can be brought to the enterprise.  That’s exciting.

Millenials
Barely a panel went by without a mention of millenials (people who graduated from college after 2000 seemed like the general definition) – a bit strange, since I only saw a handful of fellow millenials in attendance. There were two major ways that millenials came up in discussion.  The first is that we were described as being more comfortable sharing information digitally and more willing to become contributors using collaboration software. In my experience as a millenial at a big company, this was absolutely true. There were plenty of older (even 50+) people who were heavy users of our wikis at ADI, but virtually ALL of the millenials used it a lot.

The second context where millenials received frequent mention was in a sort of reverse-Luddite way. Essentially, said some panelists, millenials grew up with Facebook and are incapable of learning to operate in an environment without it. We are apparently too young to understand how to communicate via email or in person, and without Facebook for Business, we are unmanageable. Selling social software based on these premises struck me as asinine – selling software on the basis of old people being too dumb to adapt to a world where the telephone isn’t the dominant form of communication would be clearly offensive, so why is it OK to generalize about millenials in such an obviously wrong way?

New Infrastructure Ideas
My favorite product at the expo was an infrastructure product.  Cisco’s Pulse has some very bright minds working on it. Pulse is based on physical boxes that sit in front of Exchange servers, or Wiki systems, or video sharing systems, with all the network traffic itself running through them. Like, with a physical wire. The Pulse systems pull information out of the physical packets on the network and identify the appearance of a set of pre-specified keywords as they go over the wire, connecting people with the experts who regularly communicate about that keyword.

They’ve also got some incredible tech baked in for detecting phonetic appearances of those keywords in online video, making the video searchable. This reverse-keyword technique is different, because instead of building an index of every word mentioned (and dealing with associated transcription issues), they instead look specifically for a dictionary of words that are known to have meaning.

This approach is technically very interesting to me, and I am looking forward to seeing how the product develops, and potentially integrating Unsearch with it. I am very impressed with Cisco’s ability to innovate as a HUGE company – and a system this complex needs a lot of resources and a lot of different expertise, so it almost requires a big company to build it. Very impressive.

The LaunchPad

Baydin was incredibly excited to be named the winner of the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad. Companies from around the globe, including some pretty big names, competed to launch products at the LaunchPad. The four companies on stage came from Cambridge (us), Portugal, Switzerland, and Germany.

Our fellow finalists put together some amazing demos. They did a great job presenting, and all of them are working on stuff that could really have an impact. We were honored that the Enterprise 2.0 attendees selected us as the winner out of a group with this much potential.

The finalists were:

Doodle – A very easy way to schedule a meeting. Suggest times that work for you, and let the other invitees vote for which times they’d prefer. They announced a new feature that lets a meeting organizer see free/busy status for fellow Doodle-users when first selecting possible times for the meeting.  Think MS Exchange-style scheduling, but cross-platform.

InnovationCast – Leonardo described InnovationCast as a tool for managing innovation as a company develops new products and services. Built on top of Telligent, they provide some really neat analytics on how innovation grows and spreads through an organization.

MindQuilt – Enterprise Q&A tool, think StackOverflow/Yahoo Answers for inside a company. I expected MindQuilt to be really derivative, but it turns out they add some really slick autotagging features and integrate really well with email and IM clients, making it easy for users to get into it. I expect them to have a lot of success in large companies.

The E2Conf folks haven’t uploaded the video of our presentations yet, as far as I can tell, but you can see some photos from the LaunchPad and the other Wednesday keynotes here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adunne/sets/72157624252543430/.  The videos that we created to be selected as finalists are here: http://launchpad.e2conf.com/final-four-2/.

Thanks very much to all of you who voted for our video and made it possible for us to be part of the conference this year.

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My fraternity mailing list is home to a great group of people, including some great entrepreneurs and some great investors. But when you get 400 opinionated MIT grads on a single mailing list, and the topic shifts to anything controversial, the discussion might explode. We’ve had well over 125 emails come through in the last three days after someone brought up the health care bill, and several folks have emailed to get off the discussion list list. 

Don’t do that! Instead, use these super easy techniques to mute or filter the discussion out of your Inbox in less than 30 seconds. It’s faster than removing yourself from the mailing list, and better too, because when this discussion peters out, you’ll still be on the list in case something interesting comes up later.

Muting a Thread in Gmail

Gmail provides this functionality out-of-the-box, without needing to create a custom filter. Just turn on keyboard shortcuts and press the “M” key while the thread is selected or opened. Unfortunately, there’s not a keyboard-shortcut-averse way to mute the conversation, but the keyboard shortcuts are fast and efficient anyway. For more info, here’s Google’s official FAQ entry on muting conversations.  

Muting a Thread in Outlook 2010

Microsoft has done a great job playing catchup to Google in terms of features like this one in Outlook 2010. Hopefully, it won’t be three more years before they catch up to whatever Google builds in 2012! 

Outlook 2010 also comes with the ability to mute threads right out of the box.  Just right-click a message in the thread, choose the “Move” menu, and choose the “Always Move Messages in this Conversation” option. 

Click the screenshot to the right to get a visual look at the menu option.

Muting a Thread in Outlook 2007/2003

Unfortunately, muting a conversation in Outlook 2007/2003 will take a full 30 seconds, instead of two clicks or a keypress, because they’re 3 and 7 years old. 

The best thing to do is to create a rule that will move all messages sent to the mailing list, for a specific amount of time, into an archive folder or the Trash. 

Just click the “Tools” menu, and choose “Rules and Alerts.”  Select the “New Rule” button, then choose the option to “Move messages sent to a distribution list to a folder.” Click the “people or distribution list” hyperlink in the pane at the bottom, and type in the email address for the mailing list.  Click the “folder” hyperlink, and pick your folder.  Then, click Next, scroll down to pick the “received in a specific date span” box, and click the hyperlink to set the date range. 

Boom! For the next 7 days, anything coming over the mailing list will go to the Trash. And in 7 days, the rule will stop firing, so you’ll see messages that you might care about again, once this thread has stopped dumping political diatribes all over your Inbox. 

Take a look at the screenshot on the left for a quick intro to the Rules Wizard. 

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We’re looking to find a suitable to do list application from Windows. It would be great to have something as elegant looking as Things for the Mac that syncs with the cloud, runs on Windows, and is accessible via the iPhone. Web-based is fine, but it needs to use Gears or AIR to run without a network connection.

The list of requirements for a high-quality to do list for me (in rough priority) are:

• Runs in Windows
• Create a new task with one keyboard shortcut (ideally the enter key)
• Accessible via iPhone
• Supports multiple lists
• Somewhat attractive and somewhat elegant
• Rearrange Tasks

Has anyone found a great app like this?

We’ve tried Remember the Milk (multiple lists support sucks), Google Tasks (works OK, but has some quirks, and native app would be better), Tudomo (no web/iPhone access, plus expensive), FruitfulTime (entering a new task is a 3-step process, total dealbreaker). Since we build Outlook addins, we’d use Outlook, but we can’t get to the tasks in the cloud. 

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It’s already 11 AM, and you’re staring into the monitor with your eyes glazed over. There are still 21 messages in your inbox, and none of them are compelling. So instead, you decide to read a little bit of news and catch up on how the Red Sox did last night.

Next thing you know, it’s lunchtime, and there are still 21 unread messages in your inbox.

We’ve all been there, and that’s part of why we included a special structured procrastination tool in Boomerang.

Good procrastination vs Bad procrastination

Procrastination is like cholesterol – there’s a good kind, and a bad kind.

The real problem isn’t that we can’t face dealing with any of these messages. It’s that the number of them is overwhelming, especially since many of them require at least a couple minutes worth of yak shaving to get them finished.

At this point, we can either fall into the trap of “bad procrastination” and go check out some links on the web, or we can use “good procrastination” to help us get rid of some of the less-important or more annoying email messages for a while, so we can focus on the more valuable and easier messages first. 

Here’s how Boomerang can help

Just right-click the one of the low-priority emails that you want to deal with later, hover over the Boomerang menu, and choose to bring the message back at a random time.

Use Boomerang to bring the message back before 5pm today, within a week, or sometime in the next month. Boomerang will return the message to your inbox, unread and flagged, for you to work on some undetermined but bounded time later. That way, instead of dealing with 21 messages all at once, you can take care of each one individually.

Of course, the messages are still accessible, right there in the Boomerang folder. So if you find yourself a few extra minutes, you can work on them right away.

It’s all about willpower

Scientists have discovered that the root cause of procrastination is often that people have only a limited amount of willpower. Clearing out some of the messages that you don’t want to deal with right away can make it easier to get your to-do list under the threshold of how much willpower you have right now.

You can deal with the other messages later, after your willpower has had time to build back up. Try using Boomerang for structured procrastination today (it’s free to try), and discover a better way to procrastinate.

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We previously talked about a great way to measure how productively we’re working using a utility called RescueTime. But even when we know how effectively we’re working and have formulated a plan for how to improve, it’s still hard to execute. Distractions are insidious – it always feels harmless to spend just a few seconds or a minute on something else. But it’s easy to let a small amount of time browsing the web or playing a game to grow into a life of its own.

The best way that I have found to stick to a “fuzzy” goal, like spending less time on sports forums, or getting to bed at a reasonable time, is to make the goal concrete instead of fuzzy.  That is, set a realistic goal that is measurable – so that achieving it becomes black-and-white.

Making goals actionable – and with teeth!

That’s where stickk.com comes in. It’s the brainchild of Yale Law Professor Ian Ayers (author of Super Crunchers, which I highly recommend), and it encourages you to sign a contract that you will achieve your goals.  You can set the stakes if you fail, appoint a friend to monitor your progress, and send out weekly achievement emails to people who support you in your goal.

Lots of the contracts taken out on Stickk are just for bragging rights, but many people (including me), have taken out contracts where the stakes are monetary.  You pay Stickk the amount you are “wagering” on yourself, and when you report back that you achieved your goals, they return your money.  If you fail to achieve your goals, they donate the money to charity instead.

There is one even more intriguing twist to the site – you can ask Stickk to send your money to an “anti-charity” if you fail to achieve your goal.  For instance, on one of my goals, I asked them to send the money to a nasty anti-environmental lobbying group if I failed.  When confronted with the prospect of not only losing my money, but losing it to a group encouraging pollution, I had plenty of motivation to make sure I hit my target every week.

Lessons learned

One key to making stickk work well for you is to make sure that the goal is something you can accurately measure and something completely in your control. For example, I had bad results with a goal I set to get to work on time every morning.  I was doing pretty well until two weeks in, when an accident on I 93 backed up traffic for two hours.  I was late, and failed to achieve my goal for that week, sending me into a tailspin.  A better goal for me would have been to make it so that I left my house before a certain time.

The Productivity Challenge

After giving myself a couple weeks to acclimate to the RescueTime measurement system, I think I have a good ballpark for how well I’m working, and I think I have all the categories set up correctly. Now that I know how much room I have to improve, and a guess as to how much improvement is reasonable, I’m taking out a commitment contract to increase my productivity percentage (as RescueTime measures it), and to limit the amount of time I spend on very distracting activities.

We’ll see how well it works. Have you taken out a contract like this? If so, let us know how it works for you in the comments. And if you’re interested in taking on a productivity-boosting challenge along with us, let us know that in the comments or connect with us on Twitter.

Also, you can get free stuff for achieving specific business goals if you particpate in the Staples Stickk To It Challenge.

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Baydin was featured in an analyst report today.  Not an April Fool’s joke

The analyst firm is ZapThink, and their focus has been on enterprise SOA and cloud computing initiatives.  They are now taking a deeper look at the startup ecosystem – both describing how startups can create value for enterprises and helping startups themselves figure out how to position themselves to get larger companies as customers and form partnerships. 

They are beginning their work with startups with a new report format called ZapTakes.  ZapTakes are quick one-page synopses of promising startups.  They describe the problems the startups are tackling and how their solutions work at a high level.  Based on a conversation with the founders and some time spent with the products, they describe the areas in which the startups show the most promise and the key areas where they need to improve. 

Baydin was featured in the first ZapTake, which was published this morning. 

According to Jason, “Baydin (www.baydin.com) targets the information overload problem so prevalent in organizations today by helping individuals manage the information in their email inboxes and on their corporate portals.” 

To read more, get the full report here:
http://www.zapthink.com/2010/04/01/baydin-email-collaboration-productivity-enhancer/

We think it’s a pretty reasonable summary for such a short format.  Of course, we think the technology Baydin’s working on has 6-lightbulbs of game changing potential (since we’re totally revolutionizing the way people search for information inside the firewall), but we’ll give ‘em a pass on that

Since they’re just launching this new format, the report is available for free.  If you’re an enterprise or an investor looking to learn more about startups that are poised to make a big impact, this is a good place to start.  If you’re part of a startup that wants to be featured in one of these reports, we’re happy to make intros to the folks at ZapThink. 

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When I need to write an e-mail where I need to get the content right (or want to start a blog post), I get very worried about making it come out right the first time.  I spend all the time I’m supposed to spend writing wordsmithing the first few sentences, and it takes forever to get anything done. 

One of the best ways I’ve found to get stuff written FAST is to close my eyes and dictate a first draft into the computer.  Since I’m talking instead of writing, it does not feel as important to get it perfect.  And since I look away from the screen, I get the entire first draft out in a single burst, without spending any time editing until I am done writing. 

And best of all, you can do it for free, if you’re running Windows Vista or Windows 7.  Both these versions of Windows come with built-in speech recognition that is surprisingly accurate (about or better than 90% for me).  Better yet, it integrates directly with Outlook, so you can draft email right inside Outlook with your voice. 

To get started, just click your start menu, go to Programs—>Accessories—>Ease of Access—>Windows Speech Recognition.  Go through the brief, 10m long tutorial, and then start writing a new email in Outlook.  Turn on dictation, and say whatever you like.  When you’re finished, just go back through to edit the handful of mistakes, and your email will be all set. 

Windows Speech Recognition also lets you control your computer exclusively with your voice (for example, say “File Menu, New” to open the File Menu and click New).  I find those features much less helpful than the dictation, but your mileage may vary.

One other place that dictation is even more helpful is when trying to write an email on a phone.  Dragon provides a free dictation app for the iPhone that works really well.  I find that, even with not-quite-perfect accuracy, it’s much faster to dicate emails than write them on the iPhone keyboard.

Dictation has come a long way since the 90s.  Give it a try! 

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Boomerang is great if you know you’re going to need to respond to a message later, and you aren’t sure what you want to say yet.  Sometimes, though, you already know exactly what you want to say, you just want to send it later.

In that case, you want to go ahead and write the message and have Outlook worry about delivering it when you want it sent.  We have had several of our customers ask us to build a plug-in that will allow them to do this. Fortunately, Outlook already provides that functionality, called Delayed Delivery.  Here’s how to take advantage of it.

In Outlook 2007

To delay delivery of a message in Outlook 2007, open a new message, and click on the Options tab in the ribbon — as highlighted in the screenshot below.

Click the delay delivery button, and specify the time where you would like Outlook to send your message message in the dialog box that pops up.

Now, just close the dialog to return to your message.  Write whatever you want to say, and when you are finished, click the send button.  Outlook will keep the message in your Outbox until the time you specified, then send it.

Remember, though, Outlook can only send email when it is actually running. So if you specify to send a message Sunday afternoon, but you shut down your computer for the weekend, the message will be delivered on Monday when Outlook launches.

In Outlook 2003

Just like in Outlook 2007, you want to go into the message options dialog to delay delivery. In Outlook 2003, you get there by clicking a toolbar button. Click the Options button as shown in the screenshot below.

The message options window looks exactly the same in Outlook 2003, so just set the time you want the message delivered in the dialog as shown above.  As in Outlook 2007, delivery will happen the first time Outlook is running after the date and time you specified.

And that’s it!

Combine Delayed Delivery with Boomerang, and you’ve taken full control of how you respond to messages when timing matters.

Also try: three.sentenc.es for responding to emails you’re agonizing over quickly, Unsearch for finding out what your coworkers have written about a topic, and Gist to make sure that you’re as up-to-date on your recipients as possible.

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If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

-Peter Drucker.

Chris Sacca, a West Coast angel investor who I met at the Defrag conference, tweeted about a utility called RescueTime the other day.

RescueTime is a hybrid desktop application-web service that monitors how you spend your time on the computer and generates reports and analytics for you.  You install the tracker on your computer, where it monitors and tracks what application has focus – i.e. which of the 30 applications I’m running is the one I’m actually using.  It sends that information to a server, which turns the data into interesting reports. 

RescueTime has done a great job of classifying different applications (Total War: Rome shows up appropriately as a game, as does Tower Defense) and websites (espn.com, alabama live’s Alabama football section, and si.com all get grouped into a ‘sports’ category) into the right buckets.  I now know that I spend a staggering amount of time on sports websites, more time than I should gaming, and less time on Twitter/Facebook/RSS than I expected.

But even more valuable, RescueTime tells me how the productive time when I’m being “good” breaks down as well.  I know how much time I have spent on developing the CSS and HTML for Baydin.com’s new homepage redesign, how much time I spent QAing Boomerang, and how long it took me to record our shiny new demo video. I know exactly how long I spent in Visual Studio for each of the last three weeks, and how email grows to suck up however much time it possibly can (seriously, between Outlook and Gmail, the number is terrifying).

That’s not to say that I’m doing fantastic job of working harder since I installed it. I haven’t been especially more productive, but at least I know how I’m doing.  And I think I have a better handle on what kind of bang-for-the-buck I’m getting out of each activity.  I’m going to try very hard to spend more time coding and less time writing long emails that nobody’s going to read anyway.

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Seth Godin blogged last week about a technique that he claims he’s been using for years to make a little bit easier for himself to respond to all of his e-mail.

The idea is that you treat e-mail much like an SMS twitter message.  You limit the length of the response you’re going to make beforehand, so that it is easier to finish writing.  Since it’s a pain in the neck to count letters, or even words, instead you count sentences. Limiting responses to two sentences, three, four, or five – and no longer – seems like it could make it much easier to manage email.

The home of the website for the idea is here: http://sentenc.es/ with the different numbers at http://two.sentenc.es/ and so on. 

Given the amount of complexity and richness possible in email (see our Enron email and Twitter analysis), it seems like using this technique on every email is really limiting.  On the other hand, maybe it’s a good framework to start with for emails that aren’t deeply technical in nature.  Or maybe Seth uses something besides email when he needs to convey complex information. 

Do you know anyone who has had success with this?

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