• Run water over the back of the blades. That’s it.

I used to rinse the blade from the front (blades facing me) but it would eventually get clogged. For some reason, the Mach 3 rinses out much better from the back. I haven’t cut my face since — knock on wood.

This got me thinking about the little things that make our lives easier. Microsoft has a way to index shared drives on a network. This is useful because desktop search can now find files on shared drives. We surveyed several companies involved in everything from medical devices to architecture. We discovered close to 100% of the companies used shared network drives to store information. Being able to find documents that your team mates share would be a boon so we posted some directions for Windows XP and Windows Vista on our FAQ. Note that this only works if you have Microsoft Desktop search, which comes with Office 2007 or Microsoft Vista.

Customers or the C level executives that ultimately foot the bill for a product/service need to see their return on investment quickly. Amy Vickers, VP of Global Enterprise Solutions at Razorfish says that they expect to see signs of progress within 6 months. The better the product/service can provide them that information, the easier it is for the implementers to justify the project.

The key to success is in integrating a variety of technologies to meet business objectives according to Laurie Buczek, Social Computing Program manager at Intel. The days of closed, all encompassing solutions, are limited. There are many, many enterprise software solutions out in the market. Companies have adopted a variety of them. It takes a significant amount of work to put information into those systems and to get employees to use them. A better product is not going to displace something that works. This point was re-affirmed by talking to some other attendees at the show. Companies want interoperability between software packages. It’s a strong message to enterprise vendors that is best surmised by one of the panelists, “co-exist or fail.”

Stand out. A lot of the demos looked the same. They have what looked like a CSS styled dashboard with news feeds, social media and wikis. One company, caught my eye: Artus Labs. They focus on life science. Yeah, they have collaboration features like everyone else but what the others don’t have is the ability to search through molecular chain drawings. Very cool. Everyone else’s demo has static text next to some sort of instant messenger. Artus Labs in contrast has beautiful molecular compounds drifing across their screens. I had a chance to talk to their Founder and CEO Robin Smith. He’s been around the block and knows what he’s doing. Enterprise 2.0. Good stuff.

I was at a talk, recently, where the speaker mentioned “a lot of data driven people fall into the trap of wanting more information to make a decision. The problem is that the world does not always give you complete information.”

I thought about my own experience. I remember at times presenting a new product idea and getting the feedback, “we need more *fill in the blank* information.” Usually, they asked for more market information. The product concepts we were proposing were in a burgeoning field. We could only show the customers we visited or contacted who demonstrated interest, the competitive solutions out there, how much customers currently pay and the total available market.

Now that I think back, I think I would have had much better luck if I took the decision-makers on strategic customer visits. I remember traveling to several medical accounts with one marketing manager. He was exposed to our customers’ challenges. Enthusiasm would have been an understatement for his reaction. He understood the problems that our customers faced because he stood in their shoes, albeit briefly. When we got back to our headquarters, I didn’t even have to pitch the concept anymore. He was telling everybody that we should build products for that application.

Now that we are pitching products at Baydin, these little experiences bubble back up to consciousness. If I can’t show market numbers because it is nascent, I can at least help investors stand in our customers’ shoes.

So getting back to that talk. Baydin can’t help someone who is not ready make a decision. But we are thinking about and working on the problem of giving you more complete information.