I’m cross-posting this one for those friends and family who don’t read the MindTouch blog (all of you). I’m just so damn proud of what we’ve achieved. 🙂

Over the past few days I’ve been grinding away on the most comprehensive written explanation of MindTouch’s technology completed to date, at least, high level laymen explanation. I finished it today and then Steve polished it and added a couple sections.

Technology – MindTouch
MindTouch is the developer of Dream and Deki Wiki. Dream is a Distributed REST Application Manager that Deki Wiki is built on. Deki Wiki is a wildly popular wiki, but it is much more than just a wiki. In fact, Deki Wiki is a wiki interface to a composition of loosely coupled web services that serve as a distributed application platform. Meaning, users of Deki Wiki get the immediate value of a wiki: improved collaboration around text, file, and email, but are also able to connect and mashup systems, databases, external services, and Web 2.0 applications in the form of composite applications and data mashups. This is achieved while still allowing a site administrator, presumably an enterprise IT professional, to provide governance of the data and services that users can access. The end result is a user-centric interface to data that is dynamically generated from data silos and the ability to create business user specific applications (situational applications).

I encourage everyone to read the full write-up. The quote above is just the abstract and the article should be accessible even to the less technical reader. I’m amazed at how far ahead we are of anyone else in this emerging space. Our technology is easily a couple years ahead of anyone else and there are some very big companies entering this space including IBM, BEA, SAP, etc. I know we have a brilliant team, but in comparison to the big boys our resources are just a drop of water in an vast sea.

I frequently marvel at what we’ve built, but what I find even more amazing is how we’re dominating the market. Primarily because I’ve always known we have a team of amazing engineers, but I guess I never realized just how damn good we are about getting the word out. Case in point, there isn’t any vendor that is seeing the kind of distribution and adoption that MindTouch is driving. To be honest it is shocking when one realizes how much more market penetration MindTouch has. I knew we could build some bleeding edge technology, but I hadn’t thought we would be equally successful in marketing it to the extent and as quickly as we have managed. Especially since it’s been entirely organic. People find our software by searching for “MindTouch” and “Deki Wiki”. Our SEO is atrocious. Anyway, if you look at only our download stats at Sourceforge you’ll see we’re driving around 1100-1200 downloads a day. It is important to note that this only accounts for a portion of our total distribution. Deki Wiki is now in several build systems and other people are regularly redistributing our software from places other than Sourceforge. MindTouch Deki Wiki is being distributed well over 2,000 times a day! There is no other vendor even remotely close to this in our space. What about adoption? Well, I looked at some stats earlier this week and I was stunned by our total count of unique users. That is to say, it was more positive than I ever imagined. 🙂 Of course, we can only count a percentage of the total unique users of Deki Wiki, but we have a really good idea what percentage we’re counting. As I said, I was stunned and very very happy with what we’ve accomplished in this first year and half of Deki Wiki being public. I will announce these numbers at a later date.

Now it’s time for the obligatory “thank you”s. Credit to the Gardeners, these are the folks that have been spreading the word. It certainly wasn’t due to any PR or advertising efforts on our part because MindTouch just began these campaigns near the end of last year. So, MindTouch users and customers please continue to spread the word and we’ll continue to make kick ass software.

Raven came up with this idea at the OSTT08 conference a couple weeks back to aggregate the tweets of folks who are active in open source. He’s called it The Pulse of Open Source based on the previous Pulse of PDX, which I would like to see used for the creation of a Pulse of San Diego site. Hopefully Nate Ritter or Hober will make this happen. Cool idea. I think thanks are in order for Michael Richardson, and the seemingly ever-present 🙂 Scott Kveton.

Initially I put the list of twitterers at my personal wiki. I think this is only a partial list at this point, but some of you may like to click-through this list and follow folks directly from your twitter account.

Thanks Raven! (and others)

PR 2.0
How To Use Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis & Other Social Media Tools To Find Clients, Make Money & Create the Lifestyle of Your Dreams

I’m going…are you? 🙂

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This is a photo from several months ago, which is ages in Ashby days, but I just stumbled across it and it brought back a flood of memories from this day. She loved her face painting.

Tara and I celebrated a late V-day tonight. I know I’m supposed to say “Tara and me”, but I prefer to say “Tara and I” so piss off. We did a late V-day because getting a babysitter on V-day is challenging. I had a great time tonight, but the best part of V-day was taking Ashby out yesterday. Look at this:

And this:

Need I say more? Other than rainbow legs rule.

Ashby was so happy to go out for V-day with her daddy. She felt so special and pretty in her V-day outfit. I wish I could help her feel this way everyday until her last.

Tara and I took Ashby for some bangers and chips at Shakespeare’s pub. She was most pleased to be with her daddy in her heart outfit and sandals that Mi-Mi (grandma) supplied her. Tonight T and I went to a pleasant Lebanese restaurant and then went out for drinks. Ashby was with Michelle, our babysitter, whom she really loves. I just checked on her sleeping in her heart pajamas. So sweet…

Tara Anderson of Lijit shares with us this photo:

And a profile of Feld. After a recent post from Tara about a title she was bestowed by a scary admirer I felt compelled to advance this meme. Brad Feld: most bangable Internet entrepreneur / venture capitalist. You read it here.

• Why Novell should become the center of the open source .NET universe | Negative Approach – CNET Blogs
  (tags: Mono .NET Novell)

I had a fantastic time last night with several Microsofties whom I had not previously met. I can’t recall a more pleasant time with colleagues at a conference except for those rare occasions Steve (other Mindtouch founder and CTO) comes along. During the regular conference session yesterday there was a CIO panel and a brainstorm session. During the brainstorm session we were tasked with answering some simple (and rather boring) questions. What could have been a dull time was actually quite entertaining thanks to Doug Levin, Ross Turk, Larry Rosen, and Larry Augustin who were some of the people in my assigned group. Doug is a fantastically witty fellow and a Tarheel; so you know he’s wickedly smart too. 🙂 After the regular conference session Larry Augustin introduced me to Sam Ramji. Having spent dinner and several drinks in conversation with Sam I have to say: that dude is smart, hilariously funny, and very authentic. I was surprised. 🙂 I didn’t expect *bad* things, but I didn’t expect to hit it off with him as we did, especially not so immediately. A highlight of the evening was getting to know Tim Golden from Bank of America. I’ve seen him speak at a couple conferences in the past, but I had not met him until last night. That guy had me laughing so damn hard over dinner I twice almost fell out of my chair. What an amazing fellow!

As the night wound down, along with my sobriety, I found myself chatting with Marten Mickos the CEO of MySQL. I thanked him for his work and the benefit he’s given to all commercial open source companies with the recent acquisition of MySQL by Sun. This provides a very helpful data point for all of us in this space. I’ve always admired Marten and Monty. I asked Marten several questions that he, as he always does, very candidly answered. I asked him: What was his biggest mistake? His best move? Starting over what would he do differently? Will there be a stand-alone open source software Goliath? And some other common questions. It would be inappropriate for me to blog much of what he said, but something that really struck me was his assessment of being a CEO. He said, and I may get the wording slightly wrong, being CEO is a lonely and often scary position. You’re alone. You often have to make decisions that others don’t agree with and you really don’t have someone else to speak with about your anxieties and concerns. You can’t talk to your wife about it because she doesn’t understand it, nor would you want her to. And there are occasions when your decisions will put you at odds with everyone else’s thinking; thereby alienating you entirely–perhaps even from the board and advisers. It can be very lonely. Another of Marten’s responses I feel comfortable divulging is what he felt was his best move as he matured MySQL. “Personally engaging the community.”

One final point of interest I feel compelled to cram into this blog post. During the regular conference sessions a person asked everyone to raise there hands if they’ve written code. 90% of attendees raised their hand. It’s an open source conference, right? So what? Pretty much everyone at this conference is a CEO and it’s not all startups. I thought this was fascinating. More so, I believe, in open source than with proprietary software companies the executives come from an engineering background.

Cross post

Open Source Think Tank 2008 – Olliance Group – Home
this is not a traditional conference; all attendees are expected to contribute in the brainstorm and workshop format and take advantage of the CIO panels.

I’m at the Olliance Open Source ThinkTank in Napa Valley from February 7-9. The guest list is a long list of C’s (CEO, CIO, CTO, etc) from predominately open source software companies, but proprietary software companies are well represented as well. I just skimmed the guest list. It’s a veritable who’s who of open source. The event is intended to achieve two goals: give open source company executives access to CIOs through a series of panels. And provide a venue and medium for open source entrepreneurs and executives to brainstorm about key issues that effect our businesses and the industry as a whole. Rather than spamming the MindTouch blog I’ll likely post a couple times during the event to my personal blog at O b (LOG N ).