Mårten is wonderful. SteveB and I just bumped into Mårten and his lovely (and equally brilliant) wife Anicka at the San Jose Airport. They were on there way to Phoenix to celebrate with MySQL..errr…new Sun execs. We were all delayed. Every time I speak with Mårten he impresses me. Now that I’ve met Anicka I’ll tell you I think she is even cooler. 🙂 Anyway, in usual Mårten form he made me laugh my ass off, one particularly choice quote, which for his sake I’ll not put into context was: “It feels good, like when you pee in your pants…it’s warm.”

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.

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…

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.

From “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”

As you might suspect, given my affinity for wikis, I’ve a personal wiki. This is running at the un-announced shared hosted site that I won’t mention by name, but I will provide a link to it. I plan to do a complete write-up about this at the work blog in the new year when we announce the service, but by then this gorgeous Christmas theme Damien built will be obsolete. I’m using the Pro version of this service, which gives me 10GB of storage, a custom domain, and custom HTML regions that allow me to injects ads, widgets, Google analytics, whatever into the site. It’s a killer service. I use it a lot for taking notes, sharing files, aggregating content in one view from all over and for keeping private communications. The Pro version is only $60/year. The free version is ad-free and limited to 100MB of storage, but I think we’re going to drop that down to 15MB of storage. I suspect this service will cut into some of the competitors’ market in the shared hosted/software as a service wiki offerings that are charging several thousands of dollars for a weaker feature set, user limitations, and quite frankly an inferior wiki. This is the best damn wiki you can find, you can do mashups, you can run your own ads, and you’ve got the richest enterprise wiki feature set available. For free…or $60/year.

We’ve intentionally kept this service quiet since the Holidays crept up on us while we were still working out some last minute kinks in the service. Announcing it now would be pointless because it would just get lost in the Holidays. Moreover, we’ve still got some minor kinks to get around and we’re already getting a lot of traffic to the site just through the word of mouth of the community. In fact, we’re all pleasantly surprised by the number of Pro registrations we’re getting a day. I’ve seen lots of churches, schools, Universities, orgs, and some businesses going Pro in the last few weeks.

This wiki service is a great extension to a blog because it provides a fully customizable, persistent and collaborative authoring tool. For example, let’s assume you blog about online marketing. Well, your blog is a tool for you to publish time sensitive information on the subject. However, frequently there is the need for a more persistent information architecture. Also, the wiki can provide a medium for building a community around your blog by which you allow your audience to participate in the conversation in a more meaningful way than allowed by comments. It’s important to note that this particular service also allows you to easily and automatically aggregate content from all over the Internet on particular topics. Moreover, you can easily create rich application mashups to serve as interactive extensions to your blog posts. These can include interactive maps, charts, graphs, forms, countless widgets, flickr, news feeds, video, search tools, and more… I’m certain it will soon be the case that all bloggers with a community they’re looking to engage will have a wiki extension to their blog sites to facilitate a richer engagement with their audience and to provide persistent and more robust information sharing.

Celebritards: Fake Bono draws real pitches
I finally got the story behind Bono’s alleged appearance at the Demo tradeshow last year. MindTouch cofounder Aaron Fulkerson recruited the singer from a U2 tribute band …

Ugh, the E-Entertainment TV of the tech blog-o-sphere. I think I just puked in my mouth.

Ok, so you eavesdrop, you write it up…ok fine. Whatever. At least you actually got the facts straight and did the research, found Pavel, etc…but wtf, no link love for MindTouch?

Update: Dude, shows you what I know. This wasn’t eavesdropped I actually took the time to talk to Mr. Valleywag himself? It wasn’t until I saw Solis’ post that I realized this. Here’s a photo of me from the Stirr event (credit: Solis):

River gonna take me
Sing me sweet and sleepy
Sing me sweet and sleepy
all the way back home
It’s a far gone lullaby
sung many years ago
Mama, Mama, many worlds I’ve come
since I first left home

Goin home, goin home
by the waterside I will rest my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
to rock my soul

Final update on Marc.

At some time between 7:30 and 8:10 AM on Sunday Morning December 2nd, 2007 Marc Orchant sustained a massive heart attack while working in his home office. Marc’s good friend and colleague Oliver Starr has the full story.

I don’t know what to say. This troubles me so very deeply. I’m really torn up by this. Since founding MindTouch and hitting the technology conference circuit a couple years ago Marc Orchant is one of the most wonderful people I’ve met. Marc is an amazing guy. Marc is sincere, kind, and hella smart. I had a long phone call with him, I think, just last Friday night while he picked up, and then ate Chinese take-out with his son, Jason. I’m so damn thankful I gave Marc a big hug at Defrag a few weeks ago. This guy has been a friendly face I have always looked forward to seeing and to speaking with. He has made so many intros for me. He’s been an informal mentor. Marc in many ways took my obnoxious, punk ass in and helped me in ways he probably doesn’t even realize. I’m so deeply saddened by this i don’t even know how to react other than this stupid blog post.

Please, get well Marc.

To Marc’s family: My family’s thoughts are with you. Please ask Oliver or someone to post somewhere if you have _any_ needs that myself or the community can help with.

To everyone else: If you wish to send flowers, cards, or anything else for support, Marc is at:

Presbyterian Hospital
Cardiac Care Unit Bed #3
1100 Central Ave SE
Albuquerque, NM 87106

The hospital switchboard number is 505-841-1234.

Update: Marc’s status and comments are now being posted at a new URL.

Cross-post

Steve and I sat down with Jeremy Zawodny, one of Roy’s heroes, on Yahoo’s campus. MindTouch uses Yahoo! technologies extensively, we’re big fans. Specifically, we’re using YUI, CDN, Flickr API, widgets, etc…

On a personal note, I think Yahoo!, to date, has been the most adept of all the big boys in connecting and growing a Developer Network. These guys get devs and I, for one, am happy to help them evangelize their work.