Features

The ProtoShare "away team" just spent an excellent week in New York City at the Web 2.0 NY conference, a gathering of existing and new companies with web 2.0 products, technologies, and services. We were excited to attend the event as this was the first event where we showcased our technology in front of Fortune 500 companies and other start-ups. The event was a great success Site9, and ProtoShare was very well received.

Web 2.0 was also an opportunity for us to meet with the press and technical bloggers. We spoke with Technology Review, Venture Voice, Simply Communicate, and JungleG, among many others. We had over 500 visitors to the booth and did demos around the clock. There were so many people signing up for the free 30-day trials and asking questions; it was a good thing we brought four people.

We were impressed with the feedback we got, almost instantaneously. One user signed up and came back the next day to tell us how much he liked the product. People were really excited with the possibilities and benefits of collaboratibe website development. As Jorge Escobar put it on his blog,
We were happy to engage with people from Bank of America, Johnson & Johnson, T-Mobile, IBM, Microsoft, Infosys and the many others who stopped by the booth. While not everyone who stopped by was a website developer, they did see the benefits of the tool for the entire project team, and promised to share ProtoShare with their project teams back home. We also visited Ascentium, R/GA and Octopz, and hope to soon work together.

While in New York City, we also took the opportunity to personally introduce ProtoShare to many of the top interactive agencies. So on our off days, we gave demos and met with G2, Ogilvy Interactive, Euro RSCG 4D, Draftfcb, Avenue A | Razorfish, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies. The meetings all went extremely well.

And since we were in New York, we had to have a good time after hours. Some of the crew went out to see Squeeze and James at Radio City Music Hall, while others explored some of the legendary watering holes of lower Manhattan. The search for Dylan Thomas's ghost at the White Horse Tavern was mostly unsuccessful. And to top it off, Peter Weiss, our SVP of Sales and Marketing, ran into the inimitable Gilbert Gottfried. Perhaps they shared a few dirty jokes....?

In one of our first posts here at the Interactive Ideas blog, we mentioned seeing best-selling author and collaboration guru Don Tapscott deliver an exciting and insightful presentation on the power of web-based collaboration at Portland's Innotech conference.

His mantra that "mass collaboration changes everything" really resonates with us because ProtoShare was developed with the philosophy of improving and enabling team collaboration. Wikinomics, Tapscott’s latest book, has received accolades from many luminaries of the tech world, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt who said of it, "Wikinomics heralds the biggest change in collaboration to date. Thanks to the Internet, masses of people outside the boundaries of traditional hierarchies can innovate to produce content, goods and services.”

Thus, it’s quite an honor to have our collaborative web development tool featured and discussed on the Wikinomics blog, where there is also an interview with Site9 (developer of ProtoShare) founders Andrew Mottaz and Blake Johnson.

“ProtoShare opens the process up to other stakeholders, such as the marketing team, allowing them to follow the project’s progress over time, and provide timely and effective feedback to developers, “ writes Wikinomics team member Will Dick. “By improving communication and collaboration within the project team, and between them and their clients, ProtoShare has the potential to revolutionize the process of web design.”

Read the interview and explore more on “the cutting edge of mass collaboration” at Wikinomics.com

We had a great time at the Internet Strategy Forum Summit, which was held in Portland on Thursday and Friday of last week. We were excited to be a partner sponsor of the event and the turnout was impressive. Just like our visit to the Innotech conference, collaboration was the buzzword of the day.

Peter Weiss, SVP of Sales & Marketing (pictured) spoke briefly about the history of Site9 and the future of ProtoShare™. CEO and co-founder Andrew Mottaz was featured on a panel discussion and spoke on how online marketers can be more involved in the web development process by using ProtoShare. His message on the benefits of using collaboration to get involved earlier and easier with clients was warmly received.

We sent Sylvia, our intrepid intern, along to document it all. You can see the results below:

Look for us at the upcoming Internet Strategy Forum Summit, held in our hometown of Portland, Oregon on July 17th and 18th. Site9 (and ProtoShare) is a partner sponsor of the event. The Summit covers a diverse array of strategy areas including general digital strategy, social media strategy, personalized marketing, e-commerce, email marketing and customer metrics.

Attendees of the Internet Strategy Forum Summit engage in a dialogue with each other and share their insights and ideas about smart enterprise Internet strategy and how to best leverage and integrate the Internet into overall business strategy. Keynote presenters from eMarketer, Forrester Research, Disney, Nike, Intel, IBM and more also participate in the discussion. Site9 CEO and co-founder Andrew Mottaz will also participate in a panel discussion.

The Internet Strategy Forum, presenter of the Summit, is a "professional association and peer networking group for management with responsibility for driving Internet strategy and implementation from within medium to large client-side organizations across multiple industries."

ISF members include 3M, adidas, AOL, Ask.com, Bank of America, Barnes & Noble, Cardinal Health, Costco, CNET, Disney, Dow Jones, Fairfield Resorts, General Motors, Google, Gucci, HP, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Motorola, NBC, Nike, Oracle, Pfizer, Portland General Electric, Providence Health System, Reuters, Siemens, US Postal Service and Xerox.

We hope to see you there!

One of the most exciting things about developing the ProtoShare™ software has been hearing from satisfied users. Kind of like when your kid brings home a report card with straight A's. (Not that that's ever happened to me.)

We're especially pleased at the amount of international interest we've been attracting. It was great to see a shout-out on the Interaction Designer's Coffee Break blog, which is based out of Denmark. We also have users in Australia, Thailand, France, Canada, Brazil, the Netherlands, South Africa, Finland, New Zealand, the UK and many other countries. Hmmm, I wonder if there's any time in the schedule to send this blogger on a tour of our overseas clients.