Duke and Tech,
The buzz is the next killer app is a P to P program designed by Ray Ozzie (Lotus Notes fame). The following article is OK describing the potential, but I've seen better. BTW, Intel is an investor (10 million).
Tuesday October 24, 9:21 am Eastern Time
TheStandard.com
The King of Groove
By Lydia Lee
Ray Ozzie, the brains behind Lotus Notes, is ready to display his next big invention. The software, called Groove, enables anyone to collaborate with anyone else on the Internet, sharing files and applications as if they were working side by side. With its compelling capabilities, Groove, which spent three years in development, has a great chance of becoming the next killer app for the mainstream desktop.
"It's a really slickly engineered product," says Tim O'Reilly, book publisher and proponent of open source and peer-to-peer technologies. "Everybody I know wants to get their hands on it."
Watching his teenage son Neil play Quake with friends, Ray Ozzie was struck by how they conspired together online. "He was on a team, playing 'Capture the Flag' in a very collaborative fashion - they were using computers as they should be or can be used - way more than we do in business."
As he's describing this scene, Ozzie, an energetic 44-year-old, starts to make dramatic gestures with his arms and his voice goes up a notch or two in volume. The last time he was inspired to create new software, Ozzie came up with something pretty darn good: Lotus Notes defined the whole category of groupware, and today 60 million users working together in giant corporations use its e-mail, calendars, discussion groups and other features. Notes also created a billion-dollar market for third-party developers, who build custom Notes applications such as document-management systems.
While at Lotus, Ozzie noticed that businesses were starting to work more closely with partners and suppliers. He also noticed that communication was pretty much limited to e-mail, phone and fax, and that IS departments were loath to open these internal systems to outsiders. "You can see the power shifting to people, as companies have to be more responsive to customers and partners," says Ozzie. "I wanted to create software where you didn't have to ask anyone's permission first. I download what I need, and then you download what you need, and that's all that needs to happen - we can get off the ground and go very spontaneously."
In 1997, Ozzie left Lotus with the general notion of creating something akin to Quake for business users. His new company, Groove Networks, has raised $50 million in three rounds of financing, with Accel Partners as the lead investor.
What has the company come up with? Groove looks a little bit like an uber-ICQ program, with voice and text chat boxes and a buddy list of people. Once you've invited someone into your workspace, the program sets up an encrypted connection between the two of you, bypassing any firewalls - basically, setting up a LAN on demand. There are voice and text chat functions and shared spaces for working on common files. You can access basic applications like a sketchpad, and simultaneously work on a drawing, seeing everyone else's changes in real-time. And, unlike other collaboration tools like NetMeeting, Groove lets you work offline - it tracks your changes and syncs your work back up once you reconnect.
Groove is really intended as a starting point, like Lotus Notes, for third-party developers. The company has made it fairly easy for to create custom programs out of Groove apps using familiar Web site scripting methods.
Initially the company is focusing on corporations and Web services companies (the Scients and Viants) that are building business-to-business applications - "supply chain management, that sort of thing," says Ozzie. Financial companies are also interested in Groove as a way to work closely with their private banking clients. But there are potential consumer uses as well. A small photo-developing company has created an application that enables customers to create online photo albums and share them with friends and relatives.
Groove's business plan includes a couple of revenue streams. The biggest one will probably involve selling IT managers a version of the client that they can manage centrally. Another possibility, down the road, is selling consumers an enhanced version, a la RealPlayer.
Ozzie can't wait to see what uses people make of his latest invention. "When I went around to see how businesses were using Lotus Notes, I saw the most bizarre apps that I had no conception of," he says. Meanwhile, his son Neil has since moved on from Quake to EverQuest. "Last I checked, he was using it to share things and talk about his adventures within his EverQuest Guild," says Ozzie. "I'm almost certain that he has been using it to work on a shared homework project with another high-school friend." That's two more possible applications for Groove. |
