LongJump Landing Spot

Meetup with LongJump @ Office 2.0

LongJump is sponsoring the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on September 5-7th, 2007. It's another great opportunity to meet members of the LongJump team, see previews of the LongJump service.

PLUS the organizers have a great bonus for attending: You get a free Apple iPhone! (if you have one already or don't have an AT&T phone plan, you can opt for a Sony Playstation 3).

So forget the foam toys, T-shirts, pens, and other tchotchkes.

David Needle of Internetnews.com Recaps AlwaysOn Summit

David Needle of the Internetnews.com had a nice write-up about the AlwaysOn Summit in Stanford this last week. His piece was spot-on in our opinion.

While not the official "theme" of the conference, issues around finding the right data and helping business collaborate over that data seemed to be on the minds of many of the presenters and attendees. It is a critical issue to adopting any of the new solutions that are becoming available.

You can also view video of Pankaj's presentation to the AlwaysOn faithful here.

Schmooze with LJ

LongJump will be giving demos at two Silicon Valley events these next two weeks:

• TechCrunch Party at August Capital on Friday, July 27, from 5:30PM - 10PM.
• AlwaysOn CEO Summit in Stanford Thursday, August 2nd. We will be part of the Web Services & Collaboration at 11AM.

If you happen to be lucky enough to attend these hot tickets, do stop by for a demo and connect with our team!

LongJump on TechCrunch

Great news!

We were featured in Mike Arrington's TechCrunch this morning after a briefing with him on Father's Day. That's one hard working blogger!

We do have one correction: LongJump is going into Private Beta. What this means is that we are looking for a few select users to try out the platform and give feedback. To sign up for the Private Beta, click here: http://www.longjump.com/signup.html.

We're also at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston today so come by Booth #23 to talk more and see a demo.

Web 2.0 Conference

Get a preview of LongJump in our booth (#328) at the Web 2.0 Expo next week in San Francisco. It's a great opportunity to meet our team and get a taste of what's to come. For exhibit hall hours, click here.

What 2.0?

While attending UTR something interesting occurred to me.

Web 2.0 concepts have given birth to lot of necessary fragmentation. One vendor focused on widgets. Another focused on secured feeds. Another on API mash-up management. They are all aiming to create and tap new opportunities to communicate over the web. In the Web 1.0 or 1.5 world, there were lots of old paradigms from the enterprise days. You had to work how the company was used to you working.

Today things are getting more specialized. You have developer communities, you have social communities, business communities, etc. And you have the opportunity to truly have it your way. And if you can do your work and plug back into the main arteries of business when you need to, no one can say that their regiment is any better than yours.

It's very exciting because like the need to extend beyond the primordial ooze, web companies are pushing a lot of boundaries organizationally and technically. And integration isn't an option, it's a way of driving greater opportunity. It's also a way to let you migrate quickly to the next new solution.

And I'm starting to question whether Web 2.0 is actually a real thing (i.e. some period of human achievement and evolution) or if it's improperly named. Maybe this moment is really about when the Web stopped being about technology and started being a seamless sixth element (with apologies to water, air, earth, fire, and metal) that infuses our personal and professional lives. That's the way it feels from here.

Opening the Kimono for 15 Minutes

Pankaj M. (our CEO) presented at the Under the Radar conference this morning. Some of the early buzz came from Webware and ZDNet.

Also some blogger feedback!

• Startupsquad
• Praxis/Mashery
• Twitter

Why Wait for IT

One reason I believe on-demand services are starting to take off is that during the dot-bomb, everyone and their brother was involved in some way with IT. It was the thing to do, like real estate in the SF Bay Area.

With strapped budgets, a knowledge-gap in internal web services, and a need to focus on core competencies, there's a missing IT ingredient to supporting SMEs and SMBs. Couple that with the rise in Web 2.0 development technologies, open source, and mash-ups, the everyperson now has all the means to hang themselves properly.

BUT...

Few small companies have IT teams geared towards custom, business-driven applications. You might have one or two IT staff, but their main focus is on procuring equipment, securing the network, setting up email and mobile devices, and maintaining backups. They simply don't have the resources (and sometimes the knowledge) to build new business process automation for the company. Let's face it, a new business service, whether you buy it or build it, takes resources to understand the user/customer, the knowhow to create the application, testing, and fine-tuning.

One of the objectives for LongJump is that we remove the IT burden. You don't have to be a SQL expert. You don't have to know how to backup a server or write perl/cgi/java/etc. There are no security issues to deal with. It's all built in. All you need is your data, an idea, and to think through your work processes -- all stuff you'd need to do if you were to give the project to your IT department.

Chasing Pre-Beta Users

We're looking for pre-beta users to explore the LJ platform and maybe try to create some of their own applications. If you think you have a great idea for an app, please visit our sign-up page. Friends are welcome as well, since we probably all know someone who has a small business or have a small team that needs their own special app.

In the next few weeks, we'll start letting people log in to get a feel for our platform.

Dow Jones Web Ventures

Yesterday, Pankaj (our CEO) presented LongJump for the first time publicly at the Dow Jones VentureWire conference in San Mateo. While the audience was mainly venture capital firms, it gave us a unique opportunity to test-drive our messaging. LongJump is in a unique position as we're a service of Relationals, Inc. and therefore don't have immediate funding needs. But VCs see everything, so we felt it was worthwhile to get some vetted feedback.