Mike Wagner - Perpetual beta

I created a limited LinkedIn poll. What alone is the most effective Social Media Marketing tool poll? http://polls.linkedin.com/ poll-results/44998/soppp Pleas take a second and share your thought.

Palo Alto, Calif. -- Picaboo , the Palo Alto-based developer of a custom online photo book and card printing service for consumers, has raised $1 million in new funding, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company now has raised nearly $3 million since its founding in 2006. Picaboo competes in the growing market for custom photo books with Blurb, Viovio, SmileBooks, Snapfish, Shutterfly and Kodak. The company's previous backers include New Enterprise Associates, CampVentures, Odyssey Research, Softbank Capital Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

By Jeff Feinman May 14, 2009 — It started slowly. First, one person in Mexico got sick. Then another. Then more. The culprit? A strain of influenza commonly known as swine flu. But before it was identified, folks returning from that country were unwittingly bringing the deadly flu back to their homelands. As fear of a pandemic grew, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) needed to get a handle on outbreaks of the H1N1 virus. One of the tools of their disposal was a software mashup, created by IBM, that brings together the CDC’s reporting data with Google Maps. “The mashup could see where the outbreaks are in different regions of the country,” said Rod Smith, vice president of IBM’s emerging Internet technologies unit. “A business can now share that mashup with its stores and regions so they can see what’s going on with it, and the CDC can share it with state services, maybe to see what other health facilities or health products are out there.” Contin...

I've decided to go full force into the services business and offer my expertise in Product Marketing and Social Media on a consulting basis. I've started a group dedicated to connecting organizations with Social Media needs with those who can help. I just created the Facebook group so trying to get people to join to get the wave effect going. You can join the group here .

Happy to see JackBe still making news and especially with regards to a project which started while I was there. Click through to read the article from eweek in the entirety. Mashups Give Defense Department Strategic Edge ( Page 1 of 4 ) Off-the-shelf Web 2.0 mashup software from JackBe aids decisions and keeps troops safe. To make the right decision, it's essential to have the right information at the right time. But just what information is needed, when and in relation to what other information is a subtle science that tests the mettle of IT managers everywhere. In the armed forces, victory and defeat—not to mention human life—may hang in the balance of every decision that is made. In its ongoing effort to enable better decision-making, the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA, has deployed an enterprise mashup server running JackBe software to bring together strategic information from disparate sources, particularly geographic and mapping data. "The DOD [Depa...

Serials Solutions ( www.serialssolutions.com ), a business unit of ProQuest, has added several new content providers and a new library beta development partner for its Summon unified discovery service. The service is being developed in close cooperation with library beta partners, with a goal of not only bringing the researcher back to the library but providing a channel for greater return on the library's content investment. The new partner, Western Michigan University, which will use the Summon service with its VuFind next-generation catalog, joins Dartmouth College, Oklahoma State University, University of Sydney, and University of Liverpool in providing feedback that will refine all aspects of the service. New content providers include IEEE, the pre-eminent engineering society, information technology publisher IGI Global, international scholarly publishing leader Brill, and a pair of Australian presses that expand the service's local coverage. The Summon service's cont...

by Paula J. Hane Providing a single point of access to a broad range of library materials seems to be emerging as the Holy Grail of the library world. Libraries provide a vast richness of content, but that content has historically resided in separate silos of storage and access-books in the catalog, subscription content from multiple providers, ebooks, archival collections, electronic journals, and other resources on the web. Library vendors have approached the problem with federated search products that search remotely and rely on connectors, but these are generally seen to be only partial and limited solutions. However, new discovery tools have begun to appear that promise to provide a single interface to multiple resources based on using a centralized consolidated index to provide faster and better search results. Serials Solutions ( www.serialssolutions.com ) announced its Summon service in January (see NewsBreak) and garnered much interest; it is currently in beta testing in a sm...

April 14, 2009 Serials Solutions Signs Beta Partner WMU and New Content Providers for the Summon™ Unified Discovery Service IEEE, Brill, IGI, and Australian presses bring new content to rapidly expanding service Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest, has signed Western Michigan University as a beta development site for its new Summon™ unified discovery service. New content providers will also participate. Among them are IEEE, the world's pre-eminent engineering society, information technology publisher IGI-Global, international scholarly publishing leader Brill and a pair of Australian presses that expand the service's local coverage. The Summon™ service's contributors, which include the massive content resources of ProQuest and Gale, have expanded to more than 80. Harvested content now exceeds 400 million records in preparation for the service's July launch. Announced in January, the Summon™ un...

I joined the Summon product team at Serials Solutions this week as the product marketing manager. I have to say, it was the potential I saw in this streamlined information discovery service that was the tipping point in choosing the oppertunity over others. Just as Newspapers have been dropping like flies, acedemic libraries face a very real challenge of exposing the breadth of information in a streamlined fashion in keeping with the paradim establish by Google. Libraries are realizing that information if undiscoverable is meaningless in this experimental learning culture. Meaning, if the discovery process is not streamlined to the standards of the web search engines, people will pop out to the web and bypass all the resources behind the walled garden of the institution. Summon, unified discovery service soon to be released by Serial Solutions, aims to solve this problem... and it does as proven in early beta tests. More to come....

That's right, I went with the MacBook Pro and am extremely happy. 4gigs if proving more than enough to virtualize with Parrallels and run Windows XP for some windows only apps I run. Thanks to all that took the poll and or sent me their feedback.

Using the power of the crowd to help me decide so please cast your vote on what should be my new laptop. Get This - Survey Results - GlowDay.com

JackBe still going strong.

Its been a while since I've written a personal post but the time seems to be right. I, like so many others currently, found myself victim to business reorganization. Although I agree in part, I still believe the decision was short sighted. Never the less, these are unprecedented times and with that comes uncharacteristic opportunities. For the time being I will most likely offer my broad business and product marketing skills and experience via consulting and contract work. In addition, as when I first arrived in Seattle, I have more time to work with the true startups in the area. Stay tuned.

In an effort to foster Electronic Contract Execution and Electronic Signature solutions, DocuSign has officially launched its developer center . Now developers can download API and SDK materials as well as set up a developer account to test against a dedicated development environment. I'm excited to see what creative applications folks will create to streamline their organizations arcaic contract processes.

After a grueling number of months aligning the product road map with service packages that make sense to all market segments, I am proud to provide the following press release. DocuSign Unveils New Scalable Product and Support Offerings for Electronic Signature and Electronic Contract Execution SEATTLE - January 28, 2009 - DocuSign, the industry leading provider of on-demand electronic signature and electronic contract execution solutions, today announced its new DocuSign Professional Edition and DocuSign Corporate Edition are available now at www.docusign.com . The new product and support offerings were designed specifically to create a scalable cost-effective on-demand solution for businesses of all sizes to replace the expensive and inefficient process of transporting, signing, tracking, storing contracts and capturing business data . DocuSign Corporate Edition also features the industry's first 'Smart Envelopes™ for the precise management of ...