Every time I look at Gist, it’s a little different. Given it’s a scrappy startup trying to navigate the worlds of e-mail, social networking, business software, and Web search—each a huge market opportunity, each hugely competitive—this is probably a good thing.

The Seattle company, backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and Colorado-based Foundry Group, is announcing today that its software, which has been in private beta trials for the past year, is now available to the general public. Gist bills itself as an online service that helps people manage their personal and professional relationships more efficiently.

The basic idea is to provide a Web dashboard that finds your contacts from your e-mail inbox and social networks (Outlook, Gmail, Twitter, Salesforce.com), and keeps you up to date about these contacts—even ranking their importance—through online information from blogs, articles, tweets, and updates on Facebook and LinkedIn. So, before your next business meeting, instead of having to Google around or search on Twitter to get up to speed on notable developments, Gist will surface any recent activity involving your contact, says Gist founder and CEO T.A. McCann.

It’s an ambitious product. Since the company’s $6.75 million Series A funding round from Vulcan and Foundry Group was announced in May, Gist has buckled down and focused on listening to customers (about 10,000 and counting) and improving its software and interface. It also moved into new office space near Qwest Field.

Among the new wrinkles in the software: Gist can filter information based on which people you’re meeting with this week, or which people you’ve exchanged new e-mail with; the software can also hook into customer relationship management through your Salesforce.com contacts; you can invite other people to try Gist, so there’s a viral component to the product distribution.

“There are probably a whole bunch of users who can get a lot out of Gist,” McCann says. “We think Gist is something people will want to talk about and share with other professionals.”

For now, the software is free, and will remain so for the rest of the year. But come early next …Next Page »

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I spent nine years working for a Customer Relationship Management software provider called Onyx Software. Our CRM systems were (at the time) largely implemented and run on-site at our customers’ locations. I ran the Professional Services team for the Americas—we were responsible for aligning business strategy with our software implementations, conducting business modeling, installing and customizing our software, performing training, and supporting our product.

Today I run Deneki Outdoors, a company that owns and operates fly fishing lodges in Alaska, British Columbia, the Bahamas, and Chile. We’ve got six year-round employees spread across those locations, and 40 folks who work for us seasonally.

What in the world could you learn at an enterprise software company that also applies to a fly fishing lodge business? Here are three big lessons.

—As a small business in 2009, you probably don’t need to own a single server.

Just a few years ago, running sophisticated business systems like CRM, financials, document management, and heck, even e-mail and calendaring, meant buying enterprise software packages, installing them on servers that you own and maintain, and paying a person or a team of people to keep things running smoothly. In 2009, the vast majority of small business functions can be supported by hosted applications that are simple, cheap, and close to zero maintenance.

Our business runs on Google Apps, Salesforce.com, and hosted Quickbooks. Other modern productivity tools like Skype help too, but our ability to run our core business functions on hosted platforms leads to a huge savings for us in terms of time and money. We don’t own a single server. We’ve never had to perform an upgrade. Customization is a piece of cake. Our “core systems” have been down for all of about three hours in the past five years combined.

If you run a small business, let the SaaS [software as a service] folks do the dirty work …Next Page »

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My favorite limerick of all time came printed on the bottom of a coffee cup:

All hail the goddess Caffeina!
She hangs out by the coffee machina.
We’re all on the run
But we get more work done
Since coffee came onto the scena!

Yes, this anonymous ditty breaks the rules of limericks, principally by mangling the meter and using made-up words like “machina” and “scena.” But it’s the sentiment that appeals to me. I do get more work done because of coffee. If the sprightly elixir was good for Voltaire, who is said to have consumed 50 cups a day, I figure it must be good for me.

I also get more work done because of e-mail. And because of the Web, and RSS feeds, and Google, and Twitter, and my iPhone and my MacBook and my Kindle—all of the tools, in short, that are melting our brains and impoverishing our communications, according to a circle of naysayers who have been very busy lately publishing books and articles with titles like Digital Barbarism and The Cult of the Amateur and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Technology criticism is an invaluable strain in our culture that stretches back to such brilliant writers as Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson, Marshall McLuhan, and Jane Jacobs. But to tell the truth, I don’t give much more credence to the recent anti-digital jeremiads than I do to the periodic warnings—always swiftly overturned by medical authorities—that caffeine is bad for your health.

The latest addition to the curmudgeon’s club is John Freeman, the acting editor of the UK-based literary quarterly Granta, who published a so-called “manifesto for slow communication” in the August 21 Wall Street Journal. The essay, which was adapted from Freeman’s forthcoming book The Tyrrany of E-Mail, argues that living in such close and constant proximity to our e-mail inboxes stresses us out, cuts us off from the physical world, and undermines our communication skills. Freeman thinks that spending all day writing and answering e-mail amounts to “simulated busyness” rather than genuine productivity. And he believes that the only way to restore sanity is to “step off this hurtling machine,” jabber less, and think more. “We need to learn to use [e-mail] far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives,” Freeman writes.

There are certainly days when I’d love to ignore my e-mail. Thursdays, for example, when I’m supposed to be writing this column. As Freeman rightly notes, “We need time to shape and design and filter our words so that we say exactly what we mean,” and it would be wonderful, on those days, to have a few uninterrupted hours to take his advice. But I know that closing the e-mail tab in my browser would be as unwise as …Next Page »

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Northwest software startups Evri (Seattle), Ontier (Portland, OR), and Kutano (Burnaby, BC) will be presenting at the DEMO technology conference in Palm Desert, CA, March 1-3. They are among 39 companies that each will give six-minute stage demonstrations of their new products.

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Seattle-based Jott, which provides free voice-to-text services for e-mail and text messaging, announced today it is moving to a paid model effective February 2. Jott Founder and CEO John Pollard cited the economy and ad market as reasons for the move. The startup, which was founded in 2006, is also rolling out a voicemail-to-text tool today.

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Portland, OR-based Jive Software, which makes social-networking and communication tools for businesses, announced it has signed up Bewag, the Austrian electric utility, as a customer. Since laying off a third of its staff in October, Jive has signed a number of new customers and partners, including United Business Media, Portland Energy Conservation, and Premiere Global Services.

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Portland, OR-based Ontier, a stealthy software startup, announced it has landed new board members and investors Les Fahey, of Fahey Ventures, and Paul Gulick, co-founder of InFocus. The amount of investment was not disclosed. Ontier was founded in early 2008 and is developing software for business communication that tries to fill the gap between e-mail and Web conferences.

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Allegedly, surfing the Web is a leisure activity for a growing number of people. I wouldn’t know—my job as a technology blogger obliges me to surf the Web all day at work, so if I have to use the Web from home, it’s usually because I’m taking care of some task like paying bills, uploading photos, or getting driving directions. But for people who do use the Web as a hangout, there are more and more ways to make it a social experience. And one company, Hamburg, Germany-based Weblin, is optimistic enough about the future of its animated chat service—which gives surfers inch-tall avatars that can communicate directly with the avatars of other Weblin members visiting the same Web pages—that it has expanded to the United States, starting with an office outside Boston.

If you belonged to Weblin (I’m guessing the name is a combination of “Web” and “gremlin”) and you had downloaded the company’s Windows-based plugin, your customized avatar or small-w weblin would be standing on the status bar at the bottom of this browser window right now. If another Weblin member happened to be reading this Xconomy article at the same time, their weblin would also appear. You could then chat, joke, or flirt with that person via text balloons that show up above your weblin, the same way avatars communicate in virtual worlds like Second Life.

You can even make your weblin smile, wave, dance, or run. So what Mystery Science Theater 3000 did for horrible B-movies and what Lycos Cinema is doing for online video, Weblin does for the entire Web (although in practice, you’ll only run into other weblins at a small fraction of websites, since there are only about 10,000 to 100,000 Weblin users online at any given time).

“Even with social networking, the Web is not a social place; a typical website doesn’t allow you to chat with other visitors,” says Jan Andresen, Weblin’s co-founder and CEO, who’s based in Hamburg but was traveling on the East Coast when I reached him by phone last week. Yes, Andresen acknowledges, you can leave a text comment at your friend’s blog or their Facebook Super-Wall. But that’s like deciding you’re only going to communicate with your family by leaving sticky notes on the fridge, he says. “Why not interact instantly with other people, make jokes, and see their reactions? It’s so much more normal.”

Well, “normal” if you don’t mind a bunch of cartoon characters sauntering around your Web browser. And the 20- to 35-year-old users who are Weblin’s main target audience probably don’t. (Indeed, the system still bears the stamp of the virtual-classroom application, developed by CTO and co-founder Heiner Wolf, on which it’s based.) But for older or more mission-oriented Web users like me, Andresen agrees, a crowd of weblins might be a distraction. “If you have to book a flight or finish your spreadsheet, you don’t do it in a pub,” he says. “But maybe you’re at home, you’re bored, you have a glass of wine next to you, and you just want to be entertained. We call that moment ‘chilling.’ For that time, Weblin is ideal.”

Andresen and Wolf launched Weblin in 2006 and have raised $1.3 million in funding from a combination of private investors and the High Tech Grunderfonds, a public-private initiative that invests in early-stage technology startups in Germany. The startup’s technology is built atop XMPP, an open-source instant messaging platform formerly known as Jabber. Andresen says that Weblin hit the 1-million-member mark in September, and that about 10,000 people are downloading the Windows plugin every day. (There’s also a purely browser-based version of the system called “Weblin Lite” that works on Mac and Linux computers, but it assigns you a random avatar that does not persist as you travel from Web page to Web page.)

The company hopes to make money in two ways. The first, more predictable revenue stream will come from selling ads, which will pop up in the same transparent layer over the browser window that the weblins themselves inhabit. But while that may sound like another annoying distraction, Andresen says …Next Page »

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It must be the weather—or rather, the climate. How else to explain another tech startup with Seattle roots moving to the San Francisco Bay Area? Last week I heard from DocVerse, a collaborative-document software company, which relocated from the Seattle area to San Francisco this summer after raising a round of funding from Bay Area investors. This week it’s Chatterous, a “multi-channel communication” startup founded by two former Amazon developers. The story of Chatterous cuts across three familiar themes we’ve written about lately: the investment climate for early-stage startups, the role of incubators, and the challenge of helping people manage their daily communications.

I tracked down Chatterous co-founder Wilkins Chung yesterday. He and his business partner Kenshi Arasaki have been busy with the move to San Francisco—they’re setting up an office in the SoMa neighborhood that will officially be up and running in the next week or so. The idea behind Chatterous, which is about to start beta trials, is to let you communicate with a group of friends, co-workers, or other contacts across different channels like e-mail, text messages, instant messaging, and Web-based social networks—as smoothly and automatically as possible.

The idea was born from an experience many people can relate to. Chung says that on Thursdays or Fridays at Amazon, he would send out e-mail blasts to friends about getting together for happy hour. But some people wouldn’t get his message because they had already left or weren’t checking e-mail. So he’d have to call them or send text messages. “I became the aggregation point, and it’s really hard,” he says. Why not create a service to handle these different modes automatically, he thought. It just so happens, he met Arasaki at one of these happy hours, and the two started talking about possibilities.

They applied for the Y Combinator incubation program and got in. “We thought, let’s go for it,” says Chung. “Opportunities don’t come along often.” So he and Arasaki left Amazon—Chung had been there for two and a half years plus an internship—and spent the winter session at the beginning of this year in Silicon Valley, developing their product and making contacts.

When the time came to raise a round of funding, Chung and Arasaki talked to investors from Seattle as well as the Bay Area. “We did talk to people from Seattle, but mostly people in Seattle came down to San Francisco,” Chung says. “We were in Seattle for a short period of time, with the idea to move down to the Bay Area.” In the end, Chung says, they raised a round of angel funding (an undisclosed amount, but Chung says it was less than $1 million) from four investors in the Bay Area.

And that’s the main reason for the company’s move—to be a lot closer to its investors. “We’d like the ability to just call them up for coffee,” says Chung. “Especially in the angel round, it’s not just about money, it’s about their experience, and being networked to people in your space.” (As an aside, Chung is from Toronto and Arasaki is from Calgary, so they don’t really have local roots that would tend to keep them in Seattle.)

Chung also had some keen observations on the early-stage investment climate in San Francisco versus Seattle. “People are willing to meet if you get an intro. Even if an investor isn’t interested, they’re really willing to help you find others who might be,” he says. “Our investors came about through referrals. It’s a lot easier to meet investors that would be suitable. [There seems to be] a lot more investment opportunity in the Bay Area than Seattle. Even if your company is in Seattle, it’s probably a good idea to come to the Bay Area. The network of investors is stronger than in Seattle in scope and breadth… In the Valley, the investor network is big, but word gets around really quickly.”

“Another thing is,” Chung continues, “a lot of investors [in the Valley] used to have their own startups. That’s a really big difference. Sure, you have people who made a lot of money in the corporate world, but still, having investors who’ve started their own company, have been through the whole thing, is very important. They can advise us on how to get through it.” The implication is that Seattle has fewer of these—which is probably true, at least in raw numbers.

At this point, Chatterous is still two guys, but they’re looking to hire. And that’s something that’s not any easier in the Valley. “The talent in Seattle is also there, it’s just as good as the talent in the Bay Area. In fact, recruiting is a bit more challenging, because there are a lot more opportunities to work for cool startups,” says Chung.

Chatterous is in the process of adding new features for its beta run, such as more types of social-networking channels. “We’re trying to make Chatterous into a product that you use without changing your existing methods of communication,” Chung says. If you’re used to primarily using e-mail or instant messaging, he adds, the aim is for you to not even notice Chatterous. That’s as opposed to a service like Twitter, which competes in the same social communications space. “The concept of updating your status for everyone to see—a lot of people outside the Valley don’t understand it,” says Chung. “Whereas with Chatterous you’re just trying to reach [certain] people and communicate with them.”

It’s definitely a crowded space, and Chatterous has its work cut out for it to stand apart. Kevin Merritt of Seattle-based Blist recently had an interesting post about how he views all the different forms of communication and their best uses—from face-to-face to e-mail to instant messaging and Twitter—and how much he likes yet another service, Yammer (which just won best in show at TechCrunch 50).

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