Ross Mayfield

CEO, Socialtext, Inc.

Matt Asay, Scott Lemon, Ross Mayfield (L to R)

Online social collaboration continues to grow in popularity as companies develop tools to greater facilitate its use. Socialtext was the first company to build its products around the wiki and its CEO Ross Mayfield joins Phil Windley, Matt Asay, and Scott C. Lemon in a review of the technology news of the week.

Phil begins by following up on the previous week's speculation about Oracle's possible collaboration or acquisition of Red Hat (it turns out it plans on support Red Hat Enterprise Linux), a move that is called disingenous by Matt.

Beginning with a report on SocialPoint, Socialtext's integration with Microsoft's Sharepoint, the discussion turns to wikis and how they compare to real time collaboration tools existing in other online office products.

The group also discuss a number of other topics, including how best to reduce email volume and Google's acquisition of JotSpot.


Ross Mayfield is CEO & Co-founder of Socialtext, the first wiki company and leading provider of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. A noted blogger and industry expert, he is a serial and social entrepreneur. Mayfield has grown Socialtext to over 2,000 customers with Software-as-a-Service, Appliance and Open Source solutions. Mayfield partnered with Dan Bricklin, the creator of the first spreadsheet visiCalc, to co-develop and distribute SocialCalc. Socialtext is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, SAP Ventures and Omidyar Network. He previously served as VP of Marketing for a Fujitsu spinout and CEO of an enterprise risk management software company. Mayfield co-founded and served as president of RateXchange (AMEX:RTX), the leading B2B commodity exchange for telecom.

He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California at Los Angeles and completed the Management Development for Entrepreneurs (MDE) program of the Anderson School of Business. He resides in his hometown of Palo Alto with his wife and two children.

Co-host Matt Asay is vice president of Business Development for Alfresco, the leading open source Enterprise Content Management company. Prior to Alfresco Matt co-founded Novell's Linux Business Office, founded the Open Source Business Conference, and ran embedded Linux vendor Lineo's Network & Communications division. Matt earned a JD from Stanford Law School, where he spent two of his three years studying open source licensing under Professor Lawrence Lessig. He serves on the advisory boards for SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Bungee Labs, MuleSource, and Specifix, and on the board for OSI.

Co-host Scott C. Lemon is CTO of MediaForge - a next generation viral marketing and web enhancement company - and founder of HumanXtensions - an Internet R&D company. Scott's recent history in the computer industry include several small start-ups, along with being Chief Technologist at SCO, Chief Strategist at Vultus, and holding numerous positions during his four tours of duty at Novell. Scott's expertise ranges from computer and wireless hardware technologies, to networking and distributed software applications. As a futurist studying the patterns of evolution, his past experiences in operating systems - CP/M, DOS, Windows, OS/2, NetWare, UNIX, Linux and others - is allowing him to explore the new levels of abstractions provided by the Internet.

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This free podcast is from our Technometria with Phil Windley series.

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