I woke on Monday morning to the sights and sounds of the Pacific Ocean, as experienced from floor 2 of the Hyatt Regency at Huntington Beach. I ate breakfast looking out through the trees toward the ocean ... it was a great way to start the day.
I was picked up by my client at 9.30am, and we spent the day discussing product features, product strategy, go-to-market ideas, and in-progress partnerships. These guys are working on a neat product ... but I'm under NDA until it is released.
By 3.30pm, it was time to head up to the Orange County airport for a Southwest Airlines flight to San Jose. I had not flown on Southwest before, but I was hugely impressed with their business ideas ... you can order a ticket online, you can change it without penalty when and if you need to, and so on. Sounds like the way the airline business should be run. Kudos to all involved.
After landing in San Jose, I took a cab to the headquarters of JotSpot, Inc., for its 7pm meetup. Although I didn't count how many people there were, my sense of it is that about 40 people showed up. It was neat to meet Scott and Joe. Four demos were given:
- The JotSpot Bug Tracker provides a wiki-based approach to capturing, assigning, closing out, and reporting on bugs or issues with a product. It includes a change log that tracks every change over time, by performing a delta comparison between different versions of the page. Outstanding bugs can even be grouped and graphed using the integrated JCharts open source charting application, through which charts are drawn on the server in PNG format, and then sent to the browser.
- Kathleen of Knowesys, a Jot solutions partner, showed something of their work. I didn't totally follow what they had done (I was getting tired!), but it was something about dynamically changing layouts and formats based on certain settings on configuration pages. I haven't done justice to the description.
- Scott Johnstone (sp?), the Head of Vertical Applications at JotSpot, Inc., demonstrated the Class Reunion Planner that he has built in the last 4 weeks since joining Jot. It looked good, and one lady in the audience wanted to know when she could get it.
- Finally, the man himself, Joe the CEO, demonstrated a beta edition of JotSpot Tracker, a replacement for some uses of Microsoft Excel. For spreadsheets that just show simple lists, in other words those that don't have formulas in them, the rows and columns can be pasted into Tracker. Every row is automagically turned into a wiki page, but is displayed as a spreadsheet table. Columns can be sorted, just like with Excel. Additional information, such as comments and notes, can be appended to each row, exactly unlike Excel. It was ... not bad. Formula-based calculations will be added, thanks to a new hire named Michael.
And finally, it was time to head off to my hotel. I had a reservation at the Sheraton Palo Alto, but my reservation could not be found when I went to check in. Melissa asked for my name once more, and discovered that I had been bumped to the hotel next door, the Westin Palo Alto. Some things in life are tough, but not that!
Whilst the hotel was very comfortable, I go on record again as saying that something stinks about Internet access at Westin properties. I wasted 90 minutes trying to get my computer connected to the Internet, including having service people calling to my room in person and by phone. A resolution was not forthcoming. I remain very unimpressed ... especially since I experienced very similar poor service when I stayed at the Westin Times Square in June 2005.
All-and-all though, it was a neat day.
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