Onfolio Group Blog

Onfolio Post: Quick Story about DEMO@15

While we were showing Onfolio 2.0 at our "demonstrator station" at DEMO@15, we had a number of visits from technology and business writers who wanted to see Onfolio in action. Spike did a great demo for Michael Miller, the Editor-in-Chief for PC Magazine, and JJ and I teamed up on a demo for Larry Magid who has a radio show on CBS and is a contributor to the New York Times. There were two funny things that happened during the DEMO for Larry.

1) We showed Larry how easy it is to set-up and use the blogging features of Onfolio by letting him sit down and do it himself. He ended up posting an article to his blog right from our demonstrator station.  You can see the blog post here. I'm pretty sure that this was the only time I've seen someone get some real work done during a 5-minute demo.

2) After we had spent a lot of time on the high level stuff, Larry asked JJ if we integrated with Internet Explorer as well as we integrated with Firefox. Rather than answering the question directly, JJ said (with great excitement) "Watch this..."  He then opened IE, launched Onfolio and then showed Larry how adding a flag to an Onfolio item in the Firefox window instantly updated that same item in the Internet Explorer window so it displayed the newly added flag. It was a pretty funny moment because the amount of power JJ was showing with this move went well beyond the question of  browser integration and gave Larry a peak at the strength of  Onfolio's architecture. The only problem with this demo was that only an engineer could really appreciate it, and once JJ was finished there was an awkward silence as Larry tried to figure out how this related to his question.  Once that was clarified, we all had a good laugh about how excited we were to show Larry such a subtle (but critical) feature of the product.

Customer Post: Lead users - Onfolio excels

I found this article about Lead User Analysis, there are probably better ones but this should give you the idea.

http://www.betterproductdesign.net/tools/user/leaduser.htm

I think Onfolio excels at this during this BETA cycle. Onfolio has far more to gain than loose by opening up the BETA process as it has. The days of having closed BETA's and a fixed plan on a product BETA and release are over if you want to really be out in front with your software. I believe Onfolio has benefited from that. Many people are freely helping shape Onfolio and it will ship as a far better product due to this. For a small software company you automatically make yourself far bigger. Onfolio gets better feedback and insights to what their software could do. Users get the product that they want. Sounds like a win - win situation to me. I BETA test a lot and the Onfolio experience has been exciting even... if I do not find it to be my solution for information management. I have learn't a lot here and the ideas have even allowed me to expand my use of other software. Onfolio's handling of this BETA is magic and just as specially as the final software. I am not sure you could do this with Microsoft as their attitude is today but they can get away with it because of their size. Small software companies should take note of Onfolio and follow their lead to take on the big companies head on.

Onfolio 2.0 Just Shown at DEMO

Spike and I just got finished demoing Onfolio 2.0 at Chris Shipley's DEMO@15 conference in Scottsdale .  At this show, everyone gets 6 minutes on stage to make their case.  We demonstrated Onfolio using a scenario we made up based on all the conversations we've had with the people who have posted on this blog and on our forums and sent us emails. We never would have been able to make a compelling demo without all the feedback you've given us, so we just wanted to say thanks.  Special thanks go to Peter Phelps for lending us his persona for the morning.

For those of you who are interested, you can follow Robert Scoble's blog during demo to read what he has to say about each of the companies demonstrating.

Getting cozier with my favorite COSie

Sebastian invited me to join this blog right at the beginning, but I've been so busy that now is the first chance I've had.  Onfolio has increasingly been an asset in my busyness, not to mention my business.

Over the last month, I've begun using Onfolio to organize travel documents, e-tickets, conference materials, and so forth because it's now so easy to capture e-mails directly from Outlook. Also, with the very welcome integration of the feed reader, I'm capturing more personal interest items in addition to the work-related research projects that originally made an Onfolio addict of me.

I've just installed the newest beta release. My only serious complaint about the Onfolio 2 beta  was that it seemed terribly slow in Firefox. It may be my imagination, but this new one seems speedier. Am I dreaming, lucky, or what?

Another point, and this one goes to the somewhat bizarre title of this post. My biggest issue with blogs and blogging and all the trappings is that the blogosphere as a whole is much techier than the world at large.  The recent Pew study on the "State of Blogging,"  while supporting the credible claim that blogs are now an established part of online culture, still tells us that only 38% of online Americans claim to know what a blog is and only 5% use feed readers to access blogs.

In my opinion, those numbers suggest that we need to find better, simpler ways to make blogs and news feeds understandable and accessible to the broader online world. Applications like Onfolio boost personal productivity and make it easier for people to control information overload online. (By the way, I'm doing a study and writing a book on the topic -- so please take my info overload survey and then download "Infomaven's Top Ten Tools for Taming Information Overload Online" -- of which, it goes without saying, Onfolio is one.)

In his recent keynote at the New Communications Forum, Andy Lark offered a good metaphor for RSS feeds, calling them "TiVo for the Web." But I've still had trouble explaining Onlolio and its ilk to the uninitiated  -- partly because applications like this don't seem to have a consistent name or description.

So I made one up. I call Onfolio (and its competitors) "COS" applications -- that's Collect/Organize/Share,  COSies for short. Having tried a couple of others (and, yes, found some things to like about them, as well), I'm coziest with Onfolio, and getting cozier all the time.

COSies. Whaddya think?

Onfolio 2.0 Preview Release - The Office Weblog - office.weblogsinc.com

Link: Onfolio 2.0 Preview Release - The Office Weblog .

2.0 Preview Release post blogged directly from Onfolio.

The new release is a substantial improvement over Beta 1 with many performance enhancements, bug fixes, and requested features including my number one request - better proxy server controls!