I'm jetting out of here tomorrow to the Gartner Symposium, invited to speak as one of their "cool vendors". Here's what Gartner had to say about why they picked us:
Enterprise users aren't lacking in ways to communicate — with multiple phones, e-mail systems and messaging platforms, users spend too much time managing their communications systems. Presence is a solution to this problem, but managing presence is a manual process prone to error. iotum automates presence management, resulting in more accurate and easy-to-use communications systems.
What Gartner is keying off ties back to our concept of New Presence. Except for the rare individuals who want to drink from the presence firehose — consuming everything from location to mood to status (can you say Twitter) — presence needs to be mediated to be useful. Our ability to automate presence management is based on two elements: context and relationship. We gather all the raw presence information from where it's being created, massage it, and present it to the requester, filtered based on the relationship the user has with the requester. With Talk-Now it's possible to be seen as unavailable to some people, available to others, and busy but interruptable to still others, all depending on the relationship you have with the user.
And in my opinion, and Gartner's too, that's pretty cool.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
