DEMO: The Launchpad for Emerging Technology

We recently release Eluma 2.0 into private beta. So, a little history is in order... I started Eluma with my friend Paul Christen in 2006 because we noticed that even with all the incredible innovation that's happening on the web, we couldn't find any good tools to help regular people organize everything they do online. iTunes does this for all of your music files. Outlook does this for your email and appointments. We kept asking ourselves, "why hasn't anyone built something like Outlook for all your web stuff?" When we did our initial research, we found that most people were just using favorites in IE, bookmarks in Firefox, or emailing web site URLs to themselves to keep track of their stuff. Certainly not the most organized way to manage all the content they were finding online. So that's the problem we set out to solve. In Eluma, we're combining ~folder and tag based organization techniques, ~intelligent "smartlists," ~social sharing, ~community interaction, and ~"social search." Some people will want to keep their stuff completely private, and that's cool. We are strong proponents of keeping private stuff private. Eluma is a great tool to help those folks stay organized. Some people will want to share what they're organizing in Eluma with their friends, or with team members at work. Eluma is great for that, too. And some other people will want to take advantage of the new techniques around social search to find new information that they won't easily find on Google. And we think Eluma is great for that, too. We built Eluma to help organize all of your web content from your existing browser(s), bookmark manager(s), as well as new content you discover while browsing the web. We try to make it seamless for you to: ~organize your content into "collections," or with tags, without doing a lot of extra work; ~share collections of content that you build with a friend, a group of friends or co-workers, or with the entire Eluma community; ~interact and collaborate with other users around content and collections of content; ~get alerted in real time on your desktop to whatever information/feeds you choose; ~discover content and collections of content that have been organized and recommended by other Eluma users. You can subscribe to these collections, and you can pull any of the content into your own collections. We're finding that it's not just individuals that are attracted to Eluma. Enterprises that are trying to find ways to bring the usability advancements brought about by Web 2.0 technologies (things like using tags to organize information instead of adopting and enforcing a rigid taxonomy) are finding Eluma is helping improve knowledge sharing and collaboration among their employees. Web 2.0 meets the enterprise! We built Eluma as an application that resides on your computer, not as a browser based application. As you can imagine, this was the subject of some pretty intense debates around here. But browser based applications can sometimes be a bit limiting in terms of their usability, especially when it comes to organizing, managing, and browsing large amounts of information. If you're using Eluma to organize lots of web information, we think you'll appreciate the difference in usability, not to mention that there are a whole bunch of performance related things that we can do better in an application like this, including pre-fetching information that you've subscribed to, and caching it so that it's already there when you ask for it, even when you're offline. We expect to take some criticism for this decision, but we strongly believe people will find the difference in usability is worth it. We originally launched V1.0 of Eluma back at the DEMO conference last year, where Chris Shipley and her panel of judges awarded us a DEMOGod (thanks Chris!!). V2.0 builds on that version, but whereas V1.0 was a product for our distribution partners like traffic.com and WHDH-TV, in V2.0 we've added personal productivity and organizational capabilities that make it well suited for anybody with a browser, an Internet connection, and more than a handful of links they're interested in tracking. We still work with brands. Very soon any brand will be able to use self-service tools to skin Eluma to look like it's their app, pre-populate Eluma with their content, and distribute it to their customers who want to stay current on news and information from their favorite content provider, and to get a useful personal organization tool emblazoned with their favorite brand. And what's with our name?! Well, we're trying to make it easy to organize and keep track of your online stuff. We're hoping we can bring a little "elumanation" to your online world! So we're obviously all really excited to get Eluma 2.0 out the door. We hope you try it. And we hope you like it! Please visit us at www.eluma.com to sign up for private beta. Thanks. Richard Buck, CEO, Eluma

We recently release Eluma 2.0 into private beta. So, a little history is in order... I started Eluma with my friend Paul Christen in 2006 because we noticed that even with all the incredible innovation that's happening on the web, we couldn't find any good tools to help regular people organize everything they do online. iTunes does this for all of your music files. Outlook does this for your email and appointments. We kept asking ourselves, "why hasn't anyone built something like Outlook for all your web stuff?" When we did our initial research, we found that most people were just using favorites in IE, bookmarks in Firefox, or emailing web site URLs to themselves to keep track of their stuff. Certainly not the most organized way to manage all the content they were finding online. So that's the problem we set out to solve. In Eluma, we're combining ~folder and tag based organization techniques, ~intelligent "smartlists," ~social sharing, ~community interaction, and ~"social search." Some people will want to keep their stuff completely private, and that's cool. We are strong proponents of keeping private stuff private. Eluma is a great tool to help those folks stay organized. Some people will want to share what they're organizing in Eluma with their friends, or with team members at work. Eluma is great for that, too. And some other people will want to take advantage of the new techniques around social search to find new information that they won't easily find on Google. And we think Eluma is great for that, too. We built Eluma to help organize all of your web content from your existing browser(s), bookmark manager(s), as well as new content you discover while browsing the web. We try to make it seamless for you to: ~organize your content into "collections," or with tags, without doing a lot of extra work; ~share collections of content that you build with a friend, a group of friends or co-workers, or with the entire Eluma community; ~interact and collaborate with other users around content and collections of content; ~get alerted in real time on your desktop to whatever information/feeds you choose; ~discover content and collections of content that have been organized and recommended by other Eluma users. You can subscribe to these collections, and you can pull any of the content into your own collections. We're finding that it's not just individuals that are attracted to Eluma. Enterprises that are trying to find ways to bring the usability advancements brought about by Web 2.0 technologies (things like using tags to organize information instead of adopting and enforcing a rigid taxonomy) are finding Eluma is helping improve knowledge sharing and collaboration among their employees. Web 2.0 meets the enterprise! We built Eluma as an application that resides on your computer, not as a browser based application. As you can imagine, this was the subject of some pretty intense debates around here. But browser based applications can sometimes be a bit limiting in terms of their usability, especially when it comes to organizing, managing, and browsing large amounts of information. If you're using Eluma to organize lots of web information, we think you'll appreciate the difference in usability, not to mention that there are a whole bunch of performance related things that we can do better in an application like this, including pre-fetching information that you've subscribed to, and caching it so that it's already there when you ask for it, even when you're offline. We expect to take some criticism for this decision, but we strongly believe people will find the difference in usability is worth it. We originally launched V1.0 of Eluma back at the DEMO conference last year, where Chris Shipley and her panel of judges awarded us a DEMOGod (thanks Chris!!). V2.0 builds on that version, but whereas V1.0 was a product for our distribution partners like traffic.com and WHDH-TV, in V2.0 we've added personal productivity and organizational capabilities that make it well suited for anybody with a browser, an Internet connection, and more than a handful of links they're interested in tracking. We still work with brands. Very soon any brand will be able to use self-service tools to skin Eluma to look like it's their app, pre-populate Eluma with their content, and distribute it to their customers who want to stay current on news and information from their favorite content provider, and to get a useful personal organization tool emblazoned with their favorite brand. And what's with our name?! Well, we're trying to make it easy to organize and keep track of your online stuff. We're hoping we can bring a little "elumanation" to your online world! So we're obviously all really excited to get Eluma 2.0 out the door. We hope you try it. And we hope you like it! Please visit us at www.eluma.com to sign up for private beta. Thanks. Richard Buck, CEO, Eluma