I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
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I’ve been really proud to follow two excellent companies from Wellington start their global journey over the past few weeks.
I’m involved with PlanHQ and been enjoying getting the daily reports back from Tim. He’s just presented at the prestigious DEMO conference and I think done us all proud.
I’ve been watching Tim mature over the last six months as a technology leader and this high pressure 6 minute presentation on the global stage is world class. Tim and the PlanHQ team having been working hard in New Zealand with several hundred early customers getting the product ready for a full international launch. They mapped out a strategy to get global exposure and completely nailed it.
Great coverage on the influential Techcrunch and ZDNet.
PlanHQ Still Tiny, But Getting A-List Attention
PlanHQ: Collaborative business planning
Ponoko is another great Wellington example, making the TechCrunch 40.
These are companies funded with small amounts of investment and sweat equity from talented and passionate founders. This is so repeatable. Tim and Dave5 are the next generation of New Zealand software entrepreneurs and it will be fun to watch them succeed with their ventures.
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Tim, here is a document that might be of useful to you to explore ontology.
The PDF or PS format is freely downloadable.
An Ontology for Business Planning
I have noted that Ontology-based application are very popular at the moment ,eg - Amazon is using one for its items knowledgebase and also for its new item recommendation, ie, when a new item that has been added to the database, which has no past history based on user-browsed log data or user-bought items, the system is able to recommend a similar book based on the user current queried item. The query is made easier since the items are linked via ontological relation rather than taxonomical relation. You can’t query related items via a taxonomy, the best you can do with taxonomy is just list all the itmes in specific branches or categories in the taxonomy tree, but the user doesn’t want to see a bunch of related items presented to him/her, he/she might only be interested in the closest related item (perhaps 1 or 2). There are lots of ontology open source projects available mainly in Java, some are listed on the page for the link provided at the very top of this message.