For those of you who are watching closely, you will notice that I added a new entry to my blog roll.  I recently got reconnected with Denise Shiffman, former marketing executive at Sun Microsystems, through another former client who has found her way to Mimosa Systems.  Denise has a new book coming out in the fall, which I hear is on Enterprise 2.0.

I met with an investor last week at a hotel in Boston.  He was in town to attend the Enterprise 2.0 conference.  The basic goal of his attendance was to get a better handle on when, or if, money was going to start changing hands for his Enterprise 2.0 company.  Let’s face it.  It takes time for some things to develop.  As one storage-industry watcher reported, a lot more money has been invested in storage companies than will be returned in profit.  I suspect the same may be true for Enterprise 2.0, though I haven’t done the math.

Getting back to Denise for a minute, she was a panelist at a conference that I hosted in Munich a number of years ago.  Around that time, consumer global positioning system (GPS) technology had just come out.  We had hired a bus driver to take our guest speakers to a speakers’ dinner at a local restaurant a few kilometers away.  Our bus driver was, let me just say, “not a local,” but he did come equipped with a GPS and some mapping software to help him locate the restaurant.  His GPS routed him onto the Autobahn, which was entirely unnecessary.  The Autobahn was at a complete standstill.  We sat on the highway for several (yes, several) hours and then, when we finally got off, a couple kilometers down the road, the GPS kept routing our driver down streets on which his bus would not fit.  Roughly three hours later, we finally arrived at the restaurant by foot.  Denise remained in good spirits…others did not. 

GPS and mapping technology is now good enough and broadly adopted to avoid the calamities of that evening.  And someone is probably making money in the market.  I suspect Enterprise 2.0 will get here one day, too.