With that kind of backdrop, seeing either the founders or their service as playing even a small role in the future of news may seem like a deranged Silicon Valley fantasy, but there is something interesting in what RapGenius is trying to do — and not just because Andreessen Horowitz invested so much money in it. And it’s also worth noting that at this point in the evolution of media, no idea is too bizarre or outlandish to be dismissed out of hand.

Crowdsourcing through annotation

The idea that crowdsourced annotation of some kind could be part of how news-gathering evolves isn’t entirely crazy. Felix Salmon of Reuters wrote a post recently about RapGenius in which he wondered whether annotation could take the place of comments, a format that is becoming less and less useful all the time. And other services are also experimenting with annotation in interesting ways — including former Twitter CEO Evan Williams’ Medium, which launched a similar feature that allows writers to collaborate with readers.

It’s easy to see how this could turn into a disaster, of course: just take the usual ad hominem attacks and trollish behavior that occurs in the comments on YouTube videos and multiply by the number of news articles. The Reddit thread where users tried to identify the Boston bombers seems to have soured many journalists on that site as a vehicle for crowdsourced journalism of any kind (although I have tried to argue that this is unfair and short-sighted).

Obviously, anyone experimenting with this approach would have to find a way of moderating these kinds of contributions — either via human editors, or through a reputation system like the one RapGenius uses, which is similar to the way communities such as Slashdot work. And this approach can clearly produce value: Wikipedia seemed like a bizarre idea to begin with too, and yet it has produced better-quality content than teams of experts who were paid for their work.

I will confess that when I first saw examples of RapGenius annotation, such as the posts that Marc Andreessen has contributed to or the letter to shareholders that Groupon founder Andrew Mason wrote, I thought it was a neat gimmick but nothing worth spending much time on. There have been other attempts at adding annotation layers to the web (including Andreessen’s own attempts at Netscape), and all of them have failed miserably. And of course it’s entirely possible that RapGenius will fail as well — in fact, it’s more likely than not.

New things often seem ridiculous

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might be worth exploring this idea, instead of writing it off as ridiculous. And part of what influenced me was a reminder from Dustin Curtis of how many new things seem to be underwhelming — or outright crazy — and yet go on to become substantial and interesting, and valuable. Certainly Twitter falls into that category for me: I thought it was an inconsequential amusement, and yet it has done more to change the world of journalism than any single invention since the telephone.

As venture investor Chris Dixon (who is now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz) has said, channelling disruption expert Clay Christensen, the next big thing always starts out looking like a toy.

What would happen if the New York Times or Washington Post implemented something like RapGenius, and allowed annotations on top of the text? They might start with approved commenters or loyal readers, or those with some expertise in the topic, rather than encouraging a free-for-all. But the principle at work is the same as that driving any pursuit of “networked” or “open” journalism: namely, the idea that there are people out there who know more than you do.

How we allow that to occur is the only real question, not whether it will occur — because it is happening, whether journalists like it or not. Is RapGenius one way of doing that, or is it a sideshow that will ultimately prove to be worthless? We have no way of knowing until we try it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn

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Google debuted Google Glasses to developers back in June 2012 at its Google I/O conference, and companies have already started thinking about how they could build a more connected internet of things and roll out specific apps for the technology. And on Wednesday, some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent investors declared their financial support.

Bill Maris, managing partner at Google Ventures, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins announced Wednesday that they’re together launching The Glass Collective, an effort to provide seed funding for people who are developing interesting uses for the technology.

Maris explained in a blog post why the investors think it’s important to support the idea:

“So what will the future be with Glass? Well, the truth is, no one can honestly predict where this new technology will take us. Not yet. And that’s exactly what’s exciting. We do know that smart entrepreneurs and engineers are going to develop amazing experiences through Glass. Glass will evolve quickly, just as the cell phone grew from this to this.”

However, with Google Glass not even in stores, it’s hard to imagine how normal people would use the technology every day, let alone what types of companies might emerge from a Glass-like ecosystem or how venture capitalists could profit from those companies. It’s a long-term bet on a very uncertain product, but if Glass does take off, it could be a profitable one, similar to Kleiner Perkin’s early investment in people building for the iPhone that was called the iFund.

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Image courtesy Ning.

Now, Glam is trying another such iteration, re-vamping Ning for the modern social era as a personal blogging platform for brands and people to pull together their existing social media followers in one place. But while the concept itself isn’t a bad idea, it’s definitely a crowded arena for Ning to enter — and the site will be charging users to boot.

WordPress and Tumblr are still huge for traditional blogging, and sites like Medium, Branch, Quora, and LinkedIn have all moved into the publishing area as well recently. (I expressed some skepticism about Quora’s move into publishing recently, and Quora is free.)

Ning’s general manager Bernard Desarnauts described it to me as the place where someone with a lot of existing social media followers would bring them together for discussion on one platform, and allow the brand to not worry as much about building new followers on the social media site of the moment. He said Ning still has about 60 million monthly active users.

“Ning itself was not a bad idea, it was just way too early. This notion of people really understanding the power of social, and the ability to commit the time and resources, which was the core of what Ning offers, was too early five or six years ago,” he said. “But publishing is key to social. While the previous version of Ning was very much about community, we’ve really focused this new version of Ning around content publishing, but also how you intertwine publishing with community.”

However, at this point investing in Twitter and Facebook (with its 1 billion active users) as a social media strategy seems like a pretty solid plan for most people. And Ning will likely have difficulties getting users to pay for its service when it’s not exactly an established platform, although it is offering modern publishing features like responsive design and analytics. However, the fact that Ning is moving to a blogging platform as a plan for making money certainly indicates that social companies see publishing as a solid bet, a larger trend that my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote about. Maybe it’s a sign that content is getting cool.

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The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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The “internet is just the facilitation part,” said Jeff Immelt, the charming and affable chief executive of the company whose engines power the planes above and generate the power that helps us remain glued to our Twitter feeds. Immelt, in a one-on-one conversation earlier this week, said that his company has been building sensors into its products and collecting data for some time, but now what they want to do is take the emerging data streams and turn them into data-driven productivity tools. “It is about turning it into crucial and useful information,” he said.

The GE event this week (which we covered here), along with Immelt’s comments, depict a general 20,000-foot view of the problem a company as large as GE faces. It is awfully hard for a company that has spent the past decade or so in denial of the internet to suddenly develop internet DNA. Just look at Walmart, which despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars and a full decade trying to embrace the Internet, has failed to stop the Amazon juggernaut.

Immelt acknowledged that it is a challenge and perhaps that is one of the reasons why the company is coming to Silicon Valley. In our chat, Immelt said that the company has been working on its idea of the Industrial Internet for sometime, but they have come to California for what he describes as “a little sanity check.” When it comes to jet engines, “we can build and engineer those in Cincinnati or in New York,” but when it comes to data, “we wanted to be part of Silicon Valley” and learn a lot about being open, new protocols and being part of the data-centric movement.

“You give up on software analytics as a company at your own peril and we have to invest in it,” said Immelt. Data is the key to GE’s future, for as more of its products use sensors and create data feeds, the company will create infrastructure to make the machines more intelligent. In order to do so, they have created the GE cloud, a combination of private and public clouds.

“That cloud can and will expand in time,” he said. “The value of the company shifts from assets to the network and it is one reality of the future.”

Speaking of reality: When I asked him if he was worried about the near monopolistic control of the networks between a handful of entities, and lack of competitive mechanism in the market place, especially in the US, he was quick to add that if the network itself becomes a bottleneck, then GE wouldn’t shy away from “playing a role.” I (for one) wouldn’t have any problem with one mega-billion dollar company making phone companies and other bandwidth providers a little nervous.

What about the legislative and regulatory challenges that emerge from data rich and always connected devices? Immelt acknowledged that this too is is a challenge and perhaps the customers are best to deal with those decisions, he argued.

Valley Talk

When I asked him, why GE is here in Silicon Valley, Immelt said that it is the recognition that “neither we can nor we want to do everything ourselves” and instead want to work with rest of the technology ecosystem. Will GE start buying software companies in Silicon Valley? After all, Immelt had venture capitalist Marc Andreessen on stage, and Andreessen would love to sell him some big data companies and pocket those GE dollars.

“We are better off acquiring people than companies,” Immelt said. He believes that because his company makes healthcare and energy products, they should be attractive to folks who want to work on those problems. The company is going to be doing what he calls “some corporate venturing” and will be involved in “incubation” efforts in the near future. “We will be looking to take equity stakes,” he added. GE has a similar model for its healthcare investments as well.

Immelt said that GE is paying attention to new technological movements such as 3D printers and new kinds of modeling software, and how those technologies are impacting the production and creation of products. He doesn’t think it is too crazy of an idea for GE to work with small teams to develop innovative products — especially consumer appliances — and plug them into their supply chain.

Immelt said that the emergence of so much data basically means that the product supply chains as we think of them today need to be rethought. “It is my belief that in the future most consumer products will have a distributed supply chain,” he said. Data is what is going to define the product experience, and as a result, a small team in Dallas can design a refrigerator that is optimized for local environments and then have it manufactured in a manner that is optimal for a smaller subsection of the overall market. (This is part of the hyper-personalization movement we have often talked about.)  It is already happening at a smaller scale, and since it has an impact on GE’s consumer appliances business, GE is paying attention to it.

The biggest challenge, Immelt said is finding those data experts who can find insights into massive amounts of data.  ”We have a lot of people in software — for instance a thousand people work on software for MR Scanners — but what we don’t have is the system architects who sit at a higher level and use data to craft experiences,” Immelt said.  What do they say – recognizing a problem is the first step!

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But the fall, when it came, was fast and relentless.

Less than a month after the deal was struck, its architect, HP boss Leo Apotheker, was on his way out, replaced by Meg Whitman. A few months later, Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch walked the plank too. And this week things exploded as Whitman announced an $8.8 billion writedown of the deal amid claims of fraud and misleading accounting that the SEC and FBI are investigating.

Whatever the realities of the deal — and Lynch vigorously denies Whitman’s claims — the damage has already been done. And it’s not just to Autonomy and HP, either.

Transatlantic tough times

Here’s one deep, abiding result of this debacle that shouldn’t be ignored: it’s likely to sour any future dealings between America’s technology giants and their European counterparts. What Silicon Valley CEO, faced with a potential acquisition of a British company, is not going to remember Meg Whitman’s claims? And what acquirer will not let the fear of being undone — just like Apotheker was — color their decisions?

For anyone skeptically minded, Autonomy underscores an unhappy trend for transatlantic technology deals. So many of the biggest European tech exits have ended in ignominy, or at the very least obscurity. MySQL was bought by Sun for $1 billion shortly before it went supernova and got snapped up by Oracle. In 2008, Microsoft spent $1.2 billion buying Norwegian search company Fast; a few months later the company was charged with fraud for violating accounting rules.

And then there’s Skype. Rightly paraded as one of the great European software success stories, it has a checkered history. Before it was bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion, of course, it had been acquired and then jettisoned by eBay, which wrote its original bumper purchase price down by $1.4 billion.

Negative patterns are hard to shake, and in meeting rooms from San Jose up to San Francisco, you can bet anyone talking to a British entrepreneur about a possible buyout is going to think of Autonomy and this mess.

And yet, and yet. The story is so much more complex. After all, eBay’s troubled purchase of Skype happened under the leadership of… Meg Whitman. Sound familiar?

Meanwhile, the Autonomy buy wasn’t just Apotheker’s deal: it also took place on the watch of HP’s board — a hyper-connected, super-smart group of the Valley’s best and brightest. I’m not just talking about Whitman herself, but also Marc Andreessen, the man worshipped by many as the new leader of the pack. Then there’s Ray Lane of KPCB, once a bright star now having his role reduced, and Alcatel-Lucent’s Patricia Russo — who, as the head of a French-American firm, has particular experience of the European-American situation. Let’s hope pressure continues on those individuals to see why they got things so very wrong.

Truth is, attempting to draw lessons from HP-Autonomy doesn’t get you far. The British company may be tarnished by the accusations, but HP is a mess, switching from one disastrous strategy to another without understanding what is happening to it. And because it’s impossible to separate the misinformed decisions from the bad ones, coming to a broader conclusion about how fit European technology companies really are would be terrible. Each deal should be looked at on its own merits, not in some gigantic cultural context stuffed with lies, fraud and unproven accusations.

Yet we know human nature, and we know it is a fickle, arbitrary thing. What a shame for everyone.

Meg Whitman photo courtesy of Shutterstock user drserg

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When you listen to Cohen (below) talk about it, the scale of the challenge is what interests him. He sees social problems getting bigger but charities and the public sector less able to try new approaches because their time is spent servicing existing needs. So 10 years ago he set about proving that ‘social investment’ could have an impact. He co-founded Bridges and the Social Investment Business and played a role in the creation of social impact bonds that are now spreading to other countries.

But it’s only now that social investment is really taking off in the technology world. In the past it’s focussed on debt based investment which isn’t suited to high growth technology startups. Earlier this year Big Society Capital (of which Sir Ronnie is Chairman) was set up with money from dormant UK bank accounts to be a £600 million ($965m) investment bank for social investment. One of their first moves was into Nesta Impact Investments which, last week announced their first £17.5 million ($28m) seed fund. In tech terms it’s not huge, but what’s interesting is that it’s the first social investment fund that will make equity investments focused on seed stage technology startups.

This all comes at the same time as prominent venture capitalists are increasingly talking about social issues as promising markets. In the UK Nic Brisbourne of DFJ Esprit has written about the growing interest in healthcare technology. And in the US, Albert Wenger and Fred Wilson have pushed founders to come to them with ‘hacking education’ ideas and have made a number of investments. Investors like Mitch Kapor have also shifted their focus towards social issues –  Kapor Capital is overtly an ‘impact’ seed fund. In his now famous piece about ‘software eating the world’, Marc Andreessen writes that, “Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation”.

Even at the really early stage support is available. When we wrote the Startup Factories a year ago, accelerator programmes in Europe were mainly for digital technology in general but it was clear they would develop into particular verticals as was starting to happen in the US. Just this week, for example, there are Demo Days in San Francisco for Greenstart, Imagine K-12 and Code for America Accelerator.

And sure enough, Healthbox has opened up a London branch, HealthXL accelerator run by Startupbootcamp in Dublin has just opened applications and Bethnal Green Ventures (which I help run) has just launched six new tech startups trying to solve social and environmental problems.

Angel networks like that run by ClearlySo and big industry conferences for social investment like SOCAP held in San Francisco in September show that a real ecosystem is developing around this both in the US and Europe.

The result? If you want to use digital technology to solve some of the world’s biggest problems like how we educate the next generation, improve the health of our elders or tackle climate change, you don’t need to apologise for it when seeking investment. That’s a welcome change.

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Over the weekend, The New York Times columnist James Stewart blamed network effects going into reverse for the declining fortunes of the new web companies, though I don’t think his argument applies to Groupon, which has its own unique set of challenges and isn’t in the same class of companies as Facebook. Today, Wall Street Journal reports that investors like Kleiner Perkins and T. Rowe Price have taken it on the chin with their Groupon investment, but for now they remain believers in Andrew Mason and rest of the team.

The Groupon debacle is particularly telling about Silicon Valley and investors. Why? Because I don’t think it belongs in same category as Facebook and even Zynga. I am not sure it even belongs in the basket of technology stocks. Let me explain:

Some deals are too good to be true

From the day it emerged out of anonymity, Groupon was hailed as the messiah of local commerce, a company that was going to revolutionize retail and advertising. I tried very hard to understand the company and figure out its technology edge. When I saw Groupon, I saw a company that was essentially using e-mails to conduct what was essentially a coupon-clipper business. (Even Groupon Goods, the new discount goods service, reminds me of QVC more than anything else.)

Nevertheless, the company kept getting valued at nosebleed valuations by private investors. Some of the smartest people on the planet were extolling virtues of the company. Google offered to buy if for $6 billion. Maybe I was too old fashioned to label the company as a “technology company.” So, I abstained from writing and tuned out GroupOn. That didn’t stop the company from going public and getting valued at around $12.8 billion, making it the biggest U.S. web IPO since Google. Nothing really changed after the IPO. The more time went by, the more evident it became, at least to me, that Groupon was no technology company. That is the most crucial point of the Groupon saga.

The momentum players

Of course, the problem with Groupon is not entirely of its making. In order for a company like Groupon to get valuations befitting a high-growth technology company instead of a coupon-clipper business, there need to be compliant and willing investors. Many have their own personal compulsions. Kleiner Perkins, having lost its shirt on clean tech and energy investments, decided to double down on social and web investments — price be damned. No one can fault them trying to remake their franchise, which as PE Hub’s Connie Loizos pointed out has been under attack from Marc Andreessen’s investment outfit, A16z.

Other late-stage investors in the company felt the heat from late stage investor DST Global, a relatively new and aggressive investor with faint regard for valuation. For others, it was merely a way to play the momentum, make a quick buck and show a win, so that they can go on and raise yet another big fund.

And then there are the likes of T.Rowe Price, a giant mutual fund that was hoping that it could get a piece of these fast growers and make a killing at the IPO. Well, that plan didn’t work out, but they are still holding onto the stock. [By the way, it is the same fund that bought into Slide at a rumored $500 million valuation. Slide was sold to Google for $250 million.]

Many of these late-stage investors were trying to time the market. And as someone really smart once said — you can’t really time the market. More importantly, it doesn’t matter who you are or how fast you grow, at some point in time companies — both big and small — have to grow into their valuation. Groupon’s late stage investors are living through that harsh reality.

If it quacks like a duck….

Photo of Ducks by Daniel Alvarez via ShutterStock

Groupon isn’t the only company that uses technology but isn’t really a technology company, nonetheless enjoying investors’ decision to value it as a technology company. Just because a company uses the web and uses social networks (instead of real estate and old media) to sell things and find new audiences doesn’t mean that it should be put in the same bucket as, say, a company offering storage services to large companies, or even running world’s biggest social identity platform.

Andreessen once famously said that software will eat everything. I totally agree — but that also means that the software should make things more efficient. That makes the companies that are using software to replace the physical infrastructure (and its limitations) more profitable.

Yes, the Internet, mobile devices and social networks make it easy for these companies to grow their businesses — really really fast — but at the end of the day, if you are selling shoes, you are selling shoes. If anything, the higher growth, efficiency of infrastructure and ability to narrowly and rightfully target your customers should mean that you as a business should have higher margins than a competitive retailer. And if you do, then you should be valued higher than an offline competitor.

However, we continue to see the online-equivalents of retailers and fashion brands being accorded valuations typically reserved for high-growth technology companies. How is a company selling subscription for shoes or underwear a technology company? Many of these online companies might seem special because of there new models, but in the end they aren’t. Like ShoeDazzle that started the whole retail-as-a-subscription madness and is now selling discounted shoes, Groupon is a rude reminder of that reality.

The fact is that the very idea of what is a technology company is starting to morph. The traditional tools of valuing technology startups might not be applicable to companies like Groupon, which are like shooting stars – they grow fast and they fade faster. It means, the venture investors have to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to value the online equivalents of old-line businesses.

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Frank became iconic with his daily video show five years ago. In February, he asked fans on Kickstarter to chip in for a comeback: His original goal was to raise $50,000 through the crowdfunding site, but he surpassed in less than eight hours. The campaign ended up bringing in more than $146,000 — and also caught the eye of Andreessen and others. Said Frank via email:

“The level of interest in this sort of show led to interest from investors and led me to think about starting a new kind of media company that could support my show and others – combining media and missions, a blend of watching and doing.”

Peretti will join the board and Frank said and he’s already “signing up media and brand partners.” Part of the work his company is doing is based on Star.me – a kind of gamification site that he launched in early 2011 and that aims to engage audiences with daily missions. Frank raised $500,000 in 2010 for Star.me.

The idea of challenging audiences to complete missions is also key to Frank’s new show, which launched in early April. Frank uses the show to challenge his viewers to tell him their dreams or record music together.

Update: An earlier version of this post incorrectly put the amount raised last month at $756,000 and was based on an SEC filing. Frank has since contacted us to let us know that this total amount includes both the recent $200,00 Series A as well as the 2010 seed funding for his company.

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The Australian software company offers tools to help teams build software and it’s had a phenomenal run of 40 straight quarters of profitability, pulling in more than $100 million in revenue last year (with exactly zero salespeople). Entirely bootstrapped for the first six years of its existence, the company is now rumored to be pondering an IPO. And president Jay Simons feels they’re just getting started. Why? Well, because software is eating the world.

“We chose early on to really focus on what we think is a strategic problem for all companies, which is how do you build software better?” Simons explained to GigaOM in an interview, “and one of the reasons that we’ve exploded is that we’re at the beginning of this digital revolution. Entire industries are being upended by software companies.”

Like Andreessen, Simons cites the usual suspects of Netflix, Amazon and Skype, but he feels that these well chronicled cases are only the tip of the iceberg, and that’s only good news for his company. “Brick and mortar companies in almost every industry are now having to differentiate their own products through software,” he says, offering the automobile industry as an example.

“If you watched the Super Bowl, it was oversubscribed with automotive commercials and each of those automotive commercials was actually advertising software. The car itself isn’t going to evolve much mechanically. What has totally changed is that software is now driving fuel-efficiency systems, safety systems, on-board entertainment and navigation systems. Google famously, and I’m sure the auto industry itself, is trying to figure out how the car is going to drive itself,” he says. “Your television set, your alarm clock, your garage door opener, your thermostat, you don’t think about those things as software products but they are or they soon will be,” Simons concludes.

This change, he argues, is literally and figuratively bringing software development out of the basement of companies and making it central to what they do, reconfiguring the workflow of everyone from customer service folks to marketing pros in the process, as they too find themselves involved in producing software. “Some of the creativity, business requirements and customer requirements are all going to come from non-engineers. They need to be communicated and shared and iterated with the engineers that are going to transform those into code. That’s a big difference today than it was five years ago,” Simons says.

Despite these promising trends, the growth of the company may not be without friction, as PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy points out. “Right now there’s a feel-good API stew of these up-and-coming social enterprise players all wanting to support one another, ” she recently wrote. “That’s in keeping with the consumer Internet world, where people generally believe it’s not a zero-sum game and there is room for multiple players. But in the enterprise world, where people pay for software, a land-war might develop between who wants to be the knowledge worker portal and who wants to be a mere API partner integrating into it.”

These lurking potential problems aside, Atlassian’s ten-year-old bet on helping engineers and non-techies build software together seems to be paying off for the time being. “What developers and what people create with code is in some ways limitless,” Simons says before mentioning the speculation about an impending IPO. “I’m personally excited about it,” he says. No wonder lots of other people are chattering about this potential IPO in the usually less than sexy world of development tools too.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ianmyles.

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