As part of its upgrade to version 4.0 of its service, Springpad on Wednesday unveiled a notebook-embedding feature for publishers and brands. The idea is that brands will create notebooks full of relevant content for their customers and then post those notebooks on their websites. Customers can browse and interact with those notebooks just as they would through Springpad’s web and mobile apps, and if they find something they like they can save those notebooks into their own Springpad libraries.

For instance, one of Springpad’s new partners, Glamour, is using embedded notebooks to aggregate everything from beauty tips and shopping list suggestions to specific articles on fashions or product pages. Customers never have to leave Glamour’s site to explore that notebook, but if they want to save the notebook it will be copied into a new or existing Springpad account. There the notebook lives on the user’s library – every time Glamour updates it, the customer’s digital copy reflects the new content.

Springpad co-founder and VP of Business Development Jeff Janer said that brands have long been taking advantage of social media and curation services to promote their content and products, but while Facebook and Pinterest generate an awful lot of traffic, there’s limited follow-through. For instance, many customers may “like” a brand’s Facebook profile, but there’s little chance they’ll return to it after the initial liking. Pinterest is a great way for brands to display their wares in a visually appealing way, but beyond the visual, there are few options for displaying other forms of content.

While embedded notebooks are initially targeted at companies  and advertising agencies that will pay Springpad for the service, Janer said they’re just a first step in the startup’s strategy to make all of its user-organized content portable. Right now a lot of loose information flows into Springpad, gets organized and then stays in Springpad. The company wants to encourage users to take those notebooks outside Springpad’s confines and show the world their organizational labors, Janer said.

Right now, anyone can embed a notebook into a Facebook page, but Janer said Springpad is working with blogging platforms and other social networks to increase its reach. Eventually Springpad hopes to make posting a notebook anywhere on the web as easy as embedding a YouTube video.

Springpad 4.0 isn’t quite a facelift of last year’s 3.0 upgrade, which effectively turned Springpad from a note-taking service into a social networking and collaboration tool. But it is supporting another nifty new feature: intent-based search. Springpad has created new search categories that parse a user’s content based on specific interests or activities.

For instance, if you want to be entertained, you can hit the “watch something” button and Springpad will dig up every movie or TV show you’ve ever “sprung” and display them in a menu. Any movie or show that is available instantly through Netflix will pop up on top. Movies that are available for rent or purchase on iTunes or Amazon will appear next. And finally showtimes and prices for films in the theater will appear at the bottom.

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Startup Padlet, which has been simultaneously enrolled in Y Combinator and ed tech accelerator Imagine K-12, has created software to fill that hole. It lets people quickly create an online “wall” for sharing any kind of content, from text to images to video, and allows them to collaborate on the creation of that content as well. It first launched as Wallwisher in 2008, but re-launched the product in October and changed its name to Padlet in January. The founders, who will be on stage Tuesday at Y Combinator’s Demo Day on Tuesday, say the site has seen 30 percent month-over-month growth for the last seven months and has had 300,000 users and 750,000 visitors in the last 30 days.

While the site has been open to anyone, co-founder Pranav Piyush said a number of teachers have been using it to post class files and encourage student collaboration. “There’s no obvious answer to what a school teacher should use that’s fun and collaborative,” he said. “We’ve set out to find the easiest way to put stuff on the Web.”

On Padlet.com, users create a “wall” with its own URL with one click. Then they can choose how public or private they want it to be and how much control they want to give others. They can add content and change the design with a drag-and-drop interface. A teacher could use it to share and collect images and video related to a history lesson or friends could use it to share memories and pictures from a recent trip. The NYC Public Advocate’s Office used Padlet to collect online tributes for the first responders to Hurricane Sandy.

Other online collaboration tools exist but they tend to provide slightly different functionality. Google Docs, for example, let people share and collaborate around documents and spreadsheets, but they tend to focus on text (you can share images and drawings but not in an integrated way). Scoot & Doodle, a new startup that recently raised funding from Pearson and others, encourages online collaboration, but via Google Hangouts and with more of a focus on real-time face-to-face communication. Dropbox is great for sharing files with a group but not really built for group content production. In education, teachers could use social platforms like Edmodo and Schoology to share content and collaborate, although those sites are intended for far more than one-off collaborative projects).

While the basic product is free, Piyush said the company is piloting premium versions for schools and corporate clients. The startup also envisions opening up the platform to third-party developers to create a paid marketplace of add-ons for further customizing with backgrounds, themes and other tools.

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“When I first met [board member and partner at Benchmark] Matt Cohler, he asked what I really wanted to do,” he says.” I explained that my goal is to win a Nobel Prize.”

And he’s not kidding. The Harvard-trained virologist and computer scientist put a fast track medical career on hold in order to concentrate on building a website that he hopes can change the face of science. The reason is simple.

“I was on my way to becoming a professor, I’d published a lot,” he tells me, speaking from the company’s headquarters in Berlin. “But I noticed that I wanted more. Sure, I could be changing one discipline, but I wanted to change more than that… and I think if you can make it easier to share research, then it can change the world.”

In the simplest terms, ResearchGate is referred to as “Facebook for scientists” — a social network where professional researchers can share their work, communicate with each other and ask questions. But because it focuses on sharing knowledge, rather than activity, it’s probably got more in common with the likes of Quora or Stack Overflow.

And it’s proven very popular, with 1.4 million users from around the planet, sharing ideas and talking to each other about their work in fields from biology to physics to social science. By asking questions of each other, scientists are able to identify the academics who can help them, and perhaps avoid constantly reinventing the wheel.

“People tend not to share information on experiments that didn’t work,” says Madisch. “It means we end up making mistakes that other people have made already.”

The ability to learn from each other is what has driven ResearchGate’s popularity — and that popularity is something that has convinced investors including Founders Fund, which has just formally announced its participation in a series B round. Although the amount of money is not being disclosed, it comes on top of previous funding from the likes of Benchmark and Accel.

They all see value in a service that can capture the collaborative trend in a huge industry that — by and large — remains stuck in silos.

Online collaboration in science may still be in its infancy, but it is a powerful, growing trend — driven by the same technologies that underpin social networking and business collaboration. In a story last year, I spoke to several people who were at the cutting edge of ‘open science’, a loose movement trying to break down some of the barriers and take advantage of the online tools now available.

The internet, now an indelible part of our lives, allows like-minded individuals to seek one another out and share vast amounts of raw data. Researchers can lay claim to an idea not by publishing first in a journal (a process that can take many months) but by sharing their work online in an instant.

And while the rapidly decreasing cost of previously expensive technical procedures has opened up new directions for research, there is also increasing pressure for researchers to cut costs and deliver results. The economic crisis left many budgets in tatters and governments around the world are cutting back on investment in science as they try to balance the books. Open science can, sometimes, make the process faster and cheaper, showing what one advocate, Cameron Neylon, calls “an obligation and responsibility to the public purse”.

And given the trillions of dollars pumped into scientific research each year, it is perhaps no surprise that investors think ResearchGate is on the threshold of a major opportunity. But still, there is a serious question about how the site makes the sort of money that venture funds require — a point made recently in a piece in The Economist which dubbed Madisch “Professor Facebook.”

At the moment, most of those users are in their 20s. Their favourite activity is to ask each other questions about practical research problems, from DNA-sequencing techniques to statistical tricks. They are also busy reading each other’s papers: more than 10m have been uploaded.

Scientists whose reputations are established may be more hesitant, though, and not just because they are set in their ways. Science is not only about collaboration but also about competition. This limits what people are willing to share.

So far the company has been paid to build out some private versions that can operate behind the firewall inside institutions, and it is also looking into the possibility of job listings, reputation management and contextual advertising as revenue streams.

Board member Simon Levene, who is a venture partner at Index but put independent angel money into the company in its previous funding round, says that he sees a great opportunity to shake things up.

“The reason I fell in love with ResearchGate is that, in my opinion, the market for academic research in science is broken and ripe for disruption,” he says. “The dream of the web for Tim Berners-Lee was to allow researchers to collaborate, but the irony is that it hasn’t worked out that way.”

Madisch accepts that not everybody is convinced — many scientists simply refuse to share their knowledge, since they need to boost their own careers in order to receive funding. But like any good researcher, the 31-year-old relies on data to back up his response. Yes, the user base is young, but it’s skewing older as time goes on.

And then he pulls out a piece of anecdotal evidence to show precisely what he means.

“When I started ResearchGate, I was in Germany and my professor — 62 years old and a distinguished academic who has published more than a thousand papers — wouldn’t let me divide my time between research and the company,” he says. “He didn’t believe that scientists would do this, that they would share their ideas and answer questions about their work.”

“Six weeks ago I noticed that he’d signed up for ResearchGate.”

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In a press release, Teambox said that private elements “allows users to conduct private conversations within a project that can be restricted to certain individuals. This new functionality is ideal for internal teams that want to bring outside vendors into Teambox for project and task management, but also need the flexibility of private internal conversations.”

This is an eye opening combination of a collaboration tool supporting modern organizational practice – creating circles of communication. Transparency design choices are explicitly in the project management mix with the addition of private elements. Information can be transparent across all members of project — or not — as deemed appropriate by the project administrators and the task at hand. Karl Goldfield, Teambox vice president of sales and marketing, explained it to me with an example:

Wedding planners, like an Internet marketing lead, or any other general contractor, have lots of clients and subcontractors.  When it comes to certain things, you want open collaboration. A wedding planner doesn’t always want to filter [limit] information to clients and the florists or the caterers they work with. They invite the client to a project where they understand the different subcontractors they  can work with (for example, seeing all the information for all four possible caterers) — they all get to see things and discuss. Everyone is in this open place focused on working on what the client wants.

Think about that: The client, and all the bidding florists, caterers, etc. get to see the information from the others, though this level of transparency isn’t fixed. The conversation can go private, tighter circles can be created, perhaps as the bids come in, or perhaps only after particular bids are accepted.

I asked Karl about the response from the subcontractors.  Are they comfortable with this cross-organization, cross-competitor transparency?

Karl responded with a perfect Enterprise 2.0 answer:

People can already contact a [competing] caterer and find their pricing — and if [the competitor] wants to keep it private they can just not answer. But, if I’m a good wedding planner and work with a specific set of caterers and do 100 weddings a year and 25 percent of the projects come to you — I’m the caterer’s best buddy — even if 75 percent of the business goes to others. The caterer knows the final decision (the clients’) will be personal preference. This isn’t a question of the technology system, but one of the relationship.

Makes sense to me. Yes, I’d be giving information to my competitors, but I’m also learning through the process. If this work process brings us into a community, the benefits may outweigh any costs. We all become better caterers or florists.  We learn our own competitive advantages.  We have community members to cross-sell with and or to ask for help.

But not all wedding planners, Internet marketing teams, or other Teambox users may understand these community issues straight away. I asked Karl how Teambox helps people come to understand this. How do you help users learn how to manage all these options and strategic choices?

My goal for 2012 is an education campaign. Online videos, best-case scenarios. Eight to 10 core [types of users with demos on] how to make Teambox the central resource for communication…. We want to find ways of keeping the noise off your plate.

Karl had me think of two different types of project collaborators to clarify the information noise issue. The first is a highlevel manager who doesn’t want details. This manager just wants to follow a dashboard and a timeline — no drill down — as clean and quiet an interface as possible. That manager wouldn’t be part of the private elements until he or she asked for details and then the manager could be invited in. The second type might want a more micro understanding of how the project is going. It would take too much time to play middle-man with this manager so nothing in the project should be private; let him or her see everything as it happens.

Karl also talked about the evolution of how Teambox is used and how this helps people come to understand the value in their particular setting. Initially they might manage Teambox information completely from their email inbox (using Teambox’s notification and response systems). As their use becomes greater they will find value in managing Teambox content from the activity stream. But Karl suggests that you don’t push this approach to happen overnight. Let circle techniques evolve as use grows.

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My students come to class straight from their jobs at a variety Silicon Valley firms large and small. They are required to do team projects, and  much of the team work is virtual. They tell me they have the following requirements for collaboration tools:

• Privacy. While they are interested in sharing examples from work, they don’t want these examples available publicly.
• Threaded/searchable Q&A with the answers coming from both students and faculty.
• Ability to share relevant links and files for commentary. Basically Facebook for the classroom.
• A simple, clear calendar with readings and due dates available at a glance (in other words, project management tools).

And there’s also my additional requirement: On-line quizzes with a gradebook that supports the U.S. regulations for educational privacy.

While all faculty at my university have access to Angel (a Blackboard course management system), in my classes, I’m happy to beta-test student-built tools, and I find especially interesting the simplicity offered by these solutions. An effective collaboration application is not about how many features the tool has — it’s about getting the task done.

Acceledge

This term I used Acceledge, founded by one of my students, as my main course management tool instead of Angel. It’s a custom-built tool, based on the open-source Moodle learning platform. Its simplicity is what drew me to say “yes” to the trial. Because of the customizations added on top of the Moodle base, the students only saw the features they told me they needed — there was no wiki, and no deep detail around each topic.

Piazza

Pooja Nath, Founder and CEO of Piazza, was still an MBA student at Stanford when she approached me two years ago about trying her Q&A tool. From the Piazza site:

I started Piazza so every student can have that opportunity to learn from her classmates. Whether she’s too shy to ask, whether she’s working alone in her dorm room, or whether her few friends in her class don’t know the answer either.

I want Piazza to be a remedy for students who are not given the intellectual space, freedom, or support to fulfill their educational potential and desire for learning. And I want Piazza to empower instructors to have a positive, personal impact on more students.

Piazza is designed to connect students, TAs, and professors so every student can get help when she needs it — even at 2AM.

Again, the simplicity and student-focus is what made me say “yes” to the trial. The only repeat complaint I’ve had from students is about the quality of some the questions posted by their classmates and the fact that Piazza is not an integral part of the overall course management tool. Both my students and I find huge benefit in the control they have over when and how they see questions.

Coursekit

The University of Pennsylvania is apparently feeling the same push by students to take control of their collaboration space. Coursekit is the result of frustration on the part of Wharton undergraduate Joseph Cohen (cofounder & CEO). From the Coursekit site:

We started Coursekit out of frustration with existing school software.

We’ve re-imagined what a class should look like online. We give instructors and students amazingly designed tools to manage their courses — gradebook, calendaring, file management — and we make it unbelievably easy to interact with one another.

We believe that there’s a lot more to class than lecture. Post links, videos, files. Start discussions. Write a blog post. Ask about an assignment. Classes are meant to be social, but they rarely are. We’re changing that.

There is much to be learned from the priorities of students with multiple courses (projects) functioning in self-managing teams. They aren’t looking for bells and whistles; they are looking to simplify and be effective. We can all learn from these students’ experiences and perspectives: Translate academic team project to basic team work, gradebook to performance appraisal, and you have a web working environment with needs similar to those of most organizations.

Take the students’ perspective for the moment — frankly, we are all students in this quickly-changing environment — how could simplification enhance your projects? What is the minimum viable product for your setting?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Harry Wood

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The web conferencing market has changed considerably since our 2007 WWD roundup, but here are a few options that we’ve covered in the past.

• Fuze Meeting. This service is entirely browser-based, and offers many features, although it doesn’t have a free option.
• Skype. Simon reminded us that this is a good alternative for small meetings, and it has both video and screen-sharing capabilities.
• Yugma. This app includes some sophisticated features, but still offers a free version.
• Yuuguu. Doriano liked this IM-based service because it doesn’t require those you’re sharing screens with to download or install anything.

Here are some of the other solutions available. Prices, features and usability vary greatly.

• Adobe Web Conferencing
• Live Meeting
• GoToMeeting
• WebEx
• Zoho Meeting

What will you use to replace Dimdim?

Image courtesy Flickr user vivevans

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