Freshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich

The quest for the “killer app” is like the search for the Holy Grail: irresistible and never-ending. Of course, like website UIs and Michelle Obama’s wardrobe, everyone has an opinion about what it will be. Many think the answer is communications. I enjoyed a recent interview with Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun, on this subject. You can watch (or read) his full interview. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

“One thing though: every killer app on the Internet, every success story on the Internet entirely without exception has been about communication. The killer app of the Internet is people there is always people I don’t think any reason to think that it is not going to be people, email, the web, lightweight publishing, chat, IM, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Flick, Youtube, it’s all about finding new ways of sharing with other people. We have got all these communication channels and a couple of centuries ago to talk and be in the same room and the phone came along and then eventually email came along, and then chat came along and IRC and IM and Twitter and until Twitter existing nobody could have predicted that you needed a thing like that. But now for many of us it’s an essential part of our daily work environment and how many other communication channels that we don’t know we need are going to be invented and quick become essential. So I think that we can safely predict that as long as the Internet grows, its primary effect will be to facilitate easier and richer communications between human beings, the infrastructure we use to build that effect is to be invented.”

In general, I’d have to agree. But, in answer to the specific question – “the web’s next killer app” – my opinion is (Ta Da!) it’s search. “Boring” you may be saying or “Google = search = game over” you may be thinking. However, if you haven’t been following the subject very closely, there has been a tremendous surge in search. My nGenera colleague, Espen Andersen recently led one of our bi-monthly webinars for Global 2000 CIOs and their teams on the subject of search developments and futures which was very popular. Espen’s writings on the subject and associated developments are a good indicator of the high degree of innovation in the field.

One Austin company that is on the trail of search innovation is Llesiant, led by Mitch Scherr. As first reported in AustinStartup.com, the company took in over $4 million in funding earlier this year.

I first ran into the company nearly a year ago, in late Q2 2008. At the time, Glyn Meek was serving as an advisor to the company and dropped by one afternoon to give us a look at the product. We immediately loved what we saw with Relevance. Don’t let the misdirection of hard-to-categorize, can-use-it-for-anything language put you off.

What we liked was the absolutely blazing speed and the amazing ability to organize multi-source data in a single comprehensive dashboard. We were most taken with the enterprise version of demo that Glynn showed us for a large oil company, that had the commercial equivalent of data that you see in Llesiant’s public sector screen shots.

The good news is, after much development and boot-strapping effort, Llesiant finally appears to have some customer traction and we look forward to hearing much more from the Llesiant team (and, hopefully, some the other novel start-ups focused on search) in the future.