Rael Dornfest, photograph by Duncan Davidson
Last year I met up with Rael Dornfest and the team from Values of N, a Portland-based startup which says its mission is "to help people collaborate and get organized". Their main product, Stikkit, was just about to launch, and they were both enthusiastic and interesting.
Stikkit's premise is fairly simple - it parses short notes in order to create address book entries, to-dos and calendar events. It's developed a lot in the past few months and I've been using it on and off with some success.
Now they've announced another forthcoming product, I Want Sandy, aimed at helping you organise your email. Although I had a horrorshow of Clippy in my mind, it seems I'm mistaken: the essential idea seems to be that you copy "Sandy" in on your emails, and it (like Stikkit) parses the data for useful information. Of course, I haven't used IWS yet, and so I've no idea whether it will work.
But I like VoN's concept of trying and build intelligent software that integrate into the way you already work.
In a world where everyone is trying to come up with the next killer app, there's a good argument to be made that we shouldn't be trying conquer the world - but applying some intelligence to the apps we've already got.
