The X1 Blog

The Limits of Memory

In reading Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell’s great book Total Recall, there were certain passages that struck us as directly relevant to the problems that we are trying to solve here at X1.  Granted, the MyLifeBits project is a fascinating and ambitious study that we won’t try to reduce to a few words in our blog post here!  Much simpler, some of the language is virtually identical to what we hear from our users on a daily basis.  Total Recall imagines a time when we have a full digital record of our entire life, in minute detail.  The authors’ stress that such “e-memory” is less intensive than what we are limited to by nature as it allows us to rely on limited pieces of recollection, with confidence that the full corpus of information attached to the recollection is immediately retrievable with just a few key strokes. 

The X1 Professional Client, from its very beginning, was architected to address the “findability” problem, with the important presumption that task-oriented search of personal information is fundamentally different than searching the web.  Heavy users of email see upwards of 200-300 emails per day, and typically receive even more as members of distribution lists.  What is it that our memory catches and holds onto months and years later?  Is it a random, but significant word of text within the body of the email?  A net present value figure within an excel attachment?  Or perhaps it’s simply the sender’s last name and a faint idea that the information was sent at some point in late 2008. 

It has always been our opinion that the speed of a business-related search, at an end-user level, is paramount – precisely because of the way our minds are trained to recall information.  The application must be architected to allow the individual to wheel and pivot during the search, refine mid-typing, sort on various fields, and drill down where necessary.  In short, a search experience that effectively renders the file tree approach to information retrieval irrelevant.  We spoke with a long-time X1 user yesterday who lamented the process of setting up a folder file structure for a co-worker in conjunction with a new initiative at work.  “I haven’t had to rely on folders for years – there is simply no need to do so with X1.  I had forgotten how archaic and time-consuming a process it is.” 

The “E-Memory Revolution” that Gordon and Jim write about is certainly upon us, and there is no shortage of revolutionary and complex products and technologies currently available to help us deal with the overwhelming stream of information we face in today’s world.  What do you think?  How do you remember the incredibly valuable communications and work product produced in both your current and prior jobs? 

PowerPoint: Loved or Hated, But Rarely Ignored

Elizabeth Bumiller’s piece in the New York Times last week, “We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint”, was at one point mid-week the most read and emailed article on nytimes.com.  While the focus of the article was the U.S. military’s reliance on PowerPoint, response in the comments section and throughout the blogosphere quickly shifted to a more general discussion of its overall utility.  Suffice to say, Microsoft’s presentation application is so deeply embedded in corporate workflow and culture that any commentary generates a fair amount of reaction, both positive and negative.   Candidly, this is no different than the typical chatter we hear within X1 on a daily basis, both from our customers and our own workforce.  We are heavily dependent on PowerPoint for a full spectrum of uses, from internal meetings to analyst presentations to board meetings.   

As David Silverman stated in his response to the article on the HBR blog, PowerPoint presentations are typically “distributed far and wide” after the initial creation and meeting, leading to an instinct to cram a massive amount of information in each deck.   The result?  There is a ton of corporate IP sitting dormant in PowerPoint archives, both as attachments in email inboxes and within personal folders on individual employees’ computers.  Think of the time it takes to create just a single PowerPoint presentation, and the corresponding salary costs necessary to support this time.  Now multiply this figure hundreds, if not thousands, of times to address each new presentation and corresponding round of edits.  Multiply again over the thousands of individual employees working with PowerPoint in a large organization.  Pretty large figure, right?

This is precisely the type of problem that X1 was specifically architected to address.    As a result of the inevitability of information overload, “findability” is the key to unlocking the valuable information stashed away in email inboxes and disparate file folders.  Our product’s interface allows an individual to sort on a file type, here .ppt, and find an updated result set with each keystroke, all with a full preview of the PowerPoint presentation directly next to the search results.  We will not debate the value of PowerPoint (we use it a ton) nor will we take issue with the argument that it is overused.  It is difficult to argue, however, with the incredible amount of thought and analysis sitting in PowerPoint presentations scattered throughout the typical organization.  And it’s just as hard to argue that PowerPoint will be going away anytime soon. 

Is your organization doing everything you can to capture this latent IP?   Download a free trial of the X1 Professional Client and discover the helpful data and analysis in long-forgotten PowerPoint slides in your inbox and files.

X1 Selected as a 2010 FiReStarter Company

We are proud to announce that X1 has been selected as one of 12 FiReStarter companies for 2010.  Strategic News Services’ FiReStarter company selections were “based on their potential to bring positive change to the world” and will be showcased at the annual Future in Review technology conference on May 11-14^th in Palos Verdes, CA.  SNS is now in its 8^th year of operating the FiRe Conference, which the Economist calls “the best technology conference in the world.”  

We want to thank Mark Anderson and SNS for the honor and look forward to discussing our unique approach to dealing with information overload at the individual level. 

Brainstorming is a process as well as an event

With all the time you’re getting back from using X1, there’s something that you and every last member of your organization should clear your desks to do: Think. While it seems simple and intuitive, it often isn’t.

Many individuals and organizations are faced with the problem of maintaining a steady stream of fresh ideas. For some knowledge workers, the daily deluge of digital information makes it impossible to ever feel up-to-date on their task lists.  Thoughtful reflection, whether directly in response to a particularly vexing problem or with the express intent of designing new and innovative solutions, typically takes a backseat to the burning “to-do” item of the day. Some organizations, however, recognize this inherent problem and set aside specific time for fresh thought. For others, idea generation has taken on a formal group process under the title of “brainstorming.” Those of us with exposure to formal brainstorming sessions know the fundamentals: clear everybody’s schedule for an afternoon, appoint or hire a moderator and note taker, and let the games begin.

The problem with most brainstorming sessions, however, is that they often aren’t conceived, staffed, or organized very well. Here now, five brainstorming tips learned the hard way.

• If you’re hiring an outside facilitator, pick someone who truly understands your organization, your mission, and your brand. If your facilitator has a cookie-cutter, undifferentiated approach to your session then it’s likely the meeting will be dominated by his ego and not idea generation by your staff. As you would with any other hire, talk to the facilitator’s references.

• Direct your facilitator to tease out the opinions of the “lower-on-the-totem-pole thinkers” and neutralize the traditionally louder voices. One strategy is to split the brainstorming into smaller groups to encourage active participation by all members.

• If one or more staffers begin steering the discussion off the rails, encourage your facilitator to send that aspect of the discussion to the “parking lot.” It’s a nicer way of saying you’re “tabling” the topic and also implies that someone is keeping a list of parking lot topics.

• Use exercises that play on different strengths within your team. Some team members will seize every opportunity to express an opinion, while others will be more comfortable with written exercises, such as “Take ten minutes and tell us what our company’s brand means to you.”

• Make sure to follow up on the brainstorming session. The failure to follow up on a day of brainstorming (actually typing up all of the session notes and reporting back to the team) is more common that you might think, and it wastes the valuable group time that was spent. Within a week, have someone organize and distribute the notes, and schedule a session to present the findings to the team.

Give everyone copies of the notes, discuss potential next steps for any of the ideas that were generated during the session, and perhaps most importantly, let your staff know that brainstorming is a process as well as an event: Designate a point person to receive emails from staffers who may have even more ideas provoked by the brainstorming. And encourage staffers to try to use the word “brainstorm” in their messaging – it’ll give X1 a keyword to sink its teeth into if some of those great ideas go astray.

Do you know what's in your inbox? Inbox usage grows in 2009

According to a 2009 report from Deloitte:

“During 2009, on average office workers are expected to send more than 160 messages daily and check their inboxes more than 50 times, in all dedicating up to two hours each day to email.”

With an average of 160 message sent daily, information is becoming increasingly staggered. The days of lengthy, thought-out emails are gone. Today, most emails are short, individual thoughts, sent when they reach top-of-mind. What this means is that potentially important information can easily be lost in long email threads or simply pushed out of view in your inbox.  

Due to increases in server space and companies allocating more memory for emails, the impetus to clean out our inboxes has disappeared. Everything can be kept, but with that increased freedom comes the herculean task of finding the right email at the right time.

Leo Babauta at Zen Habits is still a proponent of purging the inbox and minimizing the amount of emails you're left with by using structured organization methods. But how do you know what you’re NOT going to need? The best solution is to organize, add more metadata, and refrain from deleting potentially valuable information. By putting your emails in folders, flagging tasks, and adding items to lists you increase the ways in which you can search and consequently find the message you’re looking for.  Of course, many X1 users have abandoned the practice of putting emails and documents into a folder structure because they can always "X1 it" to find exactly what they are looking for, regardless of its location!

Kryder, Moore, and You

As the world of computer and computing powers develop, they are bound by two laws that are working against your productivity. These laws allow you to save and have access to every email you ever send and every file you ever create, while eliminating the need to delete anything. The first is Moore’s law and the second is Kryder’s law. 

Moore’s law is concerned with hardware and processing power while Kryder’s law addresses storage issues. Together they predict the continual growth and development of computers. 

What does this mean for you? In the very near future – within the next few years even – the digital landscape, be it a personal computers or cloud computing, may offer more processing power and storage than most single users could possibly ever use.

In 1965 Intel’s cofounder, Gordon Moore, published a paper stating that the number of transistors that can be placed on a circuit doubles every two years. There is no upper limit to Moore’s law – the number of transistors on a circuit will never cease to increase.  Since 1965 Moore’s observation has proven absolutely true.

Years later came a hard drive heavy weight, Mark Kryder, who fathered his own law. Kryder’s law is like a rocket car to Moore’s horse and buggy. Mark Kryder is credited as providing the impetus for the amazing 1,000-fold increase in hard drive space over the past 15 years, easily deserving the honor of being Kryder’s law’s namesake. Kryder’s law explains the continual growth in storage bits on a hard drive. His goal is to affordably get a terabyte worth of storage on a single square-inch magnet hard drive.   

Together, these two laws describe the upward trajectory of computing power and storage. The problem is that as storage becomes larger and cheaper, we are presented with less incentive to stay organized and encouraged – a la Gmail – to never delete anything ever again.  You might already find yourself holding on to files and emails you never would have kept even 3 years ago, just because you can.

As computers and servers become archives for everything you’ve ever done on a computer, we’re faced with increased challenges to find everything. We download attachments to different folders, accidently save things in the wrong place, and spend more time than it’s worth tracking down rogue files in the endless warehouse that our computers have become.

It is important to create a digital business environment that is accessible not only to a single user, but also to any users that might be brought on in the future. When making your decision to store data locally, on a server, or in the cloud, consider how easy it will be to find a single item in a vast data system. This is a key consideration especially if you work with a number of people, collaborating using the same files and information, as more and more information will amass on your hard drives very quickly. 

The question is: With everything at your fingertips, will your work flow slow you down?  

Release of New X1 Professional Client v.6.7

We’re proud to announce the newest version of the X1 Professional Client: v.6.7. The new release includes a number of key enhancements and bug fixes. v.6.7 makes X1 faster and more usable for one reason: to make you more productive so you save time.

When X1 is faster and smarter it makes you faster and smarter. With that in mind we set out to make improvements to search speeds, content indexing, add more actionable items for different file types, and increase usability. Once you start using v.6.7, you’ll see the difference not only in X1’s performance, but also in yours.

Features

X1 is more versatile than ever to better integrate not only with the way you work but also with the tools you work with. v.6.7 now supports removable disks. If you attach an external hardrive, flashdrive, or any other removable memory device, v.6.7 will include its content in your index. When the removable drive is ejected, X1 still includes those files in the index and will update them next time the device is plugged in. 

V.6.7 also supports RSS feeds. So now any RSS feed you subscribe to benefits from X1's premier search. You can now index and search RSS feeds to find things faster than ever before. When you find what you're looking for within the RSS feed, X1will show you a live web preview in the preview pane.

Besides RSS feeds, flashdrives, and removable hard drives adding more information to our computers, the amount of emails we’re presented with day-to-day is increasing and our inboxes are getting bigger by the hour. We’ve enhanced X1’s real time indexing of Microsoft Outlook to make finding new emails faster. Additionally, v.6.7 expands the scope of real time indexing to cover your entire mailbox and non-default profiles.

For Lotus Notes users, X1’s v.6.7 release includes more functionality. We’ve improved the “Move/Copy” post search actions. When you copy an email to a target folder X1 no longer links to the email but instead it now creates a distinct copy within the folder. The move action has more flexibility, as well, by allowing you to move an email from its source to a new folder or creating a linked copy of an email when moving it from a view to a new folder.

X1 also includes update notifications to let you know of any new X1 releases. This update notification system will also alert you when your registration key is set to expire.

Performance

Under-the-hood improvements make v.6.7 faster and more stable. We’ve improved X1’s speed all around. Some key performance issues include decreasing the time it takes search results to be returned, reducing the time required to display the results pane,  and sped up the column search. We’ve also enhanced the search panes and improved previewing zip files to let you interact with your search results better. X1 v.6.7 moves faster to let you spend more time working and less time searching.

v.6.7 is also more stable in different digital environments than ever before. v.6.7 is now Microsoft certified for Windows 7, and many of the problems that previous versions had when used with Windows 7 have been eliminated.  Furthermore, the new X1 addresses a number of bugs that caused intermittent downtime in the product.

For a complete list of feature enhancements and bug fixes read the complete Release Notes for v.6.7.