It was great at CeBIT 2010

Gnowsis.com presented our product, "follow the links, be Cluug" at CeBIT 2010. It has been a great event for us and for the happy people who are now Cluug alpha users.The first day of CeBIT, Tuesday the 2nd March 2010, marked the launch of Cluug as a minimum product: it works, it is useful, and you can start linking your information in an easy and intuitive way. Since then we have been open for alpha users, and we take your feedback to improve the product. There is a big roadmap ahead now towards the beta and to the release of the first public version. 

So CeBIT was your first chance to get to learn Cluug. 50 people signed up right on spot, and since then the user numbers are continually growing. Today we are at 73 signed up users, and they give a lot of feedback which we use to improve it. Also, I will go out in the next weeks and interview more people about their personal information management practices and how Cluug can help - if you are interested how others organize themselves and want to chat with me, write to gnowsis. We also had great conversations with roughly 200 people about Cluug and got in touch with 36 interested companies to close deals or go into a deeper cooperation. If we forgot to contact you, contact us. People offering project management systems as SaaS were interested to offer Cluug as a plugin, so we will follow these ideas up to bring Cluug into the project management system of your choice.

Two gnowsis people have been at CeBIT, Martina Gallova who is director of marketing, and myself, Leo Sauermann, I am the CEO. As a startup we had to save money so we stayed at friends - many thanks to E and K from L3S for their hospitality, you are great buddies, like all the other partners we had in the NEPOMUK project! All pictures from CeBIT are here. The gnowsis.com team worked together hard to make this happen. Bernhard Schandl and the developers were alert to fix any bugs, but for the first days, Cluug.com ran without any glitch. The indexing server had some hickups on Friday, and the registration form needed some love, which was fixed by us quickly. Great.

Many people were interested in Cluug, also some journalists.  So, there will be more articles about Cluug in the future. Nicole Kobie from ITPRO wrote about Cluug: Semantic scanner links up documents, contacts and more to help you better manage your desktop. She covered some of the interesting features it has and the NEPOMUK history it came from. 

Another important aspect of CeBIT is partying: the fair is also one of the biggest IT parties in Europe. Especially exhibitors use the event to stay in touch with key accounts and other exhibitors. We had our own booth party and gave away one original Vienniese Sacher-cake to our friends from DFKI.

Stephan "computational culture" Baumann made sure that we went to the right concert by "Die Sterne" (yes, they have rock concerts at CeBIT, unbelievable) and we also had a lot of fun at various booth parties. Greetings go to GPSAuge (a company that started like us with two people and a small booth 10 years ago and today is an international bestseller. They have a very nice booth, and music loudspeakers built into the booth for partying - thats understatement) and Bayern Innovativ, who went berserk at their own party. Greetings to ChocoBrain, Spectralmind, SemVox, Yocoy, SLS, P.Solutions, and all the other lovely people Martina and I did meet.

So - we went to CeBIT with a brand-new easy-to-use product that helps people remember. Every day in the morning we listened to TheSteve for motivation, and it worked out. Thank you for your positive feedback so far, sign up to the newsletter or to the blog to stay in touch, if you got curious, join the other alpha users.