TakingAIIM

Enterprise 2.0 – It all came down to CIT

Last week the annual Enterprise 2.0 Conference was once again held in my home town, Boston. Of course I attended. How could I not; hot topic, personal and professional interest, and the show was within walking distance from Information Architected headquarters.

Like thousands of my colleagues, I came, I saw, I commented. 

So, why has it taken me so long to blog about it? Well, in addition to the usual – “I have been busy” excuses (truthful as they are), I also am learning how to balance microblogging and blogging. My more prolific than usual use of Twitter while at the conference kept the burning need to post an entire blog entry at bay. I am beginning to learn the complementary nature between Twitter and blogging. But more on that later.

Let me start by stating that some excellent commentary and insights have already been posted via Twitter. If you missed them you can retrieve them via the tag #e2conf. Additionally, there have been some very insightful blog posts form friends and colleagues such as Larry Hawes, Doug Cornelius, Oliver Marks , Stowe Boyd, Ron Miller and Bill Ives.

So the purpose of this post is not to rehash the comments I made in Twitter, or to restate (most) of what has already been documented in the blogs I listed above. Here, I share a very high level summation of the event.  I have pondered in retrospect what it all came down to, for me and can summarize it in an acronym – CTI.

CTI? - read on

ECM Writers Summit Looks at Web 2.0, Text Analytics, SharePoint, Cloud Computing and e-Discovery

I have Twittered about it, as have many others in attendance - but now its time for the "beyond the 140 words-at-a-time" input.

Last week I had the distinct honor of moderating the 2nd Annual Content
Management & Archiving Writers Summit (#ECMWriters), sponsored by EMC Documentum.  (I was also the moderator of last year's Summit.)

Over 30 industry analysts, consultants and practitioners assembled in New York City to discuss the current state of:

• Content Management in the Cloud
• Text Analytics
• Web 2.0
• SharePoint
• e-Discovery.

Those in attendance included Ralph Losey, Ron Miller, Bryant Duhon, Dan Woods, Jerome Wendt, Fern Halper, Gabe Acevedo, Virginia Backaitis, Geoffrey Bock, John Webster, Annette Weller-Collison, Theodora Blanchfield, Kemal Carr,  Vincent Berdot, Leonid Chernyak, Yuval Dror, Fred Van Der Molen, Philippe Niewbourg, Marta Oldani, Markus Gross, and Daniel Alguacil.

Additionally, the group was rounded out by several EMC strategists and leaders:  Mark Lewis, Whitney Tidmarsh, Razmik Abnous,  Matt Coblentz, and Marko Sillanpaa.  (I apologize for the inevitable omission of others who were there, whose name I fail to recall.)

With such a crowd, you can imagine the activity level. The room never went silent. The day was structured around the 5 topics listed above, each initiated by a formal but short presentation, and followed by open discussion and debate.

There was a subtle difference from last year, with discussion much more focused on business - less on technology, per se. With few exceptions, the discussion focused on real world business applications and case studies.  In this regard, the group often concurred that the change in the market has been subtle and more evolutionary of late.  Many of the technologies we focused on, from text analytics to SharePoint (soem even argued that the cloud was the latest iteration of time-sharing/ondemand/SaaS), have been available for several years, but the group felt that it was within the last year or so that their application within a business setting was being realized and appreciated beyond IT.  We agreed this was a positive sign of market maturity - though there is still a ways to go.

A major exception was Cloud computing, which we agreed is still a technical value proposition, but one whose value can be appealing to the business manager (in terms of greater agility, lower costs, and greener processing)

Razmik Abnous led this part of the discussion, and he continuously brought the conversation back to the business impact Cloud computing could have on ECM.  The group concurred that there is an erroneous preponderance of thought in the market that cloud computing is an all-or-nothing situation.  Razmik felt it was important to appreciate that in reality ECM can be deployed flexibly in a cloud, supporting many different architectures. The underlying ECM application, for example,  could reside in the cloud but the content may not.  Ron Miller shared an example of the US Military who is aggressively using cloud computing to enable dynamic creation of collaborative ECM sites around the globe, in an agile AND secure manner. (Miller learned of the program "from the horse's mouth - Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, at the recent MIT CIO Symposium).  Perhaps the strongest value statement discussed for ECM in the cloud was its potential as a connector, a means to provide transparent access across repositories and applications. 

Connection was a major theme of the day.  In fact, Mark Lewis kicked-off the day by stating connection was the single biggest challenge for ECM today. While the issue of content and application silos is not new, Mark proposed that other facets of ECM are fairly stable, and focus for both solution providers and business users needs to turn to connectivity.   While the group agreed, the message took on additional meaning (beyond bridging access to content silos), as the day proceeded.  As we proceeded through the various topics du jour, the degree to which these technologies need to be connected  in order to reach their full potential became apparent.  (The most powerful example of this was the role that text analytics can play within e-discovery.)

Fern Halper, who kicked-off the discussion on text analytics had just been at the Text Analytics Summit in Boston a week earlier.  Her presentation was peppered with real-world examples, garnered from the summit. Though some in our group started from a perspective that text analytics was still not practical, Fern's anecdotes, as well as those from others in the group, dispelled that sentiment.

Dan Woods provided a  review of the success of Web 2.0 and how it is ushering in Enterprise 2.0.  It was interesting for me to observe how some in the room (a room of ECM industry analysts and consultants), were still somewhat unclear on the role and value of Enterprise 2.0, separate and distinct from Web 2.0.   Dan's main message, which many, including myself concurred with is that although Web 2.0 has been somewhat successful in accelerating adoption of Enterprise 2.0, there is often a tendency for enterprise adopters to adopt not only the underlying technologies, but also metaphors, models, techniques and strategies. This often leads to failure. The subtle differences between communities, goals and objectives inside the firewall require a targeted fresh look at how technologies such as wikis, blogs and mashups should most effectively be used, and what it takes to foster user adoption.

There was much agreement among the participants concerning the state of SharePoint.  Bryant Duhon shared with the group a wealth of data regarding current SharePoint market trends.  Most users leverage SharePoint as a front-end to a larger ECM deployments. Nonetheless, given the extent of penetration across organizations, SharePoint is viewed as a near ubiquitous component of ECM platforms within organizations. While we agreed that SharePoint still lacked much functionality that keeps it from being an all encompassing ECM system,  we also agreed that Microsoft is likely to continue adding functionality, both through acquisition and development. There was much speculation regarding how far it might go, and how quickly. Some felt current utilization of FAST search indicated a poor understanding of search within Microsoft.  Others felt that Microsoft's roots and strengths are in consumer-oriented, small scale applications, and as such, SharePoint would remain a "good enough for the masses", "not good enough for the enterprise"  player in the market.  (This attitude of "good enough" is supported by the findings of a study I did on SharePoint on behalf of Oracle earlier this year.)  It was interesting to watch the body language and listen to the comments from the EMC Documentum folk in the room.  There were moments of defensiveness and squirming, but there were also moments of confidence and a clear strategy for how to complement SharePoint, and leverage the fact that it is raising the business community's awareness of ECM - albeit at a elementary level.  Perhaps it was Ralph Losey (an attorney and our e-Discovery discussion leader) who exhibited the greatest frustration with SharePoint providing a "good enough" approach to ECM.

Though SharePoint is not fully to blame, Losey felt that far too many organizations  under estimate what good content management is really all about, and that lack of adequate management leads to impractical, and perhaps unnecessary challenges for e-discovery. Ralph quipped that when it comes to ECM - most organizations have the "E" and "C" (there are Enterprises and they certainly know how to create Content), but there is little "M" (too few have solid management practices.) Losey challenged records management proponents in the room, stating that a good records practice is simply no longer enough.  In the electronic world - everything is potentially discoverable - record or not, and thus good management must apply to all content.  Ralph boldly proposed that the rising costs associated with e-Discovery are killing the American judicial system, but that this can change if technology (and practices) were properly leveraged.  Here, he challenged not the business users, however, but the technology providers. In his opinion, solution providers do a terrible job in educating legal and management executives on the benefits of ECM, and as a result technology goes much under utilized.

The discussion that ensued on e-Discovery was a great culmination of the day. E-discovery most obviously related to all the other topics of the day. E-discovery is most certainly more about business than IT.  Tools such as SharePoint and Web/Enterprise 2.0 are accelerating user command and speed of content creation, but offer little to nothing in the way of management.  The virtualization of ECM in the cloud is also an issue that needs careful scrutiny from a discovery standpoint before adoption. The power of text analytics within a e-Discovery system was recognized by everyone, but again some felt that there was more promise than results.  Most concurred that the big ECM solution providers do a poor job of incorporating text analytics techniques into their systems.

Someone (I forget who) shared how the field of ECM has become more exciting.  Following discussion on text analytics in particular,  it was observed "Library services and document management is boring, but  this, this is sexy." Yeah baby.

On a final note, it is highly likely that next year's ECM Writers Summit will focus much more on Documentum's upcoming CentreStage.  Both EMC and non-EMC participants several times alluded to CentreStage as a product that will have a significant impact on redefining state-of-the-industry, and will likely incorporate much of the technologies discussed throughout the day. So stay tuned - we'll see.

The Power of Search and Information Management (or lack thereof)

I am appalled, indeed outraged by the Chinese government's ongoing use of censorship and suppression of search tools, blogs and microblogging in order to "erase" the Tianamen Square Massacre  from the history of China. According to recent articles, there is an entire generation of Chinese who have no idea the event ever happened. 

But, while I am outraged, I am also encouraged by the very fact that such an action is a very powerful example of the power of search and information management. Unfortunately in this case it is a misuse of that power in reverse. 

There is a glimmer of hope -  according to one source, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Chinese to control the internet, Twitter users found alternative outlets in rival providers to evade the censors.

Power to the people and power to search and information management.

ECM Means Business

More than once I have blogged on the emergence of ECM as a specialized obscure practice within techno-geeks into the limelight of critical business applications. In my last blog post ("ECM It was the Best of Times, it Was the Worst of Times) I discussed how according to popular news sources, ECM was responsible for radically redefining entire industries such as newspaper publishing, leaving a wake of unemployed people and extinct businesses, but also at the same time promoting innovation and giving rise to new industries and burgeoning business models.

Today, in perusing The New York Times Business Section, I was again pleasantly impressed with the degree to which ECM makes business news. On page one (continued on pages 3 and 7) for example, the Times reports that Google is getting into the e-books business with a mission to take on Amazon and Kindle.

On page 4, The Times covers Google Wave, a "latest" Enterprise 2.0 application. (OK the Times may over state the value of Google Wave (see commentary on Dan Keldsen's blog), but ECM is nonetheless being covered in this reputable high profile business periodical. On the same page, Plastic Logic, a Kindle rival is also introduced, and e-heath records are positioned as a clear technology winner in the government's economic stimulus package.

Page 5, covers the Hearst Magazine's strategy for successfully balancing paper-based and web-based magazine publishing.

Page 6 includes an article about an author who used Twitter to test works in progress. Based on collaborative feed back the very first sentence of a novel was changed - amongst other edits. The eventual publication, was then specifically formatted for publishing on Kindle.

WOW - that's a lot of ink in one Business section devoted to ECM.  OK, maybe the articles do not directly draw the correlation to ECM, but the topics they discuss: e-publishing, dynamic content delivery, e-ink, digital paper, online collaboration - are topics ECM veterans such as myself are well familiar with, and have been heralding the power of for many years. With the broader business community now catching up, this should spell a bright future for ECM practitioners. Business executives hopefully will now better understand these concepts, and want to further explore the powers and capabilities of ECM technologies within their domain, to drive new business models, increase innovation, streamline costs and processes, increase effective communication ...

As I said in the last blog post, "this glimpse into what ECM can/will be is nothing short of amazing. I dare anyone to view this and tell me that we are not experiencing "the best of times." Indeed, to further quote Dickens, "we had everything before us..." 

But only those that "get it" will be able to leverage these capabilities before they morph from competitive advantage to simply a cost of doing business. Building such strategies is what we at Information Architected do with a passion - simply because it is so powerful and fun.

ECM - "It Was The Best of Times, It Was The Worst of Times"

Those that know me, as well as loyal readers of this blog, know that I am an ECM zealot – some say a nerd. So perhaps this post is just another ranting – but I felt compelled to reiterate myself because of certain current events.

I entitle this post with a familiar quote from Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, in which he describes the state-of-the-world at the time of the French Revolution:  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  Turbulent, but ripe with opportunity.  That is exactly where we are today in the world of ECM.

Over the last few weeks I was struck by the degree to which ECM is being talked discussed within the context of   the best of times/worst of times.

Consider content publishing. It continues to undergo major, some might say revolutionary redefinition. The future of newspapers is a primary example.  In the past week, The Boston Globe, my own hometown newspaper, was threatened with extinction. Are we in danger of losing high quality press coverage and editorial?

Modes of communication are rapidly morphing. In an earlier post I referenced a New York Times article that reported paper consumption in the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Canada and Finland actually went down (between 2000 and 2005), for the first time in history. In a more recent article, Ruport Murdoch and Arianna Huffington debated the future of online news  and whether readers of the electronic news will be willing to pay for access. Are we redefining the meaning of the word “free’ in the phrase “the free press”?

Recently, a group of architects have started a project  collecting "unwanted" wrist watches, in an effort to preserve them in the Smithsonian Museum. Apparently, the advent of cellular communication devices is also changing the way we tell time.

But these same cellular devices and new approaches to communication, networking and publishing are fueling and facilitating innovation and entrepreneurship. It is truly the best of times as well. Another recent article reported that the effort and cost associated with starting a new company has never been lower. The entrepreneurial and innovative spirit is fueled by ECM.  Apparently over 100 million companies have signed up for free web-based tools, such as Google Apps to serve as their technical foundation. Networking and collaborating have never been easier, or more accessible. (I will confess that my company, Information Architected, is a subscriber to several Google apps.) In yet another recent article  the question, "Is working from home the next gold rush?" is asked. New business models made possible through online content may be eliminating some jobs and industries, but also serve as the genesis of countless others. 

I have to say that, I for one am most happy and excited to be part of this revolutionary time.  It is the worst of times;  layoffs and the possible demise of entire industries is scary and unfortunate. But on the other hand, the amazingly fertile potential for new businesses, new industries and new business models seems virtually infinite.  I stare at the future with wide-open eyes, amazed at the possibilities.

If you do not agree, or simply want to further fuel you own enthusiasm, then view this presentation and demonstration at this year's TED.  This glimpse into what ECM can/will be is nothing short of amazing. I dare anyone to view this and tell me that we are not experiencing "the best of times." Indeed, to further quote Dickens, "we had everything before us..."

Going Green With ECM – Smart – But Don’t be Stupid About It

ECM service providers are always at the ready to ride the coattails of the latest business trend.  Do you recall the rush to Knowledge Management circa 1998?  Suddenly every ECM vendor was a KM solution provider.  For some it was a good move. For others not so much.  Perhaps even more important was the damage it did to the reputation of KM overall, a blow that the KM industry almost didn't recover from.

Well the same thing is beginning to happen with the green movement.  Going green is a global focus, from the home to the office. Its good for the economy and good for the ecology.  So of course, the ECM industry is busy positioning itself on the green band wagon (see earlier posts).Not a bad idea. It has legitimacy. But will it be leveraged responsibly?

Recently the State of Massachusetts, where I live, announced two changes to its Department of Motor Vehicles, aimed at going green and cutting the state budget. Good for you, and thank you Governor Patrick, was my initial reaction.  But as I listened to the details of these program changes my opinion began to somewhat change.

First, motor vehicle registrations will no longer be printed on card stock.  In the future State of MA registrations will be printed on less costly paper. OK, not a bad idea - but does it fall short?  Ill come back to that. But before I do, the second change.

Currently, we licensed drivers in the state receive a notice in the mail (post mail that is) when our  drivers license needs to be renewed. Well, in the interest of going green and saving money, the state  has eliminated the service. As a result, the state will greatly reduce its consumption of paper (the green angle), and additionally save significant costs associated with the print production and mailing process. Well as a politically correct citizen of the state I say great. But wait, at what cost?  We citizens are losing a much relied upon service. While the benefits achieved are commendable, the lose of service to the citizen is most unfortunate.  More importantly, the lose is not necessary. 

What the state is doing is a classic case of not looking at a business process holistically, failing to push the innovative process, and failing to leverage ECM technology - technology they already have. The same technology/application used to produce the paper notifications, could be tweaked to send an online notification, with a direct link to the state's website where you can renew online no less.  I understand that this would require that the state maintain a database of e-mail addresses of its citizens, but I for one would be happy to assist in this (i.e. fill out an online form, or provide my e-mail address the next time I interact with the state). The addition of a single database field (e-mail address) to existing databases is not a big issue. The end result - cost saving, a greener government, and virtually no lose of service to the citizen - one might argue an increased level of service. Everyone wins.

The state is not challenging process owners or IT enough.  They are willing to make changes that show benefit at one level, without pushing harder to see if the benefits can be achieved with no lose of service to the citizen. They are not thinking strategically.  Ah - there is the strategy word again.  I have blogged about the evils of technology deployment without adequate strategy development before.  Well, in this case, maybe this isn't the issue.  I have heard rumors (I repeat I believe it is only a rumor), that the state did think strategically. By not providing notifications, not only are they going green and saving money, rumor has it they are also banking on increasing revenue. Without reminders, there is the potential that a greater percentage of licensed drivers will forget when they need to renew their license, which will lead to an increase in penalties - i.e. increased fees. Now again, I state this is only a rumor, and I hope as a citizen that this is a case of lack of strategy versus a deviant strategy.

Now back to the car registrations.  Why stop with the move from card stock to cheaper paper stock?  Couldn't registrations be maintained online, accessible via a barcode on the registration stickers we place on our license plates? When you are pulled over by the Boston Police today (don't ask me how I know), they can review the status of your license online. Why not do the same with registration? 

The bottom line of this rant is this - ECM holds great potential in assiting business and government in going green and cost reduction. But to maximize the return on investment, you need to think holistically, strategically and innovatively.  Stopping at the first good idea you have can easily leave much opportunity on the table.

IAM ALERT: OpenText to Acquire Vignette - Are They Out of Their Bloomin Mind?

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):

Today OpenText announced plans to acquire Vignette. (See press release.)

On one hand this move makes sense.  OpenText has clearly been on a growth through acquisition strategy, and this move is aligned with that.  As I blogged about last January, Tom Jenkins, OpenText Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Chairman, stated that OpenText was positioned to be the first ECM company to achieve $1 billion in revenue.  With the acquisition comes the revenue and installed base of Vignette. 

But, unlike other acquisitions made by OpenText, (e.g., acquiring DAM technology via Artesia) with this acquisition there is little to no gain in functionality.  The overall value proposition of OpenText remains the same.  With Vignette, OpenText acquires redundant capabilities.  OpenText was the first document management solution to embrace the internet and thus provide WCM.  They strengthened this offering with the acquisition of RedDot.  So what, technically does Vignette add to the OpenText toolset?

I cannot help but think OpenText would have been better off exerting the time, energy and cost behind this effort, with a campaign to go after Vignette customers (and those of similar waning solution providers) and make them a "deal they couldn't refuse." This is similar to what Interwoven did to PC DOCS customers years ago.

The ability to assist customers with such a migration plan is in keeping with the OpenText BLOOM strategy.  Wouldn't Opentext have been better off leveraging BLOOM in this way?  Instead, now OpenText has yet another technology platform to support or build an integration strategy for. At least short-term, OpenText will  have to keep Vignette's product line intact.

Technically, what is the OpenText strategy? Vignette only makes the company's technology strategy more complex and confusing. Open Text already has a mix of  of .NET, C++, and Java technologies. With Vignette they add a J2EE-based system.  And for what - redundant capabilities?  Is this a poor leveraging  of the BLOOM strategy?  Is OpenText out of their Bloomin mind?

Enterprise Search - The Future is Here

For literally decades I have been speaking and writing about advanced search techniques.  This has been going on for so long one might (sometimes myself) wonder if it ever really is going to happen.  I am realistic enough to admit that the perfect search tools may never be achieved.  Search is too rich, personal and situational to ever be achieved through a single best tool.  Will truly advanced intelligent searches ever make it into mainstream?

Well, I have seen the future and its just around the bend.  Ill explain.

Last week I was in the office kitchen getting a coffee, when “noise” coming form the omnipresent flat screen television perked my ears. “Look at the result in a heat map. These are hot spots of activity. With our pattern matching technology you can find stocks exhibiting similar patterns.”  "What", I thought, "is someone on television actually talking about advanced  search interfaces?".  So I tuned in and discovered it was true.  TD Ameritrade was explaining in a television commercial that they offer a host of trading tools,  content analysis and display tools that are on the cutting edge of search functionality.  Hallelujah.  Of course, I did realize that these search and content analysis techniques are being applied to structured content - but it is a significant advancement nonetheless. Portal technology originated in the financial services sector, focused initially on structured data.  The path that took is likely to follow for content search, analytics and interaction.

But there is more. Serendipitously later that same day, at home, I was walking by the family room when again, my ears were perked by the omnipresent sound of the family television (in this case not a large flat screen, much to the family's chagrin). This time it was the familiar sound of "MAC and PC" in the latest Apple commercial that caught my attention. (I am a huge fan of these commercials, so I stopped to watch.) This time "MAC" was helping "PC" find pictures of friends online. Yes, pattern matching technology on unstructured content (images), is coming to the MAC platform as a standard feature, in the form of facial recognition.   I got so excited my teenage daughters told me to calm down.  This may be ho-hum to the Twitter generation, but to a boomer like myself that struggled with "simple search" during the early days of the web, someone who has been prostelitizing  "advanced search" for years, the fact that these two commercials appeared in one day just blew me away. "Advanced search" is finally going mainstream.

Of course my excitement is somewhat tempered by the fact that these tools are part of the commercial web.  In a earlier post, I introduced the fact that based on research we did, most corporate users felt that search within their firewall was far less powerful than search on the Internet. Nearly  half of the hundreds of companies polled had no specific goals or strategy for search in the enterprise.  So, unfortunately, for most corporate users, the heat maps, trends analysis and image recognition are likely to be techniques they become accustomed to outside the corporate setting. But, the impetus for change has come.  It is sad that in many organizations there is still a need to cost justify search technology, or debate over whether a taxonomy should be linked to a search tool. But, as more (MAC) users experience the power of patter recognition, and as corporate executives find themselves exposed to trading tools such as those offered by TD  Ameritrade, it is reasonable to assume that the necessary education to appreciate the power of such functionality will come and result in growing pressure to bring such functionality in-house. 

So, I ask, is your Information Architected for Findability?

Enterprise 2.0 - The Other Side of Governance

The intersection of Enterprise 2.0 and governance is not a new topic to this blog. Typically, however, I focus on the need to impose some control (i.e. security, records management, publishing controls) on the otherwise open approach to Enterprise 2.0-based communication (e.g. micro-blogging, wikis, blogs).  Governance and Enterprise 2.0 go hand-in-hand, in my opinion, for the responsible business practitioner. (For example, comments to this blog, while "open" are monitored by yours truly.  All comments are posted - if after my review they are deemed as not offensive in language or message.)

Recently, I had the pleasure of sharing lunch and experiences with a bunch of very clever people from VOXmarketing, a firm whose core competency is branding campaigns. It did not take long for our conversation to come to a common interest.  You guessed it - the governance of Enterprise 2.0 content. I have always been aware, and indeed have written and spoken about the need to control branding of wikis and blogs, but it was nonetheless powerful to hear similar opinion coming from the mirror perspective; i.e. from marketing/branding to content management. We shared stories of respective clients who had minimized the impact of Enterprise 2.0 tools by failing to brand them and thus align them into an overall enterprise communication strategy.  We also shared stories regarding the potential power of Enterprise 2.0 tools, when they are governed holistically, and diligently.

It was reassuring to hear this message from someone outside of the records management and content security worlds. We agreed, one of the most powerful strengths of Enterprise 2.0 tools is their openess and ease of use, but that this is also potentially one of its shortcomings.  A little bit of structure (governance) can go a long way - not only in minimizing risk, but also accelerating adoption and increasing the effectivness of communication.

Intelligent Content Delivery will Take more "Time"

Last month I blogged on the fact that I had subscribed to Mine Magazine - a dynamic personalized online periodical. I promised in the previous blog to keep readers posted on my experience with Mine.

Well, today I received the following e-mail:

Dear Carl,

Thank you for subscribing to mine magazine. We want to let you know that a computer error may have affected the first issue you received this week. It's possible that this issue did not contain the combination of magazine content you selected. Please know that the problem has been resolved, and that each of your subsequent issues will reflect the exact content you originally requested.

In appreciation of your support, we have extended your five-issue subscription to include a sixth free issue of mine. You can also access real-time mine content through your smartphone device at http://mine.mwap.at.

We apologize for the inconvenience and, again, thank you for being among the very first to experience mine.

Best regards,

Wayne Powers
President, Time Inc. Media Group

So - my somewhat dubious  tone in the previous blog appears to be warranted.  I am, however, still curious and excited enough to let me subscription stand and see what I get.  But my doubts grow.  In the e-mail message it states that I should have received my first issue already (flawed though it may be).   I have not received an issue of Mine.  Apparently the software has more than just problems gathering the right content. Stay tuned...