What motivated you to start Kolabora?

Robin Good: What motivated me to start Kolabora was a desire to see a place online where both the industry players, the thought leaders and the end users would meet and be able to talk and learn from each other.

I have been quite wary of the private beautiful gardens that some web conferencing companies keep, in the form of luscious web sites, support pages and forum areas, for their precious customers. It is curious to see how much of the exchange that could serve so well many other potential customers as well much of the intellighentia in the industry is kept under close, monitored tabs, in ways that certainly do not facilitate the sharing and faster contamination required by an open market field populated by lots of newcomers.

Fact is that maintaining support areas, forums and other non-marketing resources of information online is a costly, difficult and time consuming activity, which some cannot afford and others skip altogether for lack of marekting sense.

My ideal learning place is always an open space for both the sage and the neophyte can come together to learn and discuss, one from the other. The expert can learn from the naive user the true needs, idiosyncracies and variety of problems met while the novice can query the expert for tools, techniques, methods and stories that can illuminate her new exploration path.

Kolabora was born with this, non-business idea in mind. An idea for letting information, people, tools, needs and ideas come in contact with each other and cross-fertilize each other in a way that is helpful, useful and beneficial to all involved.

The goal is the one to educate the industry to really open up and listen to what end users need when collaborating online, and to facilitate the end user search and understanding of the methods and tools that can help her achieve her goals.

In an atmosphere not drive by marketing hype, corporate news announcement and press releases, a relaxed confronting and exploring attitude can find its way to make the industry understand that Cluetrain is not a concept anymore.
Cluetrain is the market.

What are your private hopes for it and what are your commercial interests in it?

Robin Good: My private hope for Kolabora is for it to become a useful, content rich destination and source of info for anyone interested or involved in online collaboration. It will take me some time to push all the right buttons before I can be happy about this but I am apparently well set in the right direction.

My commercial interests are the same ones of Kolabora stakeholders: the development of a marketplace that is competitive, open to new ideas and to rapid evolution, that can learn from the ideas of the small and from the mistakes of the big, while delivering to the end user better tools, that cost less, work together and better.

I know you want to know how I am going to survive too. Well, while Kolabora will not replicate the advertising mistakes done by many large information sites, which squeeze content in between monumental amounts of distracting ads, I have certainly space and welcome feelings for a few selected sponsors.

In particular I am looking for an exclusive sponsor to the directory area, where I am going to develop a very accessible and comprehensive industry access list divided by categories. In there, for example I will be giving away the full banner space and the whole of the right column for the sponsor to use.

I am also looking forward to organize some unique online events that can bring together the best experts, industry and opinion leaders and hungry end users. In this respect I will be opening up some opportunities for the companies supporting Kolabora to utilize their own technology to make people meet and discuss live.

Finally, Kolabora will have its own store with merchandise, books, guides and technologies that complement or enhance the online collaboration work requirements.

All n' all it will be a mix of economic inputs ranging from a well implemented Google AdSense contextual advertising service, to sponsorship, to live events and to the above mentioned Kolabora future techno-merchandise.

More to come tomorrow: