Fogbeam Labs The FogBlog

Earlier today, someone posted a question on Hacker News asking "What are you working on? I posted the following answer, but the entire thread wound up getting deleted for some reason. I've decided to reproduce the answer here, since it would have made a good blog post anyway.

So, what exactly *are* Fogbeam Labs working on?

We are working on some F/OSS knowledge management / collaboration tools, heavily based around social-networking, machine learning, collective intelligence and semantic web technologies.

One of our projects, Quoddy, is sort of (to oversimplify) like a "Facebook for the Enterprise," but with a focus on actually integrating into value creating workflows, and supporting collaboration in new ways, as opposed to simply being another complement to (or replacement for) email. In other words, Quoddy is an open source social network for the enterprise.

Another of our projects, Neddick is a lot like Reddit, and I guess you could call it a "Reddit for the Enterprise," but - again - with more of a focus on features that will make it a valuable productivity tool in an organization. Neddick is another example of open source social software for the enterprise, or "open source enterprise 2.0". Neddick is all about using voting, tagging, social ranking, content analysis, metadata and social connections to support social information sharing and knowledge discovery.

Heceta is our open source enterprise search engine, which takes advantage of metadata from both Neddick and Quoddy to enhance search results.

Hatteras is probably not going to remain a standalone project, but right now it's the "bridge" that allows Quoddy users to subscribe to business events from a SOA/ESB backend and surface those events in their news feed.

Of the projects, Quoddy and Neddick are the most developed, Hatteras works just well enough to let us demo the business event subscription stuff in Quoddy, and Heceta mostly exists in my head and in some drawings. But we're making great progress, and we should have an alpha version of Quoddy that's developed enough to start trying to sell to "earlyvangelist" types fairly soon.

There's also a good chance that we will work on "productized" versions of some other existing F/OSS projects, especially some ASF stuff. Nothing is written in stone, but you may one day see "Fogbeam Office, powered by Apache OpenOffice" or "Fogbeam BigData Server, powered by Apache Hadoop" or something along those lines.

Basically, the goal is to be the next Red Hat, but with a focus on a slightly different part of the stack. Not that there might not be some overlap with them at some point, but time will tell.