March 15, 2004

While Google makes finding information on the Internet a breeze, a start-up called Onfolio Inc. plans to release on Monday a new form of personal information management software that makes it easier and quicker for people to use and share data discovered online.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company's software acts as a research vacuum, simplifying the collection, annotation and republishing of information found on the Web or in one's own computer. It bridges the gap between a raw information search on Google (News - Websites) or Yahoo and the document filing system of Microsoft Windows.

"Heavy Internet users are searching for and finding dozens, even hundreds of things a day," J.J. Allaire, Onfolio's chief executive and co-founder, said in an interview.

"There are great tools for finding stuff. But there are few tools for managing research."

Onfolio faces head-on the problem of information overload, giving Internet users ways to capture and reuse the many tidbits they come across in everyday Internet use.

Other software, such as Visio from Microsoft Corp.(NasdaqNM:MSFT - News),lets users diagram and organize their data, among other things, but doesn't offer the easy Internet collection or republishing features that Onfolio does, at far lower cost.

"It's like a 'favorites' list on steroids," said Robert Scoble, a Microsoft strategy evangelist who has previewed the product. He was referring to the drop-down menu where many Internet users store their most commonly used sites.

Scoble, who runs a popular technical commentary site at http://scoble.weblogs.com/, said he has begun using Onfolio to trawl through some 1,300 Weblogs a day for useful information.

Allaire is known for creating a popular Web publishing tool known as ColdFusion at his first company, Allaire Corp., which he founded in 1995 when he was just out of college in Minnesota. He built Allaire into a publicly traded company with $100 million a year in sales before selling it to Macromedia Inc. (NasdaqNM:MACR - News) in 2001 for $360 million.

The product, also known as Onfolio, installs a small, unobtrusive icon on the toolbar of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. When the user clicks on the icon, Onfolio opens up in the left frame of the browser, just as a favorites menu does.

Users can sample Onfolio free for a 30-day trial at the company's Web site: http://www.onfolio.com. The software costs at $30 for the basic research version and $80 for the Web publishing version. It works with Windows computers but not on Apple or Linux machines.

Onfolio software offers simple-to-use tools to republish text and photos to Web sites using popular RSS syndication software or CSS style formatting. Onfolio documents also can be e-mailed to friends or colleagues, whether or not they run Onfolio.

Web pages, photos, Word and Acrobat documents, spreadsheets and other documents can be sucked up into the Onfolio.

The program works easily with other Windows functions. One can "copy and paste," or "drag and drop" material from other applications into Onfolio documents. The application lets the user preserve pre-existing formatting or just capture text.

Users can grab snippets, pages or whole documents in a single click, deleting advertisements and other extraneous information. Material can be annotated with notes to recall its importance later.

The Onfolio software is a new type of information-harvesting tool which, if it catches on, could pose big challenges to copyright defenders.

Allaire said Onfolio respects current and future digital-rights protection technologies that protect copyrighted materials against unauthorized redistribution.

But he said Onfolio is simply another digital tool, adding that issues of fair use and copyright are left up to users.

"There is a real desire to consume and republish information," Allaire said. "It is a classic trade-off between ease of use and copyright protection, which the industry is going to have to work out over the next five years."

Source: Yahoo News

        

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