Ed Brill

In case you missed it over the holidays, TechCrunch published a story on Notes/Domino on December 24th, entitled "Two free tickets to Lotusphere--is IBM's Lotus Notes Out of Touch With Web 2.0 World?"  The article is an interview with myself and Kevin Cavanaugh, VP for Lotus messaging and collaboration products.  Readers were encouraged to discuss the article, in part to potentially win a free pass to Lotusphere.  As of yesterday, well over 125 comments were posted -- a heck of a lot for a TechCrunchIT story.  Some came from Lotus community members looking for a way to still get to Lotusphere, while others were from ISVs, casual readers, or people who hadn't seen Notes in years.  

We gave TechCrunch two passes to give away, and earlier today, they confirmed that the two are going to Curt Stone and Roland Reddekop.  Both of these guys are active participants in the community, and were part of the interesting discussions on the TechCrunch site.

I'm glad it was TechCrunch giving these away and not me -- there were easily fifteen people in the discussion that I thought had good stories on why they should win.  The discussion was mostly at a higher level, and it seemed like readers were (again, mostly) open to hearing about the latest from Lotus.

As author Jeff Widman pointed out in the article, Notes and Domino have been around for 20 years, and have been growing for 16 consecutive quarters.  We're obviously doing something right, and having our story heard on a widely-read site like TechCrunch helps validate that.

Of course, TechCrunch wasn't the only way that IBM has reached out to the community around Lotusphere 2009.  As I've mentioned previously, we have our first major blogger program at Lotusphere 2009, with special activities, interviews, and surprises for the ~25 bloggers participating (who received no-charge passes to Lotusphere, similar to press and analysts).  You'll hear a lot more from them in just twelve (!) days' time.....