Boston.com : Accidental Contractor

When he founded Groove Networks in 1997, technologist Ray Ozzie envisioned a target market for its collaboration software: businesses eager to communicate with their partners and suppliers. ''In the founding documents, I don't think there was a single mention of the government," Ozzie admitted.

Today, government represents roughly 40 percent of Groove's sales. Groove software is being deployed by the Pentagon and civilian agencies rebuilding Iraq, and by Department of Homeland Security officials coordinating security for the Democratic and Republican conventions.

Ray Ozzie gave a keynote to the SuperNova conference last week. A partial transcript of his talk is available

Hugh points to an interesting article in Inc. Magazine (PDF) about collaborative tools like Groove, Sharepoint and SocialText.

Robin Good will be interviewing Ray Ozzie and Howard Rheingold next thuesday (29 june) on the future of online collaboration. You can register here to participate in this live event.

Information Patterns releases Toucan Navigate 1.0a a collaborative GIS solution for Groove.

I hope the official release of Groove 3.0 is close as there seems to be a growing dissatisfaction with the 2.5 version on the Groove forums.

smallbiztechnology.com reviews Groove

More coverage on how Groove was used at the G8.

During last week's summit in Georgia of the leaders of the world's eight top economic powers, officials used Groove Networks' software and other technology to help with communications. If Ray Ozzie can help some of these guys communicate better, we'll nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Michael Helfrich blogs about the presence of Groove at the recent G8 conference.

Groove was selected as one of the IT innovations that would be used by the delegations and their research staffs. Each leader (i.e., President Bush) has a policy advisor, who is referred to as a "sherpa". The sherpa is given a Motion Computing tablet loaded with Microsoft OneNote and Groove. During the negotiation sessions, the sherpa can use the ink chat to securely connect with their research support staff who are in a room some 3000 feet away. Groove was selected because of the secure, encrypted communications between peers, as well as because of the ink chat support. Clicky keyboards have made too much noise at the table in years past, and runners with handwritten notes is low tech.

Hommes & Process is organizing a French Groove seminar tomorrow

Netsenger (japan) has released a new Groovetool : Advance that has the following features :

* Groove Instant Message export and import - Now you can backup all those messages!
* Forwarding of Groove IM's via email - Use to send and receive IM's on your mobile phone!
* Store pictures and multiple emails/phone numbers/addresses etc. of your contacts.
* Advanced search capability of your activities, contacts, and messages.
* English and Japanese support.
* Works with Groove v2.5 and v3.0 beta

PC World magazine has honored Groove version 3.0 virtual office software with a 2004 World Class Award for Best Collaboration Tool in the mobile tools category.

Zalba, a Chinese Groove partner, has started a new weblog maintained by JiRong Zhou.

As promised, here some pictures of Isabel Cornelia Jacomina Bekkers and her proud family.

Haven't done much blogging lately as I've became the proud father of a beautiful baby girl named : Isabel. She is weiging 8 pounds, darkhaired and has a beatiful smile that even charmed her two year older brother Wolf who is (luckily) also very proud on his new sister. I'm gonna post some cute baby pics soon on my weblog and will also try to catch up all latest developments regarding Groove in the coming days.