How Jumper survives early E2.0 market and uncertain economic times – the secret sauce is open source

A customer recently asked me how Jumper was going to survive as a start-up in tough economic times. A very good question considering…

Cogenz has folded, Connectbeam has an uncertain future (the rumor is they are out of money), and Jive recently layed off 1/3 of their staff and “reassigned” the CEO and co-founder. How will Jumper survive?

The power of Jumper is in open source. Unlike the closed enterprise platforms of our struggling competitors the Jumper 2.0 software and source code will continue on with or without Jumper Networks. The ideas and creativity of Jumper 2.0 will live on in the community even if Jumper Networks is not the community leader. A new community will emerge to drive development of the software, continue improvements, and bring new ideas and insights into the development process. Our software isn’t proprietary, it belongs to everyone.

The opportunity of open source is that you can try some truly new ideas and see if they work. Jumper has pioneered a number of ideas that are growing rapidly. Knowledge tagging (see Wikipedia definition) was a Jumper idea that has taken on a life of its own and is being openly debated in the KM community. Rating mechanisms for search results was a Jumper idea first and is now being experimented with by the biggest of search companies. Although giving power to the people when you have customers paying for search placement will be an interesting balancing act for them to pull off.

The last great benefit of open source is that we have not had to take VC money and sell our soul to the bottom line. We can still experiment, still innovate, still create new ways of doing things and let you the users decide what you like and what you don’t. At Jumper there is no bottom line, at least not yet. There is no time table to profitability, and given the current economic environment that is a good thing. It takes time for new ideas, for revolutionary software platforms to take hold. It takes time for people to begin to grasp the benefits, opportunities, and real power of groundbreaking software. In that sense Jumper has only just begun.