Collokia LLC

 

CEOCFO-Members Login

 

September 28, 2015 Issue

The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information

CEOCFO MOBILE  CONTACT  |   CEOCFO-SERVICES HOME

Machine Learning Base Enterprise Collaboration System for Seamlessly Sharing Knowledge

 

 

Pablo Brenner

CEO & Founder

 

Collokia LLC

www.collokia.com

 

Interview conducted by:

Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – September 28, 2015

 

CEOCFO: Mr. Brenner, what is the idea behind Collokia?

Mr. Brenner: The idea behind Collokia is to solve what we believe is a big flaw in existing knowledge management and collaborations systems. Most of them are pretty unused. This is because they require the users to use a special tool for collaborating and/or sharing knowledge. People have their own tasks that they feel are important to do, so they do not want to do and extra effort and spend the time thinking about what they should share with their coworkers. On the other side, since the information is not updated there, people do not trust the information that is in these systems, so they end up going to Google to search for information when in many cases the information is inside the company. What we do is automate this knowledge sharing using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence; we let the machine do this knowledge learning automatically, without requiring any users effort. That is why we call it Effortless Enterprise Collaboration. The idea is to automate the process of sharing knowledge in the company through a seamless operation.

 

CEOCFO: How are you able to accomplish that?

Mr. Brenner: We do that by deploying plug-ins or agents in the different tools, for example browsers and data repositories, or specific tool, for example in the software industry the Development Environments, what we call the IDEs. These plug-ins automatically learn the knowledge and expertise of each employee and what he is doing. It also recognizes and understands when someone is in need of help, such as when someone is doing a search or Google, and presents the internal company information related to that search in the browser or in any tool that is being used. The user will get the results from Google, but will also get the results that come from the experts in the company, their recommended readings and any related internal documents that the company has. Everything in parallel to what he is seeing from Google.

 

CEOCFO: What was the biggest challenge in putting the technology together to allow the collaboration?

Mr. Brenner: The biggest challenge that we faced was implementing the Machine Learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. Without asking the user anything, this technology allows for the understanding of both what he knows about and his expertise level, then on the other side understands the information that someone needs. Therefore, putting together the technology to match the people with knowledge to the people who need that knowledge was the challenge. We do not do key word search, because that would be easy. We have to understand the context, so we need a great deal of artificial intelligence to do that.

 

CEOCFO: Why is your first product oriented to the IT industry and what might be next for you?

Mr. Brenner: The reason that we are approaching the IT industry is first, its an industry we know well, we are all coming from the software industry, so it is easier for us to do a project according to the needs of software developers, which could be for lawyers or healthcare. On the other side, people in the IT industry and technology are early adopters, this technology is very new, so we believe that software people will understand it easier and adopt it earlier. In addition, there are some big problems in the software industry that we aim to solve. Today as opposed to 15 or 20 years ago, where we wrote everything from scratch, people will search for a library or open software source code and in many cases people start a project by looking for examples on the Internet. In the cases where you have 100 software developers or more in an organization, these searches are very repetitive as someone is probably searching for something that a coworker has searched for some weeks ago and has probable spent two days understanding that. This creates a productivity problem in the software industry that we feel that we can solve.

 

CEOCFO: Have similar concepts or technologies been tried before or are in use today?

Mr. Brenner: There are some other startups in Silicon Valley today doing things with a similar approach but mostly focuses on CRM people. It is basically the same approach, where someone is looking for a contact in a company and most likely there is somebody else in the same company that has this contact. In many cases someone will go to LinkedIn for that, but not everyone has all of their contacts listed in LinkedIn or published for others to see. We have also seen people using plugins to try and solve this problem, but their approach is very general and horizontal. Our go to market approach is more focused into verticals, specializing in specific industries and their problems. The biggest problem is the artificial intelligence, where you need to build the entire taxonomy map to understand the concepts. This is why we will be going more vertical oriented, starting with the technology industry and then moving to others.

 

CEOCFO: Where are you in the development and commercialization process?

Mr. Brenner: We do have a beta vertical that we are testing now with some customers, and we are getting a great deal of feedback. We expect to be fully commercializing our product by October of this year (2015).

 

CEOCFO: What have you learned in your beta testing?

Mr. Brenner: One of the things that we have learned is that people are very concerned about the privacy issues even more than we were expecting. Our system does have all kinds of privacy settings, but we learned that we need to communicate those features better to the end users. The other thing that we learned is that our main focus is in productivity collaboration, but to do that we really have to understand the expertise of at each one of the employees, and the companies want that ability. Management doesn’t know who knows what in the company. Therefore, there is strong interest from the management to have this ability on what the knowledge base of the company is.

 

CEOCFO: Are you funded for the next steps or seeking investment or partnerships?

Mr. Brenner: We have had our initial seed round and this week we are closing our second seed round, so that we can start commercializing our product. This will give us money for the next two years, but we will probably have to raise some more money in 18 months.

 

CEOCFO: If someone were to search online for a company like Collokia, what terms would they key in to find you?

Mr. Brenner: We fall into the category of Enterprise Collaboration Systems or Enterprise Social Networks, or even Knowledge Management. These are all related categories. Our differentiation would be as a Machine Learning based Collaboration Systems.

 

CEOCFO: What is your strategy for reaching out and commercialization?

Mr. Brenner: We will be presenting at some conferences, such as the Gartner Conference, Gartner SYMPOSIUM ITxpo 2015 in October in Orlando. We will also be presenting at the KM World (Knowledge Management World) Conference, which is very oriented to the knowledge management industry. On the other side since we are focusing on the IT industry, we will start promoting the idea in technology conferences like Java One or similar. We would like to have a two sided approach, where on one side we are convincing CIOs, CTOs and knowledge management people on the benefits of having these kinds of solutions. Then on the other side working with the engineers and showing that with our system they can increase their productivity and reduce typical errors that waste a great deal of time. One of the problems that happen so often in companies is when someone spends two days researching something only to find out that they already have the information in house. This problem can be easily solved with our technology.

 

CEOCFO: Final thoughts. Why pay attention to Collokia today?

Mr. Brenner: Current collaboration systems and knowledge management systems do not function or work so well. Most of the companies that we speak with, acknowledge that, and they tell us that they spent a great deal of money on that, but no one in their organization uses it. Therefore, there is a great deal of frustration around these systems as they are not getting the desired results. We are trying to bring a fresh approach. It is not that we are that much smarter than anyone else, but these technologies were not available three or four years ago, so it was impossible to do what we are doing today. Now with artificial intelligence and Machine Learning, we believe that we are ready to start solving these kinds of problems, and we have the solution.



 

“One of the problems that happen so often in companies is when someone spends two days researching something only to find out that they already have the information in house. This problem can be easily solved with our technology.” - Pablo Brenner


 

Collokia LLC

www.collokia.com

 

Contact:
Pablo Brenner

+1 877 215 5230 ext. 38693

Pablo@collokia.com



 

 



 

 


disclaimers

Any reproduction or further distribution of this article without the express written consent of CEOCFOinterviews.com is prohibited.

 

 

Knowledge Management, Collokia LLC, Collaboration Systems, CEO Interviews 2015, Pablo Brenner, Machine Learning Base Enterprise Collaboration System for Seamlessly Sharing Knowledge, Machine Learning + Collaboration, Machine Learning + Knowledge, Context Based Communications, Context Based Collaboration, Collaboration, Technology Companies, Recent CEO Interviews, Collokia LLC Press Releases, News, Tech Stock, Companies looking for venture capital, Angel Investors, private companies looking for investors, technology companies seeking investors, knowledge management companies needing investment capital

 

ceocfointerviews.com does not purchase or make
recommendation on stocks based on the interviews published.