The Tech Baby has a living room full of toys to keep him entertained, but an empty Kleenex box, a water bottle, a TV remote, and an old BlackBerry occupy most of his attention.  As long as one of these non-toys are within crawling distance, the Tech Baby is happy.  As a result, the Tech Wife and I always make sure that the ‘simple toys’ are available when the Tech Baby is ready to hang out with us.  This week’s bullets continue my appreciation for the simple things:

• Mimosa Systems issued your ’ordinary’ customer case study press release.  However, this one highlights some challenges a company had with SharePoint and how they addressed those issues with a combination of archiving and data protection solutions.  My colleague,Lauren Whitehouse, and I believe that more and more companies will find themselves in the same predicament as SharePoint usage increases and hope we continue to see more investments made to make the application more manageable.
• In the middle of August, RenewData quietly acquired Digital Mandate which makes software to facilitate the electronic discovery review process.  Digital Mandate’s Vestigate software takes a very simplistic approach – one that I have not seen before – to make attorneys more comfortable with ‘automated review’.  Humans actually commence the review process by highlighting text within a set of documents – the assumption being that the humans will identify relevant words and text patterns related to the case they are working on.  Behind the scenes, Vestigate builds a set of queries based on what the humans are highlighting.  After humans complete a small portion of the review process, Vestigate can execute the query to automatically review the rest of the documents.  The end result is humans do a small portion of the review process, computers do the rest and Vestigate enables attorneys to sample the result set from the computer query to see how accurate it is.  Ah yes, the beauty of both humans and computers working together.  Remember those days?
• One of my favorite “start-ups” to follow is Blade Network Technologies.  I put the word start-up in quotes because the company is well beyond its years.  It was born out of Nortel Networks with existing customers and great engineers.  The company took some funding and built a tremendous management team and now makes a majority of switches for IBM and HP blade servers.  They have a few other big name customers as well and have expanded into Top of Rack products.  The company recently kept its growth strategy real simple - instead of dealing with the Sarbanes-Oxley nightmares and quarterly earnings predictions that The Street grumbles about – they raised more money from private investors to drive their business.  The valuation that they received – $230Mish – is bigger than a bunch of publicly traded technology companies.

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