Xerox’s Trailmeme Tracks Paths Across the Internet
New publishing tool puts related news, blogs and photos into an
easy-to-follow Web trail.
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E-mailCompany: Xerox, a Norwalk, Conn.-based office equipment manufacturer and document-management specialist
Market Cap: $16.4 billion*
Xerox Corp.’s (XRX) incubator program provides time and financing to support promising employee ideas. A new Web publishing tool called Trailmeme, released last September, is one such idea that made it all the way through the development process.
Developed during the past three years by Xerox entrepreneur in residence Venkat Rao, Trailmeme lets users “blaze” trails of related information from around the Web — news articles, photos, blog posts and the like — that can be linked for the benefit of other users who later pick up the trail. “It’s a way to collect links around the Web that might otherwise be clicked through distractedly, and instead put them into a more coherent pattern or map that can be consumed in a deeper way,” Rao says. Recent visitors to Trailmeme, for example, could have learned about the Civil War or how to write nonfiction by following a stream of articles, photos and videos created by other users.
Trailmeme is currently targeted only to individuals, but Rao says it could ultimately benefit companies of all sizes for tasks such as employee training; he’s hoping to have a version for small-cap and midcap businesses available by the end of 2011. It’s all part of Xerox’s efforts, he notes, to deal with a new world in which “paper and print start to decline, and the Web becomes dominant as a content-creation, publishing and consumption medium.”
*Market cap as of Dec. 14, 2010
