Just came across this press release from Foldera announcing the pending release of their web-based collaboration product. The release includes a section explaining how Foldera's "proprietary technology differs from competing collaboration products in a number of important ways" and then proceeds to list a number of "features" which have been offered by every web-based collaboration vendor on the planet since before the turn of the century in the construction and engineering space. Interesting. The only "proprietary" differentiation I can see from this release is that the software (I will not call it a product) will be free. Reading through the blog entries on their website and a plug by a journalist at zdnet - I get an evangelistic idea of some real "special sauce" on the technical implementation side and a lot of pushing on ease of use. Let's have a go I guess - I have signed up for the beta.

I would be interested to learn more about how the business model works for a company with a software offering that it gives away for free. I am guessing that it is not a support services model similar to JBoss or RedHat - considering that the application is supposed to be as simple to use as email. Perhaps it is an advertising-driven model?