In Higher Education, we have an interoperability problem.  Expensive solutions are on a box, and getting one box to talk to and share data with other boxes is either impossible or will give any IT person or registrar a migraine they’re not likely to forget.

Granted, Blackboard has some semblance of an API and our friends at Oracle have delivered SAIP to help broker information from the People Soft Campus Solutions 9+ products.  Your average university bear is can now at least imagine how to get data exported and imported into different apps.  And, a number of other companies give interoperability enough effort to make some smoke and mirrors.

However, the real winner of interoperability at the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum was just a passer-by, a speaker on another panel down in the main SIIA event.  His name is Joseph Smarr. And he’s, you know, like 25 and is the head technologist at a company called Plaxo.

Plaxo was one of the first viral internet applications, and it simply helped users keep contact information up to date and sync your contacts across multiple platforms.  It’s founder, Sean Parker, was pushed out and (unlucky him) he went on to be Facebook’s founding President (and is now a partner at our investor, Founders Fund).

Plaxo had to respond to Facebook, so they pursued a course of being more open and interoperable than Facebook.  They were the first company to make a news stream in which you could import all your activity from anywhere on the web – last.fm, twitter, netflix, yada yada.   Granted, Facebook had become the defacto standard social network for the worlds up and comers, and it was too late for Plaxo to really do anything about that.  And now Facebook is copying them with their Open Stream API.

However, the strides that Plaxo made in true interoperability are far beyond anything seen in the education sector.  Puts us to shame, really.

I talked to Joseph about this, as I had run into him at a gujillion Facebook events and was wondering what might motivate him to hang around a bunch of laggard education industry specialists.  He suggested Inigral particiapte in the Internet Identity Workshop.  So, we’ll be checking this out, stay tuned.