Lars Teigen is the founder of Second Brain. Visit their company blog here. (Picture © Kai Myhre)

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

I was a co-founder of Making Waves back in 2001. Today it is one of Norway's leading internet consultancies. At Making Waves I worked as a project manager and strategy consultant.

My educational background is in Business and Communications, with internet innovation and business development at the core.

My big mission, both in academics and in business, has always been to find new ways of using the internet to think and work smarter.

What is the current state of the company?

We share offices with Making Waves in Oslo, Norway. The development team is located in Krakow, Poland, with Making Waves Poland. There are about 8-10 people involved in the project, some part time, and some full time.

Is Second Brain a solo project of yours, or do you have partners?

Second Brain is definitely not a solo project. Like one of my colleagues at Making Waves Poland said: A success usually has many fathers (loosely translated from Polish).

But I came up with the idea myself. I got inspiration from some book I was reading. And suddenly one night I woke up with the idea of a personal information management system that would appropriately be named Second Brain.

I spent a couple of months developing the concept at home before I presented it to the management of Making Waves

It was just a PowerPoint and some bold visions - but they liked it, and decided to let me spend half my time at work preparing a project.

Then after a few more months, we'd come to the point where we could start developing. We defined it as an R&D project within Making Waves. Nine months later, Second Brain was spun out from Making Waves as a separate business entity to develop a public release and make it into a real business, and this is where we are now.

The main backer and funder of Second Brain is Making Waves in Norway, led by their CEO Even Fossen. The development team are all from our subsidiary in Krakow, Poland - so this is definitely not a solo project - it's more like a family business.

What is your plan for future funding?

We are going to San Francisco in two weeks to explore opportunities for funding via a US based partner.

We are also going to incorporate the company and establish an office in San Francisco/Silicon Valley to get closer the main internet market and center for internet innovation. We think this will be an important success factor for Second Brain. Especially on the management and marketing side.

Can you explain what makes Second Brain different from other web services that are currently out there?

There is a lot of web services available today. Even though many of them are trying to do similar things, there are several interesting services that deserve to gain significant traction.

Second Brain is going to be a service that help people take advantage of the services that already exist. We don't want to compete with them, but rather bring users to them.

We are trying to solve the growing problem of managing content from many different Internet-services and desktops. As people use more Internet-services for content creation and social networking, it becomes a challenge to keep track of everything. By organizing everything into a single online library, we are going to be the "Windows Explorer" of peoples' files and Internet-content.

Our desired market position is to become an independent service that lets you manage everything in your personal Internet library. We see an attractive position in the value chain between services and their customers.

To our customers, we solve their pain of managing their content. To the service providers, we bring more users and traffic and give them a channel through which they can compete with The Big Three.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are competing on building a suite of Internet applications that serve most people's needs. Their major competitive advantage, aside from their brands and technical power, is the convenience and simplicity factor of delivering services through familiar interfaces and integrating them.

Second Brain provides the convenience and simplicity factor to end users and services by organizing everything into a simple library and letting users remix contents in collections. This will make us an attractive partner for Internet-services both inside and outside The Big Three's portfolios.

What is the Web 2.0 scene currently like in Poland? What are the most popular startup companies there?

I have been very focused on my own project, and I don't have much specific knowledge about the web2.0 scene in Poland. But I have noticed that many companies are making localized version of already successful concepts from, for example, the US.

There is a Polish Digg, there is a Polish Reddit/Delicious, and so on. It seems that the Polish prefer localized versions of the these services, and Poland is a large market that should be able to support them.

But at the same time, when I talk to people in the community, I find lots of optimism and creative programmers around that want to create something new and innovative

What technologies have you used in making Second Brain?

The technology in behind Second Brain is based on an ASP.NET architecture using .NET2.0 and MS SQL. Internet-services are connected and synchronized via their APIs. We use Amazon S3 service for file storage which simplifies scalability. The Collection editor is built on the Adobe Flex platform.

Making Waves is totally focused on .NET and a Gold Partner with Microsoft, so this makes this the obvious choice for us.

When is the launch date for Second Brain?

Well, we are in a Private Beta right now, fighting with bugs and still working on some basic functionality. But our strategy is to release early, probably make some mistakes along the way, and let our Test Pilots guide us on to the right path. Our goal is to release a public beta in June, but this will depend on the feedback we get and our ability to scale.

How many people have signed up to be a test pilot so far?

I am actually going through the list right now and activating new Test Pilots. We haven't really done any promotion of the Second Brain yet, and at this time we have about 500 people that have applied. It is a modest number, but we can only handle users that have a good tolerance of bugs and can deal with unfinished functionality.

We add more users every week, and we'll start promoting the service as soon as we feel that we are ready.

But the feedback we get from Test Pilots and people we have talked to already tells us that we have a winning product concept. It is just a matter of executing on our vision.

Are you looking for additional testers? What do you look for in a tester?

Right now, in the private beta stage, we are totally dependent on feedback from our users. We are looking for more people to participate in our Test Pilot program. A good Test Pilot like testing new software, has strong opinions about how things should work, and is not afraid to tell us their honest opinion.

We have created a few custom made polo shirts to award our Test Pilots. Each shirt has our Second Brain logo on the front. On the left arm we have written the official ID number, for example Test Pilot 101. The number is unique to each Test Pilot. We only have a very limited number of shirts available, but there is still a few left.

First come first serve...

And how do you plan on promoting the service?

First, we focus on making a good product and try to build some enthusiasm in the Second Brain user community. We are trying to reach people who share our vision. Second, we will participate in conferences and try to reach the media who cover our business and have access to the early adopters in the Web2.0 community.

Third, we will work with the services that will be connected to Second Brain and make promotion and exchange deals.

That's the plan for the short term. In order to reach a mass market, this will probably not be enough. But right now, we just want to build a great product and work on the marketing and distribution later.