"The Shape of Things to Come" is a work by H. G. Wells, which speculates on future events from 1933 until the year 2106. Alternatively it is a song from the movie "Battlestar Galactica".
The shape of Things in Refinder is not at all futuristic, much more prosaic, entirely non-fictious and totally non-speculative, however, Refinder's concept of Thing types can help you very well in your daily work.

This is another post in our educational series about Refinder features. You might have noticed, that we continually roll out new Refinder functionality. Last friday, we made Refinders bulk operations features generally available. 

Last week, at the INiTs Investors Day, one of the participants approached me. He told me, that he had liked the Refinder presentation, however, he had missed a slide featuring the particular use-case, that Refinder addresses.  In the flurry of the networking chit-chat we were not able to discuss the question in depth, therefore I pick up the question here and hand in my point-of-view.

The Austrian startup scene is composed of a vibrant and colorful crowd of talent. This got once again quite apparent at yesterdays Investors Day, a joint event of INiTS and SpeedInvest at the Deloitte headquarters in Vienna.

Indeed, this was a good morning, because today we released our first Refinder whitepaper, titled "Semantic Technologies Tap Unrealized Potentials of Social Business Platforms".

Here is, what the whitepaper´s executive summary says:

No question about it: email is on trial. 40 years after the first email was sent, the role of email as a main bearer of business communications is disputed, resulting in striking headlines by companies announcing zero-email policies, or being scrutinized in the highly regarded self-experiments of IBM researcher  Luis Suarez, who tries to live his professional life sans email. A good moment to reflect email in the light of emerging social business platforms.