From a press release about Philippe Kahn, founder of Borland International: “Currently he’s developing wireless technology that will free us from our PCs, transforming digital photography into a mobile experience.”

Transform digital photography into a mobile experience? This reminds me of the old joke about electric cars needing long extension cords. I’m sure Mr. Kahn is working on something wireless, wonderful, and related to digital photography. But digital cameras aren’t tethered to PCs, so I’m sure digital photography already is a mobile experience.

Along with mobile digital photography, Philippe Kahn more or less invented the Personal Information Manager (PIM) with Sidekick. PIMs were the ultimate expression of personal computing. While highly diverse, they all focused on keeping track of personal information – contacts, appointments, IP addresses, recipes, quotations, birthdays, to-dos, notions, book titles, your niece’s clothing sizes … all the stuff you’d otherwise scrawl on scraps of paper and lose. A recent column mourning the extinction of this software species generated a torrent of e-mail in response.

The bad news: Most companies have banned this category of software in favor of either Outlook or Notes, both clumsy at managing personal information.

The good news: PIMs aren’t entirely dead. What’s happened is that the PIM lineage has evolved and branched. Want to manage personal information? You still have some nifty choices.

First, there are a few pure PIMs left. And while I don’t endorse specific products in this column, I feel obliged to report that an overwhelming number and percentage of respondents recommended a product called Info Select (www.microlog.com), which ships in Windows and Palm form, with bidirectional synchronization. Over a hundred e-mails say it’s worth a look.

Some PIMs aren’t PIMs anymore – they’re sales force automation (SFA) tools. And while some of the early SFA tools focused on management reporting, they’re gone. As my friend George Colombo pointed out years ago in his book Sales Force Automation, (McGraw-Hill, 1994), sales professionals ignored SFA tools that didn’t help them sell. While the best SFA packages provide management reports too, their priority is enhancing sales effectiveness. If your goal is keeping track of people and contacts, look into this category.

The most interesting PIM descendant is “thought mapping” or “knowledge mapping” software. Yes, the category is still in its infancy. Sure, the marketing makes way too big a fuss over what is basically outlining. Still, the idea … that the management of personal information is best achieved by mapping interrelationships among categories of knowledge … has potential. Products in this category let you insert nearly anything … text, document files, pictures, URLs, e-mail messages, or the family gerbil … in the knowledge map, where you find it either by traversing the tree or through a search engine.

Finally, here’s an idea from a bunch of Ecco Pro users, for NetManage, which bought Ecco Pro and instantly discontinued it: Give Ecco Pro an open source license.

How the open source business model fits into a capitalist economy is a matter of active debate. One promising role is as a haven for products that, despite a loyal customer base, are somehow insufficiently profitable.

Judging from my e-mail, Ecco Pro fits this model. Since NetManage gains no benefit from the product, it has nothing to lose, and significant goodwill to gain, by making it available to the open source community.

There’s something harmonious about personal information management and open source software, don’t you think?