It's a "fast, scalable database" that isn't focused on large installations? What?
While I haven't used couchdb much personally, its most significant characteristics seem to be that it's a document-oriented database (each record can have its own structure) and that it inherits all of Erlang's infrastructure for fault-tolerance.
Well, that's taken long enough. Lotus Notes has everything to do with CouchDB. Damien was a product developer at Iris/Lotus, and in a lot of ways CouchDB is a modern rethink of the best of what Notes/Domino is. When you take away the client and the need to be backwards-compatible to the late Bronze Age (Notes V2 applications from '93 can run unmodified in the current version 8.5 client), you're free to make a lot of improvements, but you also get to keep the good stuff.
While I haven't used couchdb much personally, its most significant characteristics seem to be that it's a document-oriented database (each record can have its own structure) and that it inherits all of Erlang's infrastructure for fault-tolerance.