The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog

Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Platform to Measure the Evolution of a New Market

This was the third time that Connectbeam sponsored the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It was yet another great show with so much to learn and explore. The most amazing thing was to see how the market has evolved over the last three years. Not trying to say we’ve reached the tipping point in the Enterprise 2.0 market by any means, but it was clear that companies are moving forward and trying to find ways to apply Enterprise 2.0 technologies and principals to better address current collaboration needs.

 

In June of 2007, Connectbeam sponsored the first Enterprise 2.0 show. Our demonstrations at the show centered on the ability to bookmark and tag the information people were finding using Google and other internet search engines.  We also demonstrated our first interface into the Google GSA.  People were widely interested in our solution, with the majority of discussions centered on understanding “What is Enterprise 2.0 really?” 

 

At the Enterprise 2.0 show in 2008, we launched our initial Centralized Tag Repository solution – now known as the Social Activity Repository.  We worked with a very large networking company in the development of the new capabilities, and our demonstration centered around the ability to automatically capture tags (labels) as they were being created in the Atlassian Confluence wiki, and provide those tags and related social content (expertise, communities, etc.) directly within MS SharePoint and Outlook. Our out-of-the-box SharePoint webparts were a hit and were on display at the Microsoft booth.

 

As you can imagine, we were very excited with the new release, and there were several very interested potential customers for the technology.  On a much larger scale, however, there were many attendees at the show who were just trying to decide “which Enterprise 2.0 technology should I deploy first, a wiki, a blog, or social bookmarking?

 

The Enterprise 2.0 show in 2009:  what a tremendous change in just one year!  The show attendees were highly knowledgeable, and many were experienced in implementing Enterprise social applications.  In fact, we spoke to many companies that were already making product changes.  They implemented a wiki or a blog a year or two ago, and they are now making decisions to replace technologies which haven’t truly met their needs. I can clearly recall a year ago at the same conference we had to repeatedly explain what a ‘tag’ was and how tagging – specifically in the form of a folksonomy – was useful for sharing/discovering content and expertise. We probably completed over 200 demos at the 2008 conference, and the one question which seemed to be asked the most was “why are some of the words in the tag cloud bigger and bolder?”

 

This year questions from attendees were not much about ‘why’ – why use wikis, blogs, etc. – but more about ‘which’ and ‘how’. People were more interested in ‘which’ wiki, blog, microblogging or collaboration solution to use and the ‘how to’. What are the best practices in implementing E2.0 solutions given the traditional collaboration tools in the existing IT infrastructure? Yes, we know it’s not just about the technology, but how do we get past the ‘cultural’ barriers behind the firewall? Companies have also realized that the true value (ROI if you will) is measured by applying E2.0 principals to ‘improve’ or ‘replace’ existing business processes that simply don’t work today. This is truly a sign of the evolution of a new market.

 

We were really excited to see that our ‘social activity aggregation’ message was well received and resonated with almost everyone who stopped by our booth or attended the presentation. That by itself says a lot about the evolution of this market. The following diagram from our presentation at the show illustrates how Connectbeam fits into a typical social collaboration ecosystem in an enterprise, and help connecting traditional and E2.0 world together. I thought I would use an example and briefly describe the solution in case you missed us at the show:

 

Imagine in a large Fortune global 500 enterprise, Corporate IT has decided to rollout SharePoint MOSS 2007 – that includes wiki and blog capabilities – and NewsGator RSS as company-wide news feed and collaboration platform. Engineering in R&D department, however, have been using Atlassian Confluence wiki to manage day-to-day design, and project team collaborations for a while. The marketing team has been using the Yammer microblogging service for the last 3 months to communicate company news and messages with all employees. The technical support team, on the other hand, has been piloting and now ready to roll out Telligent Community to engage with external customers and partners. There are probably other homegrown tools and solutions in play but let’s just assume this is the current social software footprint at this company. In the long run, each tool above will greatly help employees and management solve a series of collaboration and communication problems. However as ‘standalone solutions’ they create new ‘social information silos’ because they don’t communicate with each other. The content stored in the Confluence wiki by the engineering team might be very valuable and relevant to the product marketing team who uses SharePoint on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily use the R&D wiki – they might not even know that wiki exists! So this and similar real world examples from our clients illustrate the need to aggregate social activities and user generated content across the enterprise regardless of the originating source. That’s where Connectbeam Social Activity Platform^TM comes into play.

 

Social activities from various platforms and solutions above are aggregated through out-of-the-box or custom connectors (using published REST APIs) and the ‘people to people’, ‘people to content’, and ‘content to content’ relationships are analyzed and captured for future collaboration use.  This aggregation service can deliver the most relevant user generated content and activity ‘in the flow’ of the user’s daily workflow – through integration with existing applications and not by introducing yet another destination.  This not only improves overall productivity but also greatly increases the adoption of newly added E2.0 tools in the enterprise collaboration ecosystem.

 

We also believe that a strong analytics solution – not displayed in the picture above but an upcoming part of Connectbeam’s offering – built on top of the social activity repository is an essential part of this service and can greatly help with raising awareness and visibility into ‘how’ people interact and connect with each other and ‘where’ they turn to share and discover information and expertise. One can only imagine how valuable it would be to extend this solution to outside the firewall, connecting customers, partners and suppliers social interactions.

 

So to summarize my thoughts on this year E2.0 conference, I can think of 3 takeaways:

1. The Enterprise 2.0 market is rapidly maturing and decision makers are increasingly interested in applying new social technologies.
2. Large enterprises won't standardize on a single platform or application anytime soon. There will always be valuable social content and activity in point solution.
3. There is a real business need to aggregate and analyze the social metadata and user activity from various collaboration tools and E2.0 solutions across the enterprise, particularly as the number of these tools in use grows.

Looking forward to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2010 at Boston.

Connectbeam as Social CRM? Named 2009 Company to Watch on ZDNet

It's always a pleasure to find your company named a "Company to Watch". This week, Connectbeam received that honor in a post by Paul Greenberg on ZDNet, CRM 2009 - Companies to Watch For - Part Tree, er...Three.

Paul Greenberg is the president of The 56 Group, LLC, author of the best selling book "CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century" and was one of nine people named by CRM Magazine as 2008 Influential Leaders.

Now here at Connectbeam, we're energized by the possibilities that sharing employee generated content and activity. Share what you find out on the web, share the content you create in different social software apps. And in doing so, you're creating a much richer picture about yourself inside the company.

But CRM? When a guy like Paul Greenberg mentions you in that context, you take note. Here is how Paul describes Social CRM:

"The interest in extending CRM applications and strategies into communities and social media will increase in the large enterprises as they begin to realize that to retain their customers they need to engage them in more valuable activities that will lead to continued purchases."

And it makes sense when you think of it that way. Let me give a couple examples of how this works.

External Market Intelligence

Say you're a large company monitoring your brand, compatitors and market out on Twitter. You either periodically run a search on search.twitter.com to see the latest, or you have a persistent search going via RSS. You find people tweeting good and bad things about you and your competitors. Now the challenge is this: how do I effectively bring the tweet inside the enterprise, share it with others and make it findable?

With Connectbeam, you bookmark it into your own, behind-the-firewall database. You can tag the tweet with labels that give it context, such as a product name, 'feedback', 'positive' or 'negative' and a number of different ways. Whatever makes sense to you and your organization. And you can put it in a dedicated Group, such as Customer Feedback.

When someone runs a search for customer feedback, your saved market intelligence shows up. And if you have an app that accepts RSS, you can pipe these saved tweets into it.

In this way, you've got an easy, effective way to stay on top of market chatter. For additional thoughts on this subject, see Social media redefines traditional business intelligence strategies.

Internal Experts

The other use is when others in your organization are writing about a product, customer, competitor or market trends. They may be doing this on a wiki, blog or forum. Currently, there's no good way to ensure that these great contributions are seen by the wider organization. Nor is it easy to identify who knows something about a customer.

By aggregating the content created by employees across the organization in these social software applications, you have the basis for expanding the reach of this information anywhere someone is looking for it. You also now know who has experience with these different areas.

This occurs because aggregated employee generated content can be added to pretty much any search engine, be it internal or external. Run a search on the intranet or CRM app? You won't miss the latest content created by employees. And you'll get a list of related users.

Social CRM - Let's Check This Out for 2009

Thank you Paul Greenberg for really cracking open this topic. It's one that many companies are thinking about and is only growing in importance. We look forward to seeing how companies look at this in the coming year.

TradeVibes – Web Community for and about Startup Companies

I recently discovered TradeVibes as some people came to this blog through the Connectbeam description listed on this online community. TradeVibes says that it “finds “cool and interesting startups and adds them to TradeVibes. By leveraging the collective wisdom of our community, TradeVibes separates the best startups from their competitors. Come share your opinions, or just come see the ratings, opinions, and discussions about which startup will be the next star.” I am honored that Connectbeam is included in this discussion.

TradeVibes explained that their long term mission is to democratize business information by increasing transparency. Ultimately, they believe this will increase innovation and encourage entrepreneurship globally. It was founded in 2007 by four early employees of PayPal: David Li, Peter Chu, David Kang, and Doug Ihde. Their office is located in Mountain View, California. They have a TradeVibes blog. This is a useful effort and I wish them luck.

What’s Happening with Tech Startups? – Churchill Club Session

The Churchill Club is hosting on session, “Startup Or Hunker Down? What’s Happening with Tech Startups “ this coming Monday August 11. It will be held at SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Ave. Menlo Park, CA. It starts at 6 PM with a buffet dinner. Guy Kawasaki, a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm will moderate the event. The speakers includes:

Richard Archuleta, CEO, Plastic Logic 

Rousseau Aurelien, CEO, Second Rotation 

Susan Coelius-Keplinger, Co-founder & COO, Triggit 

Martin Frid-Neilsen, Founder, Soonr 

Puneet Gupta, CEO, Connectbeam

I am pleased to be part of this session. The site describes the session as follows. “This panel of both early- and later-stage startup founders and executives from a range of sectors including green tech, enterprise software, mobile, semiconductors, and Web 2.0 will talk about ideas, money, technology, marketing and sales, talent, and timing. What factors are most responsible for economic success? What are the biggest obstacles they are overcoming and how are they doing it? What advice do they have for tomorrow's entrepreneurs?”

I am looking forward to this event and hope to see you there if you are in the area. Cisco is the sponsor. Registration details are at the Churchill Club site.

Defining Aspects of Social Computing, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, and the Consumer Web

Susan Scrupski and Jevon MacDonald are working on a model that breaks apart aspects of the new web world, inside and outside the enterprise. See Susan’s Circles of Expertise in 2.0 for Biz post for the current model. The four areas as range for digital marketing and mass collaboration (or co-creation) to social media and enterprise 2.0.

Connectbeam is squarely in the enterprise 2.0 space and I think these types of distinctions are important to develop. It helps to avoid the confusions that can arise over issues like the role of Facebook in the enterprise that I have written about on this blog. Susan writes, “Although there is overlap among all these groups, the areas of focus are distinctly unique. Of course, businesses can benefit by incorporating the expertise from all these areas, but they’d need to source it separately.”

It will be interesting to see where this model goes. I would bring the connection between enterprise 2.0 and mass collaboration a bit closer than the current model depicts since this mass collaboration can, and should, occur within the enterprise as well as out on the web as a whole through projects like Cisco I-Prize. One of the benefits of a social networking tool that combines social bookmarking like Connectbeam, is that we can help with this mass collaboration by getting the right people together inside the enterprise to more effective engage in this collaboration. Susan and Jevon are inviting contributions to their evolving model in this shared space.

Is Increased IT Investment and Disruptive Technology a Business Game Changer?

Andrew McAfee addresses this question in a clever way in a recent post, Technology Beats a Full House. He begins with a long discussion on the decline of variation in baseball hitter’s averages. He references the work of Steven Jay Gould in Full House and quotes his conclusion that “Complex systems improve when the best performers play by the same rules over extended periods of time. As systems improve, they equilibrate and variation decreases.” In baseball there have been no significant game changing rules in over 100 years so the variation in batting averages has continued to decline as the stats show.

Andrew then takes this concept to business to see what, if any, game changing events might disrupt the performance of companies. Andrew writes, “If the combination of the Web and commercial enterprise IT really was a ‘game changer’ for the competitive game of business, then the introduction of these technologies should be accompanied not by a decrease in variation in performance, but instead by the opposite—an increase in performance spread among competitors.” He looks at data from the 1962 to 2004 and finds a major disruption in the variation in company performance through several measures beginning in the 90s when significant investments in enterprise IT began.

He divides industries into those who spend heavily on IT and those that do not. He found that “For virtually all the ratios we considered, variation in high-IT industries started to increase in the mid 1990s and stayed high after that, with some exceptions during the post-2000 economic slump. The less IT an industry had, the less pronounced this trend was.” Andrew offers some useful graphs that clearly illustrate the dramatic difference between industries that spend more on IT and those that do not. These results support the idea that IT is a disruptive game changer and that as rules change, the winners become more separated from the losers.

Enterprise 2.0 and social software are changing the rules of engagement in business now. Andrew’s evidence suggests that the winners will come from those who continue to invest in these disruptive technologies. The data also suggests that the gap between winners will increase during this disruptive period until the rules settle down again, if that ever happens.

Always On and STVP Summit at Stanford

The AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford is a two-and-a-half day executive gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and commercial trends disrupting the global technology industries. It is taking place July 22-24, 2008 at the Arillaga Center on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, CA. It is anticipated that over a thousand technology, media and entertainment CEOs, business development officers, venture capital and private-equity investors, and leading members of the press and blogging community will attend this event. The agenda is very comprehensive and you see at their site through the link above.

At this event the Always On editors will also honor the AO Global 250 Top Private Companies. Fifty of the top CEOs from the AO Global 250 will present their market strategies to a panel of industry experts in our “CEO Showcase” in sessions over the two and half days. I am very pleased to be part of one of these sessions. On July 24 at 10:45 at Faher Hall our panel will include. Maynard Webb, CEO, LiveOps, Lyle Fong, CEO, Lithium, Bill Cook, CEO, Greenplum, Manish Sood, CEO, C-Mail, Billy Marshall, CEO, rPath, and myself, CEO at Connectbeam.

Immediately following our CEO presentations, industry experts will comment, and the CEOs will be available for 30 minutes of Q&A in the lobby. The industry experts for our sessions are: Steve Schlenker, Managing Partner, Chief Investment Officer, DN Capital, David Nanto, Director, NEC Corporation of America, Sanjiv Parikh, Managing Director, Corporate Ventures, HP. I hope you can attend if you are at the event.

Many Blogs Make Top 25 Tech News Sites.

Blogs are a great way to get the news out and they have also become trusted sources for many people. eBizMBA provides many top 20 - 30 lists, such as the 25 most popular tech news sites. These tech news sources were ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast. eBiz MBA added, “Although no traffic metrics are completely accurate we do believe the data below to be useful for gauging relative audience size.”

To no surprise blogs play a major role, while the CNet News and ZDNet sites are numbers one and two, the blogs, TechCrunch (Michael Arrington) and Mashable (Pete Cashmore) are numbers 5 and 6. The top two sites also have a number of blogs within their sites. We cover a number of these on our blog list, so it was nice to see them in the top 25 sites (web sites and blogs). In addition to TechCrunch and Mashable, we have GigaOM.com (14), ReadWriteWeb (Richard MacManus) (15), and Scobleizer (21). We also have a number of the ZDnet bloggers such as Joe McKendrick, Dana Gardner, Dion Hinchcliffe, and Dan Farber. If CNet News and ZDNet aggregate the bloggers into their traffic results then bloggers are really all over the top 5, as well as the top 25.

Check out the complete list. It makes good reading.

Daniela Barbosa Chitchating about Information Delivery

Daniela Barbosa writes the wonderful blog, Chitchating about Information Delivery. The very prominent blog, ReadWriteWeb recently named her one of the Seven Leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists. It said, “Daniela Barbosa is the Business Development Manager, at Synaptica, a division of Dow Jones Client Solutions. Barbosa is one of the most prominent advocates of semantic technology and data portability inside of a legacy institution. Her personal blog leverages almost every bleeding edge web technology you can think of.”

Her blog also includes a beautiful banner of photos across the top and then excellent content underneath with a lot of cool widgets running down the right column. I need to ask where she got some of that stuff. The archives go back to February 2005.

Daniela gives bloggers some good advice in her post, I Knew There was a Reason I Never Started Smoking, I Was Waiting for Something Better. She writes that it is important to understand the behavior that drives people to read blogs if you want to make them successful. Then Daniela covers a small sample study she found on the blog, Paid Content. Many of the bloggers were more obsessive than me about reading their favorite blogs but the idea that stuck out for me was the comment by one of the respondents that she quotes, “Rather than focusing on helping readers wade through a deluge of information content, one could envision tools that focus on the reader’s relationship with the blogger or allowing more fluid, nuanced interactions between bloggers and readers.”

Daniela went on the think of some ways to expand the engagement between readers and bloggers such as matching the readers 'Attention' to specific blog posts so the first posts the visitor sees when visiting a blog are the most relevant to them based on their current attention profile, allowing readers to comment beyond text for example with video replies, and allowing 'real-time' chat on blogs once you post some content.

I find the first one the most intriguing. You can do that manually now in a primitive by going to the categories on this blog that interest you but a more sophisticated multi-dimensional tag-based profile might provide better matches. We also have Google site search on this blog to help you find past content that is off the front page. Perhaps adding more social features like we do with the Google Search Application for the enterprise might enrich the readers experience and the connections with other readers of the blog. When we integrate Connectbeam with Google Search Appliance inside the firewall the combination provides additional ranking based on number of times tagged. This Google integration also offers related tags, related users, and related communities. You are able to see who else did the same search, what they found, what they thought about it, and are provided with the ability to contact this person with a similar interest. What do you think? Daniela asks for more ideas and I do also.

Connectbeam at Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 - April 6-10 in Las Vegas

If you are planning to attend the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 in Las Vegas on April 6-10, 2008 come by the Connectbeam booth for a product demo and a chance to win an Apple TV.

We are located at booth #122.

The conference takes place at the Mandalay Bay Hotel.

Connectbeam is also proud to share the Gartner's Cool Vendor spotlight with Alfabet, Intalio, Opalis, and Primavera.

Connectbeam announces Series A funding

In pursuit of better serving our customers and increasing our pace of bringing new and innovative products to market, we are pleased to announce our Series A funding of $3.5 Million.

Gabriel Venture Partners lead the round syndicated with Startup Capital Ventures. We are absolutely delighted to welcome to our board Jim Long, representing Gabriel Ventures, and Bob Rees, representing Startup Capital. A long time believer in Connectbeam and a fellow Oracle alum, Jnan Dash also joins our board of directors. Connectbeam, together with our community of customers and partners stands to greatly benefit from the collective experience of our board members.

We move into this next phase of our company growth with very strong fundamentals, thanks again to our customers, investors, and a best in class team firing on all cylinders.

CIO Insight - The Appliance Model

CIO Insight magazine has a good article by John Parkinson on putting I.T. Appliances to work.

John lists areas such as storage, search, security, email management, data analytics, and system management - where Appliances are already in place inside corporate data centers.

The availability of industry-standard components and Linux have radically altered the economics of the appliance approach. Appliances benefit from the established set of monitoring and management standards that let them behave as good citizens in the network in a way that general-purpose computing platforms and software can't.

For enterprises, who must have their data behind the firewall, Appliance is a good fit.

We welcome you to contact us to see a demo of our Social Bookmarking and Social Networking Application packaged as an Appliance, and to discuss a fit for your organization.

Using Tagging to finding the proverbial Needle in a Haystack

At a recently conducted survey at Scientific Computing webinar around knowlege management and information search, the survey results once again highlighted the frustration people have with the status quo of search for meaninful information today.

Rich Hoeg, as one of the participants, talks about this on his blog and recommends tagging as a way to crack this problem by bringing "context" to search.

Connectbeam has mastered Social Search says Social Computing Magazine

Social Computing Magazine describes and talks about the value of Social Search inside the enterprise and highlights Connectbeam's unique approach toward providing a social search experience via combining features of Social Bookmarking and Social Networking.

The key to social search in an enterprise context is identifying and connecting each enterprise worker with colleagues whose interests and knowledge enhances their own.

Privately held Connectbeam, located in California's Silicon Valley, has mastered this. Its Social Bookmarking & Networking Appliance, a pre-configured appliance server deployed behind the enterprise firewall, highlight information from colleagues' searches, especially the information that they have found most useful.

Full article can be found here.