I see this on a personal level as I am now constantly fighting data capacity on my Mac and iPhone but I have not yet obtained flexible backup storage. The big enterprises have it much worse.  Ken said that Perfect Search has developed a number of ways to handle this issue. The company was formed in 2007. It already has three patents and six more pending. Much of what they do is to increase the speed of search through better algorithms.  This opens up a lot of options.

Now you can create better indexes to keep track of the data, as size is not an issue. In the past indexing could be too slow when addressing vast quantities of data. You can also push search on less expensive hardware opening up more options by making backup and search efforts financially achievable for more firms. Several of their clients have now been able to do things not possible before, as we will see.  You can also do broader search and include things like fuzzy ranges to capture more data. In addition, you can mix metadata and full text search. All of these are made possible through the significant increases in speed that Perfect Search offers.

Ken mentioned a few client examples. Olson DataMax specializes in taking paper files, scanning them to create digital storage. They use Perfect Search to them find these documents.  World Vital Records is an online genealogy company that provides access to several million historical documents to help genealogists.  They are able to do this so far with only a single server through their use of Perfect Search.  When they reach projected growth their old estimates called for over 1200 servers, pushing the cost beyond reach, Now they will be able to handle the same capacity with about 40 servers putting the effort within budget.

i.TV is an online TV and movie guide for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It allows you to see what is on TV and local movie theaters, buy tickets and even use your iPhone as a TV remote. Now they are also able to offer search to their users as Perfect Search brought the price down to acceptable levels.

In 2008 we generated more information online that in the entire history of information. Search is the major way to combat this glut of information. Perfect Search appears to be making a great contribution in this space by bringing the capability in a cost effective manner.  In addition to the Web site you can follow their story through the Perfect Search blog.

I spoke with Andrew Hull of RightNow about these new capabilities. He said that companies like CBS Interactive and Match.com want to provide their customers with a unified experience. They have optimized their applications for mobile devices and do not want to have to send customers to a regular Web site for support while using these apps. At the same time they do not want to heavily invest the time and expenses of custom building mobile device optimized customer service apps. Mobile is one of their fastest growing channels so they need to be able to provide proper customer service.  Below you see the chat offer on a mobile device.

Here you can see a sample chat session on the same device.

The RightNow Mobile capability allows companies to extend their customer service with a mobile device optimized interface without any extra investment. With the May release the mobile capability comes bundled with RightNow’s product offerings at no extra cost. The system can determine which device the customer is using mobile, laptop, etc. and adjust the user interface to match the device.  Here is a link to a demo of their mobile offering.

I see this as growing need and think it is a smart move on the part of RightNow. The RightNow Mobile Web Self-Service enables consumers to search for help, view answers, rate answers, see related questions, and submit an email inquiry from their mobile devices to quickly serve themselves anytime and anywhere. The RightNow Mobile Guided Assistance allows consumers to engage in a conversational question and answer dialog for complex troubleshooting scenarios to get faster and more accurate self-service. Guided Assistance helps consumers find the right answers with a mobile guide that uses question branches to guide them to the appropriate answer or resolution.

RightNow recently announced their Customer Experience Cloud Platform. It includes a full compliment of services including the RightNow App Builder, RightNow Knowledge Foundation, and mission critical operations.  This allows organizations to create, extend, and integrate customer service operations in the cloud.  The mission critical operation includes infrastructure, security, and scalability associated with the on-premise solution in a cloud platform.

RightNow also recently announced their RightNow Cloud Services Portal to support the Customer Experience Cloud Platform. It provides near real-time visibility into RightNow’s cloud operations.  This transparency matches that available in the on-premise operations. It gives IT managers insight into the operations of the their RightNow deployment so they can make adjustments in a timely manner.  There is a single view of historical and planned operational activities, scheduled updates, sandbox locations, service level attainment, and root cause analysis for all incidents.

These are all steps in the right direction. I have been pleased to see the ongoing extension of the RightNow platform over the past several years.

I recently spoke again with Spigit CEO and Co-founder Paul Pluschkell to catch up on their latest news. We began with conversation about the innovation management market. Paul said that the niche has now become a recognized market space like CRM and other genres. According to a Boston Consulting Group report on innovation from 2010, 72 percent of respondents said that their companies consider innovation a top-three priority, versus 64 percent in 2009. In addition, 84 percent of respondents said their companies consider innovation an important or extremely important lever in their ability to reap the benefits of an economic recovery. This need has helped to fuel the innovation market.

I have seen a number of high profile successes in innovation management like Cisco I-Prize (see for example my posts (Cisco Launches Second I-Prize Competition (2010) and Cisco I-Prize: The Cisco Co-Creation Contest (2007).  Spigit has become the platform for Cisco’s new I-Prize “Idea Market,” which provides contest participants with the option to “invest” in the idea they deemed most deserving of the $250,000 grand prize. They are given investment points at the start and then can earn more through active participation in the event. This has helped achieve a three-fold increase in engagement in the second year of the contest.

Paul said creating greater engagement is a major focus of his firm.  They provide a dedicated community manager bundled with their enterprise SaaS fees and employ behavioral science techniques like offering incentives and rewareds to foster this engagement. They now also offer optional professional services for firms that want to create customized reports or extend the platform based in Boulder, CO.

We discussed some of the features in the new S3 release. There are greater analytic capabilities and they added Google Analytics as one step in this direction.  They used their own product to gain customer feedback for new ideas. Some of the ones they implemented include: auto-save at 20 second intervals, widget-based features, drag and drop administration capabilities to make use of these widgets, themes, and the more back end reporting. As part of S3, administrators now have the ability to move ideas across categories and communities. You can also host Spigit on Sharepoint or on its own platform.

Spigit collects a lot of data in the process of managing innovation. Now users can generate custom reports with just a few clicks. These reports are then dynamically updated. Examples include most popular ideas, most popular participants, and what is the stage were each idea is currently located.  This can be used for diagnosis as it can track why certain ideas are getting stuck in particular stages of the process. Spigit also allows clients to benchmark their idea generation process against others based on their aggregated data.

We discussed a few client examples. Met Life has launched 60-day employee idea events. From the hundreds of ideas submitted they have selected six and these have a projected ROI of over 4 million in revenue. Southwest Airlines is using Spigit to management its employee suggestion process. The platform encourages cross-functional collaboration by facilitating transparency and enabling discussions among all work groups. The Spigit platform helps dictate a path for an idea to best become implemented and identifies the most valuable and top participants on the platform. Through an enhanced logical flow of communication between all work departments, new ideas are created along with solutions to problems that executives never knew existed. The ability to define, measure, analyze and implement ideas created a better understanding of process and improvement. I like the effort spent on process, as well as technology here.

Paul said that Spigit had its largest growth of bookings in Q2 2010. They saw a growth of 287 percent compared to the previous quarter and solid growth of 308 percent compared to the same quarter last year. The company doubled their customer base and grew its employee base by 107% since January 1, 2010. This is even more impressive given the general state of the economy.  It shows to me that there is always market for good ideas.  Now there is a market for better ways to management the growth of these ideas.

Cisco Show and Share, a social video community where contest participants can record, edit and share video; comment, rate and tag interesting content; and use speech-to-text translation for video search and viewing.

Cisco Pulse, a search platform that dynamically tags content as it crosses the network, allowing contest participants to accurately locate and connect with the best available experts and information on a particular topic.

Cisco WebEx™, an online meeting platform for audio and Web conferencing that enables users to share documents and desktops in real time.

Cisco TelePresence™, an immersive, virtual meeting experience that combines real-time video, audio and interactive technologies to give people in distributed global locations a wide variety of face-to-face collaboration experiences.

The program was divided into the following four categories:

The future of work: Use the power of the network to bring together customers, suppliers and associates to propose solutions that will change the way companies and organizations do business.

The connected life: Showcase technological advancements that will dramatically improve living conditions and culture. This category will require people to envision a life of seamless connectivity.

New ways to learn: Create innovative solutions that will transform when, where and how people learn.

The future of entertainment: Devise next-generation solutions that will change how people play.

The I-Prize event is targeted at those outside the organization as they already have programs to encourage contributions from employees. However, employees can participant in the various ways to comment on and rate the entries.  Cisco introduced an IP point system to this second contest to create an ideas market. The ideas market was build on the Spigit platform, a product I covered on this blog before. Participants received IP points when they registered. They could invest these points in ideas. There was a cap on the number of points you could invest in any one idea to prevent gaming the system. As strong ideas emerged, the investors’ points became more valuable. Participants also got more points for their participation in the process and they could invest these.

A leader board allowed people to track ideas and their points. You could also follow the point progress for people. This transparency increased involvement as I have seen in many situations. In the first contest there were 2,500 participants and 4,000 comments. In the second one there were 3,000 participants and almost 12,000, comments. Many participants said the leader board was very engaging and they followed it on a frequent basis.  I like this idea and it showed that Cisco listened to participants.

The event was organized in three phases. In the first phase, which lasted three months, the 3,000 people submitted over 800 ideas. These participants came from 156 countries. They could use video for submissions and commentary.  In the second phase the field was reduced to thirty-two teams from twenty two countries. Eight of these teams were picked through the IP point system, the top two in each of the four categories advancing. The Cisco team picked the other 24 idea teams.  A team of ten Cisco managers monitored the leader board process.

In the third phase nine finalist teams presented their ideas to Cisco using telepresence. These nine teams were composed of people from 14 countries on six continents.  The wining team received a $250,000 prize. Like all participants they retained the intellectual property rights and Cisco licensed their idea for an undisclosed sum.  The team was composed of five students from Mexico: Darius Lau Castro and his teammates Lizett Michel Gallegos, Claudia Alexandra Vargas Prieto, Guillermo Antonio Araiza Torres and Juan Rodrigo Huerta Manning. You can se the announcement of the winning team below with team members on the video screen.

They proposed an online “Life Account” to create a physical and virtual platform that facilitates connectivity along with smart objects, people and information. Life Account collects data about its users through devices that capture information both from the users’ activities in the physical and virtual world. This data is then aggregated to generate a virtual profile that understands habits and behavior patterns to conveniently blend the physical and virtual world for the user.

The winning idea from the first contest also came from students and it was directed at effective energy management.  The winning team contained two Germans and a Russian. It was led by Anna Gossen, a computer science student at the Karlsruhe University in Germany. The other members include Niels Gossen, a computer science student at the University of Applied Sciences in Germany, and Sergey Bessonnitsyn, a systems engineer from Russia. They were looking at ways to use the network as the platform for visibility, manageability and, ultimately, optimized control of energy-consuming systems. It has now been folded into Cisco’s energy management offering.  Two of the finalists from the first contest made it to the finals in the second year.

I think this is a great example of crowd-sourcing with a clearly define process and the right supporting collaborative tools. It continues to improve. I look forward to seeing what changes they may make to the next competition.

Jason said this enhancement is primarily targeted at English-based countries doing global business. Seventy percent of EchoSign revenue comes from US based companies and those outside the US are primarily in the UK and AustraIia. However, many of these countries are increasingly doing business in non-English speaking countries. EchoSign how provides versions where all the directions, guidance, and disclosure information are in multiple languages. They also allow for the signature, itself, to be in the alphabet fonts of the signer as you can see below.

They are also providing capability of mobile devices such as iPad. This allows for virtual signatures but also provides the capability for in-person signatures in the field on on-line documents. He said about ten percent of their customers want e-signatures to occur in person.

What are the stats on e-signature? The Aberdeen Group recently published a report that reinforces the effectiveness of e-signatures as a sales tool. According to the report, users of e-signatures are more successful than other companies in reducing sales cycle times on a year-over-year basis.  Aberdeen also found that companies who employ e-signatures for renewals have a 91% customer retention rate, compared with 78% for industry average.

Jason said that their own stats indicate that in the first six months of this year their 20,000 customers and 2,000,000 users achieved an average time from first click to signature on an order of 70 minutes. Typical times without an e-signature capability are measured in weeks as physical documents move back and forth.

Here is an idea that makes a lot of sense. As I wrote before it takes on the last vestige of the analog world in the digital economy. Here is a video demo.

This platform allows for customer communication to more easily move out of the traditional channels of email and telephones to a more productive and transparent collaboration platform.  Now organizations have been using wikis and other collaborative tools for some time to set up shared space to communication with customers. It is one of the more common use cases that go across organizational boundaries. I asked Chris what is different with this new release.

He said that they have recognized that customer collaboration was one of the stronger uses cases of PBworks so they have designed the PBworks Customer Relationship Edition to optimize for this activity.  There are four main new capabilities.

The first is automated custom workspace creation.  The average company may have hundreds or even thousands of customers every year.  Customizing and personalizing each of those workspaces could take a considerable amount of time.  The Customer Relationship Edition automates that process by allowing you to specify “variables” in your workspace templates that are replaced with specific values when a new workspace is created.  For example, your presales extranet template might include “Client Name,” “Company Name,” and “Account Rep Name” on various pages.  When you create a new workspace for working with a potential customer, you simply fill in those three values up front, and PBworks automatically makes the substitution on any page on which they appear. Below is a sample branded login screen for a workspace.

The second key new capability is customer engagement monitoring.  One of the most frustrating things for any salesperson or account manager is not knowing if the prospect or customer is engaged in the relationship what actions they are taking.  PBworks provides this knowledge by tracking prospect and customer activity for you. It looks at several things: whenever a customer logs into their workspace, PBworks sends you an alert; whenever a customer views content or downloads a file, PBworks records the action. You can view customer activity as part of the overall activity stream, or filter out all distractions and review it in isolation. Below you can see a sample activity notification.

Third is the ability to set up common spaces to make information easily accessible that you want to share across all customers. This allows you to update this information once and provide secure access from every individual workspace you set up. Each customers can only see the there activities and not what the others customers are doing.  There is an associated chat feature with common repository but only people on the same team can see and engage in a chat.

In addition, there is also the ability to customize workspace templates to make it easy to adjust certain types of information while keeping other content constant.  You can create a PBworks workspace from within Salesforce.com and populate it with existing data from Salefcore.com. Then you can launch the workspace form within Salesforce.com. Below is a sample screen showing some of the customization features.

The PBworks Customer Relationship Edition is a nice addition for several reasons. First, it makes it easier to set up and operate one of the most common use cases for collaborative platforms. Second, it is a great example, of a vendor listening to its customers and acting of capabilities they request. I can see more examples of customized collaboration platform editions targeted at high value use cases.

We first discussed the Enterprise App Store.  This is modeled after the very successful and well-known iTunes store but it takes the functionality inside the enterprise as a means of governance more that a commercial distribution channel. I like the use of the App Store concept, as people are very familiar with it. The platform allows enterprise consumers of apps a single source that is well organized and searchable. It also offers the creators of apps a central place to share their efforts within the enterprise.  Here is a sample App Store screen.

There is an App Store Manager responsible for ensuring the Apps have function, documentation and work as advertised.  The review and approval process provides central governance that can be very useful given the ease in which apps can be powered by mashups.  This is a way to avoid the potential chaos of too many apps and redundant apps. You can better get the right apps to the right users with some degree of vetting along the way.  The apps can be out-of-the-box creations, as well as templates requiring further customization.  Here is a App Store Manager screen.

The App Store has an area called ‘My Apps’ where users can place and organize the Apps they want and use. They can provide comments; tag and share the Apps. This information accelerates the ability for other users to find and use the Apps they want. Here is a sample My Apps screen

JackBe has also upgraded their development tools with this release. Their new visual tools make it easier for non-developers to create enterprise apps and deploy them to enterprise destination like portals, SharePoint, iGoogle, and mobile devices. Presto 3.0 includes enhancement to Wires, their visual mashup-making tool, Mashboard, a new App assembly and wiring tool, and Mashup Sites for SharePoint, an advanced SharePoint add-on that mashes SharePoint Lists and publishes Apps as SharePoint WebParts.

They showed me some apps created with these new tools. One set were developed by a non-technical marketing person and covered the World Cup. There was an amusing comparison of goals per capita and goals vs. GDP for the competing countries. These applications took minutes to create without programming using publically available data.

I especially liked the new Mashhboard that allows users to group or link apps along a workflow. The creations can run on any browser, on the iPad, or even within Excel. The approach is to make everything simple: creation, distribution selection, and implementation.  Mashups are one of the key building blocks of enterprise 2.0 and it is nice to see these new features to streamline the process. Here is a Mashboard screen.

JackBe will also be making a cloud-based Developer Edition of Presto 3.0 available to all members of its Mashup Developer Community. Registration in the Community is free and includes tutorials, samples, and support forums.

Pam first went through several trends that helped to prompt them to make this move.  Learning has become more social and the interest in peer learning has increased. I certainly agree with these observations. I have always been a proponent of social and peer learning through such methods as simulation-based learning going back to the 80s. It is great to see the rise of social computing providing a much richer platform for this approach.

There is also the move from learning as an event to learning as a continuous process. This was one of the reasons I first got involved in knowledge management in the 90s and now the line between learning and KM is becoming even more blurred for good reasons.

To address these trends and take advantage of the new capabilities that social computing and social networks can bring to learning, SkillSoft’s Books24×7 division introduced inGenius. It enables social learning by extending the value of expert information and infusing it with the knowledge and expertise of an organization’s own employees. Unlike many stand-alone social networking applications, inGenius is built on SkillSoft’s Books24×7 on demand content collections containing more than 25,000 titles — digital books from leading publishers, analyst research reports, and white papers — as well as 1,300 videos of thought leaders and practitioners. Below you can see a inGenius home page.

inGenius enhances SkillSoft’s core learning assets with a feature set that enables learners to leverage content assets as seeds of discussion and to add community content (“co-content”) including notes, comments and ratings that add a unique layer of context and relevance, specific to their organization. It further enhances the social learning experience with opportunities to build connections and allow sharing between learners. inGenius also enables learners to discover knowledgeable colleagues by searching social profiles. Here is sample profile page.

inGenius is a free add-on to the Books24×7 offering. People can set up their own profile with recommended titles and comments on works. They also have implemented the following model used by Twitter so people can see the activities of those they respect. The activity stream contains auto-generated updates based on activities such as adding comments, rather than manually created tweets. You can click on a link in the update to see the actual comment in the context of the relevant learning material. I think this is a good approach for their content focused approach. Here is a sample activity stream.

When you do searches for content you now get additional returns on the people who have commented on this content or recommended it, putting a great social context to search, another good move. The addition of social networking capabilities to a learning library makes great sense and SkillSoft has done a great job with this release.

Isaac said that 65% of the documents stored on Central Desktop are Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) files and they decided to more directly address these users. They recently announced details about Central Desktop for Office, a new cloud-enabled document collaboration tool for Microsoft Office users that will be available later this summer. Central Desktop for Office allows users to simultaneously co-author Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in real time, as well as open and save files directly into the cloud.

I asked Isaac how the simultaneous co-authoring works. Central Desktop’s co-authoring feature enables multiple users to edit Office files simultaneously, by conveniently tracking and syncing all changes made by collaborators and merging them correctly into one updated version. It is not exact real time like Google Wave but rather a back and forth capability that operates like chat. I like this better as control is swapped rather than inviting the potential chaos of simultaneous real time edits. Below you can see a Word document opened with the tool bar at the top and the editing participants in the left column.

What I especially liked was the ability to have a comment dialogue occur around the document editing. It makes the Office docs social. Each participant can see the comments and others can be alerted to them if they request to see such updates. Central Desktop for Office leverages technology from OffiSync and is compatible with any version of Microsoft Office including 2003, 2007 and 2010. So you can make older versions of Office more social, as well as Office 2010. Below you can see the commenting feature in the lower left column.

Once installed, Central Desktop for Office adds a new toolbar in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint that enables users to open, save, edit and co-author files stored in the cloud – directly from within Office. The new tool also brings additional collaboration capabilities into Office including the ability to comment on files, manage subscribers and track version history.

Isaac said they are considering more features for the toolbar such as the ability for Skype calls and micro-blogging.  Central Desktop already supports micro-blogging but they may add the capability directly into the new Office toolbar.

Central Desktop for Office’s co-authoring capabilities are very useful for business teams that need to create and collaborate on documents such as project plans, budget forecasts and sales presentations. Rather than waiting for each person to edit the document in a sequence, Central Desktop for Office allows users to simultaneously make changes and each version is automatically merged. This eliminates review cycles and can drive faster, more efficient document collaboration.

With search-engine capabilities built, customers can run queries on metadata, as well as documents. They gave me an example of this dual capability through a medical journal publisher. You can look for articles on topics, as well as by title and author. You can narrow down the search to cover a certain drug used in a certain location to address a certain issue that has been cited by five or more other journals and/or prompted five or more letters to the journal editor. This is an impressive ability to create specific search efforts.

MarkLogic initially focused on the media and publishing market beginning in 2004. They added government in 2007 and are now expanding into financial services. One of the interesting sites they support is the Warrior Gateway that supports returning veterans. This is a great cause and it provides much needed and well deserved support.  The site provides a directory, job search information, offers a blog and Twitter updates, along with other services. Returning vets can register and join the community. They can find service providers such as medical professionals and comment and rate these service providers. Below is a subset of the Warrior Gateway home page

MarkLogic has five common uses cases. First, there is providing a common repository such as the medical journal publishing firm mentioned above. Second, it is used as a metadata catalog. The National Archives and the Library of Congress are examples here.  Third, it can be used for digital content delivery. In this instance it can separate storage from delivery to accommodate a variety of devices. Fourth, it can provide intelligence about the content. In this case it can combine heterogeneous content and look at trends. A fifth case is social applications such as the Warrior Gateway.

Here is another example. The Springer database is a growing collection of unusual content including drawings, photos, tables, charts, histograms, and figures. MarkLogic Server enables users to search many parameters such as captions, references to the images, and user-generated keywords. Springer Images leverages the full-text search, content enrichment, and faceted navigation capabilities of MarkLogic Server, providing a new way to access hard-to-find scientific content of the utmost value to researchers. Here is a sample screen for the Springer application.

MarkLogic is continuing to invest in its product offerings with a focus on lowering the cost of adoption/operation for customers, adding additional enterprise data management capabilities and provide more refinement capabilities around search results.  The firm is expanding and recently received a CODiE award for  best database management system for the second year in a row. Their CEO, Dave Kellogg, writes the Kellblog, “covering next-generation database management, enterprise search, and content management technologies along with commentary on Silicon Valley, venture capital, and the business of software” I like their use cases and look forward to hearing more.