Out of this Galaxy – Delivering Premium Customer Service Has Never Been So Easy

November 14, 2008 at 2:51 pm · Filed under QuickBase, Reviews, Sponsored Post

Luke Winter and Tristan Kampman bought Granola Galaxy 3 years ago when the company served less than 100 customers direct, mostly in its Northern California home market.  They liked the product, the brand and the potential opportunity for growth.

And grow it did.  Galaxy has added over 1,000 stores since Luke and Tristan showed up.  For the first two years, they used Excel to manage their customer information.  It didn’t scale and Luke nearly lost his mind trying to keep track of it all.  Out of frustration, Luke commented, “It doesn’t matter how good you are in Excel, it’s just not meant to be used as a database.” Yet so many people are using and abusing spreadsheets in this capacity. Luke and Tristan set out on a search for an appropriate database/CRM tool. Their requirements for the solution were that it must be customizable and flexible.

‘We considered Filemaker and Access; but knew it would require a lot of work to get started and we didn’t have that time and energy to put towards it. And Salesforce wasn’t quite customizable enough for our needs,’ said Luke.

So they decided on QuickBase and have been using it since January 2008 for their customer service management needs – specifically tracking the status of customers, where customers are located, what product the customers carry and how much they have in inventory at any given time, as well as other associated activities like in-store demo schedules and staffing. Recently Galaxy has moved their Purchase Order management to the QuickBase platform. Luke said, ‘QuickBase helps us provide a level of customer service and follow-up comparable to that of much larger companies.’

Even though Galaxy Granola is a small operation today, they are serving large customers across the US like Whole Foods, Wegman’s, and Albertson’s. They’ve got big plans for growth and that includes increased usage of QuickBase over time. As their business needs and processes evolve, QuickBase applications can evolve with them.

Luke commented, ‘QuickBase is a customizable online database that can be used for a variety of business functions. We really value the flexibility the product has to offer. QuickBase has a huge advantage there. We can adapt and make changes on the fly.’

QuickBase

Review: Flock 2.0 Browser

November 14, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Reviews, social tools

The web is getting much more interactive with Web 2.0, but are the browsers keeping up? I recently came across one that tries to, and after giving it a go, I was left wishing I found it sooner. Flock is appropriately dubbed as a “social browser”, as it seamlessly integrates some of the more popular social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Gmail, Digg, and Flickr into the browsing experience.

Flock was founded in 2005, and the current version is their second major release. According to their site, the company is based in Redwood City, CA, and funded by several prominent angel investors. It’s actually based on the Firefox 3.0 engine, which means it’s fast, powerful, secure, and compatible with Firefox add-ons. As someone who uses a lot of extensions, this was welcome news. However, I had mixed results after installing some. Most worked fine, but Google Gears didn’t, along with a couple of others. This is unfortunate as I really need Gears for Google Docs.

This is what the Flock 2.0 browser looks like, with its start-up page:

At first, it felt a little cluttered with icons on the upper left-hand side, but learning about the functions of each made me appreciate what they’re there for. I particularly liked the well thought-out native feed reader, the built-in blog editor (compatible withWordPress, TypePad, and other blog engines), and the media bar (streams feeds of pictures and video from Flickr , YouTube, etc). The email and feed notifiers are also very handy, informing you at a glance if you have new messages. Meanwhile, the My World icon opens a tab that shows the latest on your favorite feeds, media, and friends.

It was easy to navigate around Flock’s menus, thanks to its faithfulness to Firefox’s scheme.  The only thing that I wasn’t too happy about was that the default search box for Flock is Yahoo! instead of Google, which I prefer for in-depth research. Of course, there are many workarounds to this, and only a matter of preference. Yahoo! is fine for the average user.

Unlike my experience with Google Chrome, using Flock exclusively for almost a week was virtually problem-free. Videos played smoothly, pages loaded fast, and web applications worked fine – no doubt thanks to the stability of the coreFirefox 3.0 engine. To be fair, Chrome was a new, experimental platform, and it had its own charms. Things can only get better.

In Flock’s future releases, I would suggest expanding support for more social networks, particularly those that are strong in certain regions like Friendster, hi5, Hyves, Bebo, and Orkut. Another feature to consider is IM support, to make the browser truly an all-in-one online communications hub. For now, Flock 2.0 has proven to be quite impressive, and I would consider making it my default browser, if only there wasn’t these add-on compatibility issues. Anyone who is into social media and don’t mind its quirks should give Flock a try.

What Does Perceptive Pixel Promise for Work?

November 13, 2008 at 2:07 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Reviews

GearLog was my introduction to Perceptive Pixel,  www.perceptivepixel.com  the New York based company behind CNN’s large flat-panel monitor used for displaying election results by states, real time and graphically. 

A Google search indicates the broad coverage Perceptive Pixel’s technology received from the New York Times to Broadcast Engineering to Wired and CNet. The CNET article reveals Perceptive Pixel’s collaborative visual data display technology was never intended for broadcasting use.  Rather:

Exalead’s CloudView Offers Integrated Search Capabilities

November 12, 2008 at 7:32 pm · Filed under Reviews

As more channels of information open, search becomes more complex as the opportunity for information silos increases. I recently spoke with Paul Doscher, US CEO of Exalead. Exalead has introduced its CloudView product line to address this issue. Paul said that one of the key challenges in enterprise information access is that content exists locally on a variety of devices; behind the firewall with databases and legacy systems; and outside the firewall with partners, SaaS applications and on the Web. He said that the future of information management requires the integration and analysis of heterogeneous, structured, semi-structured and unstructured information sources. 

CloudView is not a SaaS solution. The name refers to the industry-wide shift to housing data in a large number of silos, or “data clouds.” This creates the demand for information access platforms with better connectivity, better interoperability and better scalability. Paul gave me several examples of the scalability that CloudView offers. The Sanger Institute, a research group, has stored over 1.5 billion documents and adds 160 million new documents every two months. CloudView is able to keep up wit this effort and provides access to all of this information.

CloudView also allows for adjustments to handle peak time searches. The Rightmove, a UK real estate listing service that handles ove r90% of UK real estate gets peak traffic during lunch and CloudView scales up to handle over 400 queries per second. American Greeting, the card company, also scales up for their holiday traffic.

We covered the origins of Exalead. It started in Paris in 2000 with some of the founders coming from Alta Vista. They have a web search tool like Google that is used in widely in France and other parts of Europe.  They have had a US presence since 2005 but it operated on a small scale as a sales channel. Now they are greatly expanding their US operations to go after the North American market with their new CloudView line. Exalead is focusing on three main markets segments in this expansion: online businesses, large enterprises, and OEM. It is built on open standards for greater flexibility in these markets.

Some of the CloudView features include: business level tuning and management of the search experience, ability to extend Business Intelligence applications to textual search, WYSIWYG configuration of indexing and search workflows, full traceability within the product, and a provision for additional connectors with simple and advanced APIs for 3rd party implementations.

In addition to their OEM product and the standalone enterprise search edition, Exalead offers a 360 edition information access development platform.  This platform allows companies to build applications that integrate information sources with both structured and unstructured data. For example, an integrated call center application built on CloudView could pull from multiple data sources to simplify information access and reduce retrieval times.

Paul pointed out the Exalead has been running a popular web search engine for years and has learned how to handle scalability and other development issues through this effort. I took a look at their web search product, Exalead. It is appealing as you have greater ability to quickly focus your search than Google. You can also personalize a series of short cuts. In addition, Exalead provides a picture of the web site along with the results.  All of these are good features.

I like their move in the enterprise market.  There is plenty of opportunity here. It will be interesting to see how they progress.

A Webinar on IT’s Role in Supporting Mobile Work

November 11, 2008 at 6:39 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Reviews, Technology Management, Web Commuting, Webinar

Charlie Grantham and I completed presenting a webinar on “The Future of Work:  IT’s Role in Enabling Mobile Work” just a few hours ago.
The webinar was sponsored by Citrix Online, and included our reporting out the results of an extensive survey we recently completed of IT professionals and their views about the challenges and opportunities surrounding mobile work. The survey was also sponsored by Citrix.

Among the topics we covered:

• Why mobile work is real – and here to stay

• What challenges the mobile workforce creates for IT

• Why remote access is just as important as having a laptop and a cell phone

The session is now available for viewing online whenever you wish. Just click here and you should have your Windows Media Player or other media player open right up and start playing.

The whole session takes about 50 minutes; we’re on for about 30 minutes, followed by an online demo of Citrix Online’s GotoMyPC software that does just that – it lets you access a remote PC from anywhere and work on it just as if you were sitting in front of it.

Hope you’ll find some time to listen to the webinar – it’s mostly about the issues and challenges facing IT organizations as they gear up to support mobile workers, but we also spent the first ten minutes or so talking about why mobile work is growing so rapidly (hint, it’s not just because technology makes it relatively easy – there’s much more to it than that).

We think you’ll find the session interesting and informative.

Tags:futureofwork mobilework mobiletechnology onlineaccess

Radian6 – Monitoring Social Media

November 10, 2008 at 5:38 pm · Filed under Reviews

With the continuing rise of Web 2.0 and user-generated content, there is increasing interest by companies in monitor these conversations for a variety of reasons.  I recently spoke with Chris Ramsey of Radian6, a service that addresses this need.  Chris used the term “social phone” to describe how many conversations on the Web have evolved. In the past, when you had good, and especially bad, service from a company, you telephoned the firm and/or your friends. Now many companies do not even answer their phone. Even if they do, people can now use the “social phone” and describe their experiences on a blog, a forum, an online rating site and the other internet channels tat have become available. This social phone has a big volume switch that can be easily activated and ramped up.

So how do companies answer the social phone? First, they have to know it is ringing. Then they have to manage their response.  Chris said that a year ago the PR agencies were looking at the social phone for brand monitoring. Now many companies have taken on this task themselves and the focus is more on customer service.  They want to listen and participate in the relevant conversations for their business.  For example, Dell has a specialized team to make use of Radian6 to monitor, participate and manage the internet conversations about their business. Here is more on how Dell and Radian6 work together from the Direct2Dell blog - Dell and Radian6: It All Starts with Listening.

Chris showed me how Radian6 works. There is a lot of control over how you monitor the web. You can select what channels to monitor (e.g., blog, videos, forums).  You can select languages, countries, a list of specific blogs or web sites, and other criteria.  Radian6 provides 6 metrics. The attributes are: on topic posts, total comment count, total unique commenters, average engagement, on topic inbound links, and vote count. The vote count is an aggregation of digg and del.icio.us data.  You can adjust the weight as shown below. I like this feature.

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Radian6 attempts to let users know how they gotten their ratings. Chris said that feedback during their early adopter program indicated that users wanted as much transparency as possible into how the results were obtained.  There are a variety of widgets to place our your dashboard. One of the features is the River of News which provides continuous updates on the topics you select.

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Once you have set up your personalized monitoring, Radian6 automatically collects and tracks content for the topic.  It looks at all forms of social media including blogs, top video sharing and social networking sites, forums, opinion and review sites, image sharing sites, microblogging sites, online mainstream media and other sites as they become available. It tracks a variety of metrics and allows you to see the key influencers as well as the conversations. You can then export data and analysis for use in a variety of report and presentation formats.  

There is a new ability to show a social profile for posted items found in a topic profile. This allows a user to uncover who is behind each post. It provides a list of known and possible accounts across a number of social media applications in a hyperlink format so users can decide to reach out and add to their contacts (See the more new features post on their blog).

You can track the relative web buzz, or “share of voice,” on a topic or company. Chris showed me a comparison of GM ad Toyota. You could see the spikes in attention and determine what caused these spikes. You look at related topics and see the most prominent conversations. Here is a topic cloud on selected themes.

[photopress:TopicCloud.png,full,pp_image]

Radian6 is a SaaS tool that is offered on a subscription basis. One of the features I especially liked was the way it supports responses. You can assign who should respond to what appeared on the web, how they should respond, and manage the responses to promote consistency and avoid redundancy or gaps in coverage.  It describes itself as a tool built for and by PR and advertising professionals. I can see this in their response management tools. As Chris and I discussed, I can see applications beyond this initial focus for customer service, product research, competitive intelligence, and other tasks. 

Flowgram Offers a “Live” and Rich Presentation Format

November 5, 2008 at 6:03 pm · Filed under Reviews

Flowgram is a free online application that allows you to put together presentations that combine and annotate digital context such as web sites, photos, documents, RSS feeds, and background audio. I spoke with Abhay Parekh, the CEO at Flowgram, and he provided a tour and explanation of this useful application. It does not require you to download anything and works with any browser that includes the Abode Flash Player plugin.  Here is the start page where you can see the available choices for content sources.

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I found several things very interesting. First, the pages you add are live so you can interact with them. Second, you can annotate these pages. The screen shot below was taken as we looked at my Portals and KM blog within a Flowgram. You can see an annotation note in the upper right. You can also highlight sections, as shown in the screen shot. In addition, you can provide an audio voice over to the Flowgram and have the highlights timed to the correct part of the audio so that Flowgram takes you to that section as it is discussed.

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It is easy to share a Flowgram. You can email it or embed a Flowgram widget in your site or blog.  You can also post a Flowgram in a number of content sharing sites. See the content sharing screen below.

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Abhay said that in today’s web of expanding channels too much content is siloed.  At the same time, only parts of a web page or other content source are relevant.  You also need to be able to provide your message and focus when sharing content. You can do this somewhat in a real time webinar with screen sharing but it is hard to do it asynchronously. This is the need that Flowgram is designed to address.  You can make your Flowgrams public or private. You set up a Flowgram profile and the public Flowgrams appear on this profile. In addition to creating and distributing aggregated content, you can measure reactions to your Flowgrams.

We discussed business uses inside and outside the firewall. It can certainly be used for marketing purposes on the web. Inside the enterprise, I see the potential for both communication and education.  While the tool was initially designed as a consumer application, Abhay said that they are already seeing business uses. Over 70% of their users are over 30.  The tool is free for now, as they want to encourage experimentation and get feedback. There will always be a free version.  They also plan to offer a subscription-based application with more features and greater security.

Flowgram is a San Francisco based firm that was started in February 2007. They released their first public beta on August 24, 2007. The well-known blogger Joi Ito is one of the angel investors. I think they have a good future on the web and in the enterprise.  You see a Flowgram introducing Flowgram at their site.  There is also a Flowgram blog.