Archive for Web 2.0
by Bill Ives
August 28, 2010 at 6:00 pm · Filed under
Web 2.0
The need for fast and more effective enterprise search continues to increase as data grows exponentially. I spoke with Ken Ebert, form Perfect Search, about this problem. According to Gartner, enterprise data growth over the next five years is estimated at 650%. To cope with this trend, enterprises must be equipped with a backup technology that will capture data and move it to a safe, secondary location where data is preserved. However, if a saved file cannot be quickly located and retrieved, then the backup environment does not help.
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 World Vital Records is an online genealogy company that provides access to several million historical documents to help genealogists.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.
by Bill Ives
August 24, 2010 at 3:22 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
RightNow introduced RightNow Mobile in May 2010 and has now further upgraded capabilities in August with new cloud platform features. I have been covering RightNow for some time as I like their innovations in making CRM more customer focused and now social (see for example: RightNow Continues to Become More Social in its Offerings). The May release helps organizations engage and support consumers via any mobile device. Two of the initial clients tapping into RightNow’s mobile support functionality are CBS Interactive and Match.com. Both of these organizations have a robust and expanding mobile presence and did not want to have to custom build a customer support capability to complement these services.
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.
by Bill Ives
August 16, 2010 at 4:59 pm · Filed under
Web 2.0
I have been covering Spigit and the innovation management market for some time (see Spigit – Enabling Enterprise 2.0 Innovation Through Market Games (2008) and Spigit Increases Employee Engagement in Innovation (2009). I also continue to be a Spigit user as they provide the platform for the Enterprise 2.0 conference submission process. So it nice to see both Spigit and its market continue to grow. Here is sample from the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
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.
by Bill Ives
August 10, 2010 at 3:42 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
I have been covering the Cisco I-Prize for several years and continue to be impressed with this initiative. I spoke with Sharon Wong, the Director of Business Development for Cisco’s Emerging Technology group to discuss the conclusion of the second I-Prize. She said that the first one validated the desire for teams to work together on innovation on the global scale and they learned how much people really like to collaborate (Cisco Announces I-Prize Winner and Results of Their Global Collaboration). So this time they provided greater collaboration support through Cisco tools including the following four.
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.
by Bill Ives
August 6, 2010 at 3:36 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Last year I reported on how EchoSign provides e-signing to take out last analog vestige in business processes. Recently. I spoke with EchoSign CEO, Jason Lemkin to get an update. Jason said that signers using EchoSign can now electronically sign documents in their native language, despite what language the contract was sent in. The product supports a variety of European languages including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and others. Here is a sample screen with the directions in German.
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.
by Bill Ives
August 2, 2010 at 4:42 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
PBworks has launched PBworks Customer Relationship Edition, which extends CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com by offering shared online workspaces for collaborating with customers and prospects throughout the entire customer lifecycle. I recently spoke with Chris Yeh, VP Marketing at PBworks about this new offering that they refer to as CRC or Customer Relationship Collaboration to indicate support for collaboration with customers rather the management of them through CRM.
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.
by Bill Ives
July 26, 2010 at 3:02 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
I have covered Jackbe before including a preview of this release (see JackBe Provides Enterprise Mashup Platform on the Cloud and Previews Presto 3.0). I spoke with John Crupi, CTO and Chris Warner, VP of Marketing about their new 3.0 release. Two of the main additions are a platform for creating internal Enterprise App Stores, as well as a robust visual toolset for creating secure Enterprise Apps.
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.
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