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.

Micro Economies of Attention

The term "attention economy" is one that receives lots of...attention. It is the natural progression of the information economy. The production of information outstrips the growth in users, meaning that attention is a scarce resource. Hence the notion of "economy".

Hewlett Packard's Social Computing Lab released a paper that evaluates the motivations of employees to participate in organizations' social software applications. Revealing the long tail in office conversations studies the interactions, social graph and participation motivations in H-P's WaterCooler social media platform.

Included in that report is the term "micro economies of attention". The context is that since individuals control their own attention and what content they produce, each employee has a supply-demand curve for user generated content. The importance of understanding this dynamic is that adoption by employees is key to the success of Enterprise 2.0. And an important part of the adoption is understanding motivations for participation.

From the H-P research:

When employees perceived increased visibility of their contributions, they were more likely to actively participate and to report positive experiences.

This idea of "micro economies of attention" got us thinking here. In a recent presentation, we discussed three ways to increase information's reach. How would those use cases look plotted as supply-demand curves?

Supply and Demand for User Generated Content

If you've ever been a student of economics, the graph below will look familiar:

 

The graph reinterprets the scarce resource as user generated content (UGC), with attention being the "price" associated to that content. Here's a quick explanation of the curves:

• Supply = the more attention an employee receives, the greater the participation

• Demand = the more attention required to find and take in content, the less content will be consumed

"Attention" is this context essentially means share-of-mind. An employee has taken the time to read and consider content, and may reach out to its creator and use the content for her work. Closely related to attention is time, as there are only so many hours in the workday where an employee can read content.

A single demand curve masks the differences in use cases for consuming information. Here are the three ways in which employees consume information:

1. Search = purpose-driven activity, to solve an immediate need
2. Serendipity = happen across information that is relevant
3. Notifications = purpose-driven activity in that notification related to something of interest to the user, but lack the immediacy of solving a problem

Let's examine the different content demand curves for these use cases.

Demand Curves for Three Content Consumption Use Cases

The charts below segment employees' content demand curves by use cases:

 

Search is an activity related to a need of personal importance to an employee. She has to find information to help her move forward on some work. She will invest a meaningful amount of her scarce attention on content she finds when she's running a search.

Serendipity has a different curve than Search. If it requires too much attention to view random information, expect very little content to be consumed this way. Employees don't have time to go through a stream of content with the hope that they'll find something useful. The less obtrusive and time-intensive you make Serendipity, the higher the amount of content that will consumed. As the curve's shape indicates, the amount of attention required has to be fairly low before an employee takes in meaningful content. Serendipity really works best with quick views of information, in-the-flow of an employee's daily work.

Notifications sit between Search and Serendipity. Because an employee has actually opted into these, they will receive more attention. Whether RSS or email, Notifications can command more attention from employees than Serendipity. But there are limits. Providing effective filters for notifications ensures that there isn't a deluge of content for a given topic of interest.

Quick Example of the Effect of the Three Demand Curves

The chart below plots the three content demand curves by use case:

Following the blue dotted line...

• For a given quantity of user generated content, employees are willing to invest more attention on Search than on Notifications or Serendipity
• For a given "price" of attention, employees will consume more content via Search than for Notifications or Serendipity

It's About Employee Adoption

Understanding these curves is an important element of increasing the visibility of employee contributions. In the micro economies of attention, different content demand use cases command different levels of attention.

All three information reach use cases are important, for different reasons. A smart social software implementation program will leverage all three.

Webinar: Double the Value of Your Social Software

Are you using multiple social software apps in your organization? Each one is individually valuable. But ironically, these collaborative apps end up as new data silos, not integrated with the wider organization. Tying the apps together improves accessibility and is the foundation for employee social networks. This was the gist of our earlier blog post Fix the Enterpise 2.0 Silo Issue.

We're holding a Webinar - Double the Value of Your Social Software - to discuss the benefits of connecting enterprise 2.0 apps, and how Connectbeam does this to significantly increase their value. We welcome your attendance. Here are the details

Thursday November 20

1:00 pm EST, 10:00 am PST

Click here to register

Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0 Is Now Available - Here's the 'Why' Behind the New Release

One of the great things about working with our enterprise customers is that we get a ringside view into what they want to accomplish and what issues they are facing. Companies see the benefits of collaborative information sharing, and are working hard to connect employees and knowledge. Andrew McAfee articulated well the value of information sharing and collaboration in his bulls eye post, which provides a great analysis for the value of internal social networks.  The companies with whom we talk are moving aggressively to create authentic, useful employee social networks.

With that as backdrop, we're pleased to announce today the release of Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0. Spotlight 3.0 adds a number of features to the Connectbeam application designed to make information and expertise easier to find and share. Full details are available on our Products page. Here are the release highlights:

• Integration with leading enterprise applications
• Feeds of user generated content from Enterprise 2.0 apps
• Social Profiles with both employee-provided knowledge and experience, and real-time updates for their work activities

There's a lot to this release, and the Connectbeam website and data sheets will tell you more.

We wanted to give you a sense of why we released Spotlight 3.0. The reasons shed some light on the direction of the enterprise market.

In-the-flow: Michael Idinopulos of SocialText wrote about the differences of putting tools in-the-flow or above-the-flow of employees' daily activities. This is a critical consideration for vendors in the social computing space, and it's an approach we pioneered here at Connectbeam. To maximize knowledge touch points, and user adoption, inside an organization, we're big fans of in-the-flow tools. That's why Connectbeam integrates with leading enterprise apps. We want to put information and internal resources right at the fingertips of employees.

Connect enterprise apps: Companies have significant investments in their existing technology stacks, both financially and operationally. They also tend to have a collection of best-of-breed apps, particularly in the enterprise social computing realm. Full-suite Enterprise 2.0 solutions are still a ways off. So the problem they're experiencing is a lack of visibility for the amazing amounts of user generated information that has been created inside their walls. Connectbeam sees tying together these different apps as a major benefit for companies. Through our Connectors and APIs, we pull in content created from across the enterprise, including wikis, blogs, news feeds, forums and other applications.

Workstreams: Connectbeam's roots are as the leader in social bookmarking and tagging inside the enterprise. Fundamentally, what we bring is the ability to tap employees as sources of relevant data and filters for what's valuable. From this, everyone in the organization gains. With Spotlight 3.0, we're extending this philosophy by integrating the workstreams of employees. Workstreams include bookmarks, wiki entries, blog posts, forum discussions and other activities. There's tremendous value in providing a single repository where these workstreams:

• Can be organized and are searchable
• Form the basis for social networking and collaboration
• Can be discussed
• Are integrated into the everyday applications that employees use

That's a brief explanation for how we approached Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0. Hats off to the team for a great job pulling this one together.

Forrester Predicts a Large Growth in Social Networking Market but How Will Its Integration Occur with the Enterprise?

Forrester recently released their projections for the Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013. The report was produced by Oliver Young and some of his colleagues. They said in the summary that, “Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share. In all, the market for enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be defined by commoditization, eroding prices, and subsumption into other enterprise collaboration software over the next five years; it will eventually disappear into the fabric of the enterprise, despite the major impacts the technology will have on how businesses market their products and optimize their workforces.”

Our new Release 2.2 provides the application integration capability through our web services Application Programming Interface (API) that enables you to add the full functionality of Connectbeam social software into existing IT applications. This capability will allow the social context of information and people to become fully integrated into the fabric of the enterprise. While this can occur on a transparent basis, I would not use the word disappear to describe this integration. To be fair I do not think that Forrester really means that Enterprise Web 2.0 will go away but that social context applications will simply be part of most, if not all, enterprise applications and a standard way of doing business.

We are taking this enterprise-wide social context integration a step further with our Release 2.2. Most enterprise 2.0 tools and most social tools (e.g. wikis, blogs, etc.) are adding their own social networking and tagging features. However, the real value of social networking and tagging is only realized if they are detached from any single application. For example, while I am working inside many wikis, I can network with others who are also inside the same wiki. That unfortunately does not lend claim to 'true' social networking across the enterprise. Instead, it has the potential to create more silos.

Our APIs are bi-directional so we can draw tagging and networking information from multiple sources, breaking down the silos and setting the table for true enterprise wide integration of the social context of information. In upcoming posts I will further explore how Connectbeam can help break through these silos of information. It is this capability that can truly make social networking and tagging part of the fabric of the enterprise

We were interviewed as part of the research for the Forrester report and you can order it through the Forrester web site. ReadWriteWeb also offers a useful summary and I draw these summary comments from their post, Enterprise 2.0 to Become a $4.6 Billion Industry by 2013. First, Forrester excluded consumer services like Blogger, Facebook, Netvibes, and Twitter from their predictions. They felt that these services are aimed at consumers, often supported by ads, and do not qualify as Enterprise 2.0 tools. I agree with their assessment. There are possible roles for these tools within some enterprises as I wrote in The Role of Facebook in the Enterprise: A Post Script but they are not the tools for enterprise business applications.

One of the most interesting findings to us at Connectbeam was their projection that most of the revenue growth will occur in social networking tools. Enterprise 2.0 is often defined as social software so this should make sense. They rank social networking ahead of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and widgets on the growth curve. Mashups come in second. Now here is where it gets tricky as many social applications are using a form of mashups to integrate with other enterprise applications as Connectbeam is doing through its Application Programming Interface mentioned above. I do agree that social networking is the big new thing and would just add that mashups are the highway for social software integration with enterprise applications.

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 launches VMWare Virtual Appliance

We are very pleased to launch today - Connectbeam Virtual Appliance.

Connectbeam Virtual Appliance gives users and companies the option to download, directly from our website, full-featured Social Bookmarking and Social Networking application, and immediately get started.

The entire application can literally be up and running inside your company in a matter of minutes.

If you have a VMPlayer installed, simply go to our download page to download Connectbeam application.

If you dont have the VMPlayer installed, you can download it for free here.

For many companies Virtual Appliance will continue to suffice the need.
For those who wish to get started quickly, can now start their evaluation and deployment with the Virtual Appliance. As the usage grows, Connectbeam application provides a seamless migration path from the Virtual Appliance to our high-end Physical Appliance using the backup and restore feature under the administration console.

Value of Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise

Thomas Vanderwal, a principle at InfoCloud Solutions, also best known for coining the term 'folksonomy' and 'infocloud' writes about the value of Social bookmarking in the Enterprise.

Every organization needs to know itself better then they currently do. The employees and members of the organization are all trying to do their job better and smarter. The need to connect people inside an organization with others with similar interest, contexts, and perceptions is really needed. I am a huge fan of social bookmarking tools to help along these lines as it helps people hold on to information they have need, want, or have interest in (particularly with future uses) and put things in their own context and perception. Once people understand the value they derive from using the tools to hold on to information out of their vast flow and streams of information and data that run before them each day they quickly "get it".

Full write-up can be found here...

InfoCloud Solutions provides a series of workshops for businesses and enterprises to better understand and evaluate social productivity applications.

Connectbeam releases 'one-click' application upgrade feature

We have always maintained that the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 applications should go beyond the collaboration and productivity increases for businesses, but should also translate into reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for these applications (particularly w.r.t. installation, set up, and maintenance).

To that end, with Release 2.0 of our product we have launched a breakthrough feature - Single Click Upgrade.

Most of today's behind the firewall applications require a multi-part, multi-step upgrade process that consume tremendous amount of time and resources.

With Connectbeam this process is reduced to a single click.

The screen shot below is from the Administration section of Connectbeam application. All it takes to upgrade to the next release (or patch) is a simple single click of the Upgrade button.

Why you need Connectbeam? Hear it from people out in the field...

We had the pleasure of recently giving a product demonstration to folks from PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Ricardo Sueiras and Martin Dugage are both well aware of issues facing enterprises around better and more effective collaboration, and information discovery. They are both smart and well connected on the scene with social software, and how it benefits enterprises, and have written about it on their respective blogs.

Excerpt from Ricardo's blog:

It was a really excellent demo. The product itself is simple enough to understand, and works on the concept of using tags to connect information to people and communities. By using the concept that users use internal and external datasources to find information (anything that can be linked) the application provides a front end for this data – infact, anything that can be linked (has a URL) is a valid datasource. If one doesn‘t exist, you can even write your own.

Excerpt from Martin's blog:

...it looks like a great knowledge sharing solution for the corporate world. We still are in a world where corporate people do write short blackberry e-mails and client deliverables, but do not publish what they know in the form of blog posts or wiki pages. It will change some day, and maybe suddenly, but not now, at least not in this country (France). So building and managing links across people and content - which is what KM is really about - should work much better if it's based on the current demand-oriented and quite selfish behaviors of the average corporate employee. As such, social bookmarking tools such as Connectbeam could be seen as the stepping stone to the cultural change we all want to see taking place.

Martin brings up a great point. Something that has been at the very core of the foundation of Connectbeam as a company. He captures the enterprise user landscape (and sentiment) as it is today. At Connectbeam, it has always been our belief, and most of us at Connectbeam have worked at large companies, that the basic psyche or fabric of what motivates, and how information is shared inside a business or an enterprise is vastly different from what we see out on the consumer Web. The status quo is exactly what Martin as outlined above.

We feel social bookmarking is the most frictionless, seamless, and least disruptive to the existing environment, and yet delivers unparalleled benefits.

Ricardo and Martin also brought up an interesting point about ownership of bookmarks. Please see our response to it on Ricardo's blog.

Connectbeam announces Release 2.0 and Starter Appliance trial offer for $1,995

Today, we are announcing the general availability of our product release version 2.0.

In partnership and feedback from several customers, we are proud to bring to you innovative and break-through product features and enhancements, that are easy to use, and delivered to the user at their place and point of search. This will further empower team collaboration, people and information discovery - leading to unparalleled worker productivity inside enterprises.

The product tour link from our website will give you a high level overview of the new product and features.

Customers challenged us to deliver an application solution around information access and discovery, and team collaboration that did the following:

Where ever the user turns to search (inside the company or outside), deliver to user search results and information from:

1. Their own collection
2. What others in their social network have contributed
3. What is inside the company (Intranet)
4. What they find outside the company (Internet)

We deliver this experience to the user by presenting their social graph and view of their collective intelligence right at their point of search by integrating Connectbeam with their search experience through their web browser. Connectbeam's patented design and architecture delivers this in a completely secure and bullet proof manner, since Connectbeam's Collective Search Toolbar is installed and driven from the Connectbeam Appliance which sits behind company firewall and in control of IT administrator.

Simply put, rather than asking user to turn to yet another social software site to find information to get their work done, we deliver the information to where ever the user turns to in their universe of search.

To see a full list of Connectbeam features, please click here.

To see different Appliance models, and feature comparison, please click here.

We are also announcing a limited time, trial offer for 500 users for 120 days for $1,995. This includes the Starter Appliance hardware and full featured Connectbeam application.

Customers can place the order online, directly from our website.

At the end of the trial period, customers can chose to renew and extend the license, or not renew. In either event, the Appliance is for customers to keep - they do not have to return it if they don't renew the license.
We understand, you will inevitably put proprietary and sensitive data on the Appliance, thus specifically for this reason to not jeopardize your data, we understand that the Appliance be not removed from your location.

A note of thanks to our customers...pharmaceuticals to manufacturing

Every day we come into work feeling excited and energized by the tremendous opportunities we see in front of us based on the positive impact social software is having on businesses across all verticals.

It is particularly invigorating to have these customers and prospects enagage with us and when, out of their own volition, they share their sentiments and experiences of working with social software initiatives in connection with Connectbeam.

Simon Revell who works for a large pharmaceutical company, recently had this to say to about their need for social bookmarking and their experience with Connectbeam:

Social Bookmarking

We continue to experiment with our social bookmarking pilot - based on Scuttle.  We’re also about to kick off an evaluation of ConnectBeam, which I’m incredibly excited about.  I love the product.  Love the company - a very switched on and professional bunch - they really understand the enterprise environment and hence their product takes a web2.0 concept but then re-engineers it intelligently for the enterprise.

As I commented on his blog, it has been a pleasure working with him and learning from him some of the use cases of how they are using social bookmarking and where they want to head with it.

Another such person is Rich Hoeg of Honeywell who has often written about his exprience with Connectbeam and the broader impact of social software in enterprises.

We take this moment to thank all our customers and prospects for their trust and belief in us and our products. We have many new exciting and innovative features that we are grearing up to bring to the market very soon.

A day at Honeywell TechNet - a meeting of large corporations

At the invitation of Honeywell, yesterday we spent a day at their annual TechNet meeting at their R&D center in Minneapolis, MN.

TechNet is a small group of large corporations which meet informally to benchmark technology learning and collaboration tools and initiatives. This is a secure, and tightly knit forum for these large corporations to share their pain points and best practices, and learn from each other as they often are operating in similar operational evnironment in terms of scale. For the first time, they invited a select group of outside vendors to participate in this forum.

The companies who were invited to present were - Connectbeam, Google, Safari Online Books, and SocialText.

It was a very informative session, and it was a treat to get some very direct insights into some very specific pain points, common across these large enterprises, in the areas of collaboration, and knowledge and information sharing and discovery. Earlier in a session with Rich Hoeg we discussed how such companies are measuring ROI on these initiatives, and he outlined some very direct and clear ways of how these technologies and initiatives are being justified inside these organizations.

I am not at liberty to disclose specific discussion points or names of the companies that were present at the TechNet meeting, but they ranged from manufacturing, telecom, semiconductor, and services sectors.

It was invigorating to see and hear that the problem around better collaboration, learning - information sharing and discovery, and people (expertise) discovery is real and paramount at these places. There are people tasked and dedicated to figuring this out. They are all encouraged by and are already using and looking at new social media/Web 2.0 for the enterprise styled tools and applications and converging to share best practices and learning from each other.

Connectbeam to showcase at Intel Developer Forum (IDF)

We are pleased to be invited by Intel to present and showcase our product at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) taking place this week (Sept. 18-20,2007) at Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco.

IDF is Intel's premier forum for bringing its partners, customers, and prospects under one roof. Over 5,000 attendees will be at the IDF. This year there is a special floor area dedicated toward the theme of - The Digital Enterprise. If you are attending, please do take a minute to come by our booth in the Digital Enterprise area to see a product demonstration, and a chance to win a free iPhone.

The World is Flat - so is Learning 2.0 via social bookmarking and tagging

Rich Hoeg at the popular eContent blog outlines the power of social bookmarking coupled with social networking to reach across departmental and geographic boundaries as levers for better knowledge sharing, discovery, and collaboration.

An excerpt (screen shot) from his video presentation is shown below. To see his blog post and watch his video presentation, click here...

Enterprises and social networks...

David Terrar over at blognation UK wrote about the issues around social networking in the Enterprise, particularly many companies rushing to block access to mostly consumer facing social networking sites.

I feel the winning combination is some compromise between the features of the open, free for all consumer facing networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, but customized to address the unique attributes of a business.

We cannot discount the fact that companies need to, and have to, guard and protect their intellectual property (IP). And IP takes different shapes and forms across different businesses. I think this fact is often overlooked when news crosses the wire about some company blocking access to a consumer facing social site.

We discovered during early days of Connectbeam that campanies are not necessarily averse to social software (most understand it and like it), but not at the expense or risk of exposing their IP. We are seeing tremendous uptake on our Appliance product offering, which delivers social bookmarking and social networking software in a box, deployed behind company firewall, to build and foster social networks and communites inside businesses.

Yes, while this might start off by limiting the scope of social networking to within the walls of the campny, we feel this is nonetheless, a very good first step.

Connectbeam features in InfoWorld's Month of Enterprise Startups

InfoWorld celebrates the month of May 2007 by paying homage to business-focused technology startups. Each day they featured a new startup (established no earlier than 2004) that is a rising star in the IT enterprise.

Ephraim Schwartz covers Connectbeam as Social Bookmarking and Social Networking for the enterprise.

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.

Connectbeam sponsors Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston

Connectbeam is proud to be a sponsor of the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
Conference will take place in Boston from June 18-21, 2007.

Special discount for Connectbeam customers and prospects:
Save $200 on the Conference or get a free Demo Pass.

This conference is organized by one of the same groups that put together the recently concluded Web 2.0 Expo last month (April 2007) in San Francisco.

Enterprise 2.0 conference is squarely aimed at businesses and enterprises looking to see how '2.0' techonolgies are impacting businesses.

If you are planning to be at the conference, or are going to be in and around the Boston area, please come by the conference and our booth. We look forward to telling you more about Connectbeam and answering any questions you might have.

We will also be giving product demonstrations, and sharing with you how enterprises are using Connectbeam to break through knowledge silos, and helping users find and discover information, and connecting with people inside the organization who can help with that information - quickly and effectively.

Connectbeam links social bookmarking to the enterprise, says The451Group

For businesses and enterprises looking to evaluate the use of social bookmarking for their organizations, here are couple of industry analysts reports that can help you understand these technologies, their impact, and the market landscape around them. They further outline the areas best fit for these applications, and how to get started.

We are proud and humbled to be recognized as the leaders and innovators in this space by the leading industry Analysts.

The451group, recently published their report outlining Connectbeam's unique approach of combining social bookmarking and social networking, and delivering that to the enterprise by integrating it on top of enterprise search.

The report is titled - Connectbeam links social bookmarking to the enterprise.

And it can be found here (subscription required).

The451Group's assessment concludes the following:

Among the new lot of social software, wikis and blogs are getting a lot of attention at the enterprise level, but it may well be social bookmarking and tagging tools that have the bigger impact. Connectbeam seems to have come out of the gate with the right focus and understanding of large enterprise needs. Its search integrations make it easy to demonstrate the value of the system and let customers layer it on top of existing tools.

Gartner, earlier this year, put out a report titled - Cool Vendors in the High Performance Workplace, 2007, and acknowledged Connectbeam's market leadership position in the category of Social Bookmarking and Tagging for the enterprise, by honoring Connectbeam as a 'Cool Vendor' for 2007.

Gartner's assessment concludes the following:

Connectbeam social bookmarking and tagging are easy to deploy, intuitive to use, and add value.

The report can be found here (subscription required).

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.

Social Bookmarking and Social Networking top the list of must-have tools for organizations...

Jason Snyder of Infoworld summarizes one of Web 2.0 Expo panel focused at enterprises moderated by Rob Rueckert of Intel Capital.

Social bookmarking and social networking tops the list of must-have tools for organizations looking to leverage Web 2.0 technologies within the enterpirse.

"The sleeper hit in the enterprise, what I've been waiting for and dying to get going on, is social bookmarking," said Schueller, who, as innovation manager for the global business services unit at Procter & Gamble, investigates R&D and consumer technologies to optimize Procter & Gamble's enterprise.

According to Schueller, the main impediment the enterprise faces when it comes to capitalizing on knowledge assets is that the page-rank model is dead. "What we're hoping is that even with a small but passionate [social-bookmarking] community out of our 135,000 employees, we could start to get some real benefits in terms of enterprise search," he said.

Socialtext co-founder Mayfield applauded the notion of enterprises putting the tools in corporate users' hands and seeing what happens, adding that IRC will have a significant impact in realizing the potential synergistic effects of collaboration in the enterprise in the years to come.

Schueller goes on to say:

Once I know the stuff I've got out there can actually be found by others who need it, I'm more motivated to put it out there," Schueller said, summing up the exponential potential of Web 2.0-fueled collaborative environments.

This mirrors our view at Connectbeam, where we believe the path to social networking inside an organization is via content and information discovery, and sharing. Schueller, above outlines how social bookmarking is the path toward achieving this.

To see how another large enterprise - Honeywell, is using Connectbeam's social bookmarking and social networking application to tackle the same issues as talked about by Schueller, click here.

Social networking through social bookmarking at your company

Our view has always been that the path to Social Networking inside a company is via content and information discovery and sharing, and not just about friends and personal networks.

Jack Vinson refers to a recent write up by George Siemens and Ross Dawson and weighs in on social networking for inside the enterprise. He also outlines the difference between Social Networking and Social  Network Analysis - an important distinction.

There is something very powerful in enabling people to connect with one another on topics about which they have true expertise and passion.  While it is possible to create a database of interests and skills, the nuances of what people are doing that is exciting and that others in the company might want to tap into are very difficult to record in a data structure, as George Siemens suggests. But what does this mean? 

At some level, a company needs to have that basic interest / skill information in some kind of findable directory.  That part is relatively easy (or at least it is understandable).  The interesting stuff happens when you let people loose with this information.  Someone who needs Y is going to try contacting people with that in their profile.  Then what?  What has the company designed in terms of time an opportunity for people to follow-up on these requests.  Are the connections made one-to-one?  Or are they made through a social network (as these social networking packages tend to arrange)?  Is there a mechanism to monitor the connections, so that if the first attempt fails a longer-but-more-active path could be attempted?  Or does the company set up a more community-centric mechanism, where interested parties choose to participate?  These kinds of questions have to follow any kind of discussion of setting up social networking tools or expertise locators.

We invite you experience these workflows inside Connectbeam.

Connectbeam - Brings Enterprise 2.0 to Mainstream

A lot is being written and said about our recent deployment at Honeywell.

I thought this would be a good time for us to share some of our views and the vision that led to the formation of Connectbeam in 2005.

How Connectbeam was formed.

Back in 2004, I came in contact with Web 2.0 (can’t remember if the term Web 2.0 had already been coined at that time or not) technologies and applications while dabbling in a consumer Web company. However, given my roots are in enterprise software, I began to look at the applicability in that domain.  When the world was focused on consumer Web 2.0, and then after that largely on the arrival of blogs and wikis into the enterprises, we started Connectbeam and placed a bet on something that seemed very radical and foolish (or so some people said) at that time.

The first blueprints/storyboard of Connectbeam were put together in late 2005 and we started writing code soon thereafter.

Why Connectbeam? (a.k.a. Social Bookmarking combined with Social Networking for the enterprise)

There was quite a bit of euphoria and buzz around blogs and wikis back when we were starting Connectbeam. However, we felt there were more broadly applicable and useful Web 2.0 derived tools that could to be brought into the enterprise. To be clear, this post is not to decry the value of blogs and wikis, we use both at Connectbeam. We felt our technology had to tackle two key aspects of the enterprise landscape before we could drive for mass adoption. These hurdles are the reality inside the enterprise in a post dot-com era:

1. For end users, applications must provide a ‘handshake’ to the past (status quo)
2. For IT, the application must be complimentary to and work with existing IT infrastructure

Blogs and wikis were being adopted in the enterprise but they were not addressing the hurdles for mass adoption outlined above. Adoption was in 5’s and 10’s , not hundreds or thousands, let alone enterprise wide.

We saw a magic bullet in social bookmarking and social networking.

We like to think ourselves here as innovators, and we are proud to say that we are the first company to:

1. Focus social bookmarking at the enterprise
2. Combine social bookmarking with social networking
3. Integrate social bookmarking and social networking into enterprise intranets via enterprise search

The handshake to the past

In the enterprise, by and large, users tend not to be that daring. For new technology to take hold it must carry the user from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’.  Social bookmarking provided the perfect vehicle for that. The concept of bookmarking is as old as the browser. Everyone knows how to bookmark something (relative to how to use blogs or wikis). So the new (or disruptive) part was to simply add the social component to it. We felt this would be the easiest way to lead the user into a ‘social’ framework (introduce them to a social framework without them having to explicitly choose to do so). In our ‘social’ model, Social bookmarking leads to discovery of people inside my organization, which in turn leads to social networking with those people.

Must be complimentary to, and work with, existing IT infrastructure

A lot has been said about bottoms up vs top down, or selling to the business user vs selling to IT. While the debate rages on we believe that the winning combination, of course is to deliver value to both – in order to drive mass adoption. Many applications today overlook this fact. With social bookmarking and social networking and the way we planned to deploy it inside the enterprise we provide a business case for both.  For IT, we help them extract greater ROI from an existing investment, namely – enterprise search, by providing an infrastructure that is virtually self maintaining.  For the business users the technology is easy to use and integrated into an application and workflow they are accustomed to using day-in-day-out. It delivers immediate value.

Our vision is to bring productivity benefits into the enterprise that translate into bringing better quality products to market faster and increasing speed of innovation. We are doing this by providing easy to use applications for information access, people discovery and collaboration inside the enterprise with an enterprise wide footprint.

We are happy to see validation and adoption of this vision. We are constantly listening to our customers and prospects to learn from them and cater to their needs.

Last but not least, since lot of this debate has stemmed from our deployment at Honeywell, I would like to acknowledge what a pleasure it has been working with Rich Hoeg and his team. It has been more of a partnership than anything else. We have learned a lot from them. As a result our product stands stronger and tighter today ready to take on the needs of enterprises, large or small.

We look forward to sharing with you other similar announcements soon.

Rise of Social Bookmarking in the enterprise

Rich Hoeg of Honeywell has a podcast with Rafael Sidi of Elsevier.

Rafael heads the product development of Engineering Village product line and business unit at Elsevier.

I had first met Rafael back in 2005 in NYC, where we discussed the idea of enabling social bookmarking and tagging for the enterprises. It is great to see Rafael and Elsevier putting out products which incorporate these features.

More on how IT makes Johnny productive

You can download the authors' report on the study I mentioned in my previous post. It's available here as a pdf file:

SSRN-Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity: Task Level Evidence by Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson, Marshall Van Alstyne.

The document is @30 double-spaced pages. A bit long perhaps, but it is very interesting. I'd love to see some discussion of this study so please comment here or blog about it!

Connectbeam at Honeywell

Connectbeam is proud to announce a memo of understanding with Honeywell.

It has been our great pleasure and privilege to have been engaged with Honeywell over the last several weeks in discussing the use of Connectbeam's enterprise secure, social bookmarking and social networking application inside of Honeywell. Over the months ahead Connectbeam and Honeywell will work out final details and install our social tagging application on their network.

Rich Hoeg, who heads the social software initiative at Honeywell, and to whom I was introduced by my good friend Rafael Sidi, has been a champion of Connectbeam at Honeywell and the impact of social software inside the enterprise. It has been an absolute delight to work with his team and him.

This marks yet another important milestone for Connectbeam and we wanted to share that with you.

Social Media Collective on Connectbeam

We were pleased to have many attendees at a recent Webinar that our very own Tom Mandel gave to the Social Media Collective group.

Jerry Bowles co-founder of the group, author of the popular Enterprise Web 2.0 blog, and also a member of the Enterprise Irregulars group describes Connectbeam in his words at the FASTforward blog.

We look forward to seeing you at the FASTforward conference in San Diego next week.

Connectbeam sponsors FASTForward 2007 conference

Connectbeam is proud to sponsor the FASTForward 2007 (www.fastforward07.com) conference.

Conference is taking place in San Diego on February 7-9, 2007.

If you are a FAST customer or looking for ways and use cases of how social software can fit inside your group or organization, and leverage your existing enterprise search infrastructure, stop by our booth at the conference to see a product demo.

Connectbeam bolts on top of your existing enterprise search infrastructure and brings core features of social software (social bookmarking, content tagging, virtual communities of information sharing and discovery, rich and dynamic user profiles, and social networking) into your enterprise.