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Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:55:38 +0000

In 2013 look for the action in social technologies to be increasingly enterprise-focused. In 2012 investors soured on consumer social media companies: Groupon, Zynga, and even Facebook were deemed disappointing. Arguably, Facebook left no money on the table. As it began to show revenue from mobile by the year’s end, its stock began to recover, but the damage was done. So a different set of companies will drive innovation and perhaps a little disruption in social technologies in 2013. Look for the likes of Salesforce.com, Jive Software, and other enterprise players to make headlines in the new year.

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What makes a free trial work (or not)

Barb Darrow — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 18:47:49 +0000

Many tech startups rely on limited-time free trials to get customers to try (and then hopefully buy) their product or service. What’s not clear is how successful they are in converting those trial users. Totango, which wants to help vendors get the best user response to free-trial (and freemium) offers, drew some interesting conclusions from new research on what makes a free trial work (or not.)

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Totango sees aggregate free-trial conversion rates below 8 percent for most companies and as high as 20 percent for a select few players. What contributes to that higher rate? Super simple sign-on processes and easy work flows that help customers get up and running fast are important, said Totango CEO Guy Nirpaz. (Conversion rates from freemium to paid – depending on who you ask — range from 1 and 10 percent with most hovering in the 2 percent to 4 percent range.)

To see how companies are faring with trials, Totango signed up for ten name-brand trial services as a regular customer. And then it waited — not using any of them. Six of the 10 were oblivious (or at least seemingly oblivious) to the fact that a prospective customer had registered. There was zero follow-up. The best of the companies acknowledged the potential customer with what appeared to be personal emailed offers of support including, in some cases, the email address and phone numbers (!) of an actual person who could help them get acclimated.

When the companies did communicate, 60 percent did so without addressing the customer by name. Nirpaz called out Jive Software and New Relic as two companies that did things right. Update: Totango blog post with more info is here.

Note to vendors: Communicate, communicate, communicate

The best companies also increased their attempts to engage the customer as the trial progressed — They scheduled a call, offered a webinar, sent a satisfaction survey. Jive won plaudits by sending personal email from a “success coach” that engaged the recipient by first name, offered links to their trial instance, to a community site, along with the coach’s email address and direct phone number.

Free trials may be a more attractive to many startups than the freemium model — which offers a limited version of the overall product or service forever, but “upsells” a full version to people who want to pay for more storage or more services. Dropbox — and its 50 million users — is the poster child for freemium. No one doubts that tens of millions use Dropbox to store and share files. But, how many actually pay for the privilege? Dropbox does not share that.

Speaking Sunday at the Harvard Business School Cyberposium, Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston said revenue is not his top priority — gaining critical customer mass is. ”If people aren’t using it they’ll never pay. If lots are using it we think they’ll come,” he said. Given that Dropbox now has something like $260 million in funding, it has wiggle room that other startups do not.

At another Cyberposium session on freemium and subscription models, freemium wasn’t feeling the love at all. “I like free trial, but I’m not a fan of freemium for startups. It’s too easy to build something that people can use but not pay for. So build something that people are willing to write a check for,” said InsightSquared Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Sam Clemens.

“Freemium is a cop out.”

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Alan O’Rourke

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Forecasting the future cloud computing market

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:00:31 +0000

During the period from 2011 through 2014, the worldwide cloud market is estimated to grow 126.5 percent, driven by 119 percent growth in SaaS and 122 percent growth in IaaS. This report takes an in-depth look at each of the three areas of cloud computing, using examples of companies like Salesforce.com and LivePerson to detail each sector. The PaaS segment is expected to nearly triple from a smaller base, although all areas of the sector will continue to grow immensely over the next two years.

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Tracky wants to be your one-stop collaboration shop

Derrick Harris — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:15:00 +0000

If you’ve ever found yourself frustrated over the need to constantly switch between apps to manage your calendar, collaborate on projects, assign tasks, chat, share files — you name it — Tracky wants to be your savior. The Las Vegas-based company, which just raised $1 million in angel funding, is demonstrating its eponymous product at the SXSW Startup Debut on Saturday and opening it up for public beta.

Aside from its sheer number of features, Tracky really wants to distinguish itself from the already-crowded collaboration market by its frictionless nature. Rather than being closed off to the outside world behind a corporate firewall, Tracky lets users search its membership for potential collaborators who might be useful for a particular personal or professional project.

As Founder and CEO David Gosse recently explained to me, while Tracky certainly targets business users (those that use a lot of contract employees might find it particularly helpful), it’s also designed for everyone from a bride trying to plan her wedding and needing to find local service providers, to a group of conference attendees trying to work on an ad-hoc project. All it takes to sign up is an email address or a Twitter or Facebook account.

The company takes its status as a cloud service seriously, too. Not only is it designed with mobile devices in mind, but Tracky is hosted in the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas, which Gosse said will help ensure maximum performance and reliability.

Tracky will be free for two-person groups (or up to two groups per person) and 100MB of storage. Five dollars per user per month will provide unlimited groups and users, as well as 1GB of storage and the ability to cordon off private groups. Extra storage will be “about” 35 cents per gigabyte.

Tracky and its investors are no doubt banking on the fast-growing market for social business software and the wide variety of players (Jive, Salesforce.com, Yammer, Basecamp, Microsoft, Google, Socialcast, etc.) to help make its case for success. There’s clearly an appetite for this type of product, and one that cleanly combines so many features into a single window should be a success.

Of course, there’s also risk: Tracky’s competition has years of experience, hundreds of thousands of customers and billions in the bank. Elbowing into their space won’t be easy.

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Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:50:52 +0000

Gentlemen, start your engines. Facebook filed for its initial public offering on Feb. 1. Expectations are that in May it wants to raise $5 billion, which would make it the biggest tech IPO since Google’s in 2004. Valuations and timing may shift, but as Om says, Facebook will be doing the mother of all IPOs, with effects on hiring and acquisitions that will ripple throughout the startup and tech communities and at Facebook itself. This report outlines the myriad issues at play in such a big move, from examining how CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to rewire the world to understanding the changing implications for the company’s infrastructure dependency. But no matter the angle, one thing is clear: The company’s filing has the potential to change the game for the tech industry. Companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Zynga and Google. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:39:31 +0000

The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 08:01:13 +0000

Don’t expect the pace of change in web technologies to slow down in 2012. The web is far from dead. Social media may have anointed one huge player in Facebook, but even if there is little room for a start-from-scratch general-purpose social network, there are several companies creating useful alternative social graphs. Companies can leverage key technologies and trends in 2012 to earn revenue and gain share, whether that’s by leveraging HTML5 for rich cross-platform experiences, doing heavy data analysis or integrating collaboration tools across businesses.Companies mentioned in this report include Dropbox, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Machines will help humans harness the power of social

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 20:41:29 +0000

Social is no guarantee of effectiveness in an organization because it creates unnecessary friction as people try to figure out how to work in new ways, according to David Gutelius, the Chief Social Scientist at Jive Software speaking at the GigaOM Net:Work event Thursday. Gutelius said that while such software might be intuitive, fast and beautiful to look at, it’s also just another way to push work forward, which essentially boils down to finding the right resource for whatever the employee is trying to do.

That resource might be a person or a document, but the employee still has to find it. That’s where the machines come in. Software that learns about employees, their relationships in the company and outside the company can help humans navigate social environments more quickly, and even pull in resources that may not even be on the network. For example, Gutelius used the example of the Army realizing that one of its soldiers had figured out a new way to help deal with IEDs in Iraq. This soldier wasn’t even online, but by tracking the improvement in certain squads and soldiers the Army was able to identify this individual and promote him. He was also given a forum to teach soldiers more widely.

This example shows not only how creepy this type of software could be, but also how close it is to reality. Some people might resent having their relationships mapped at such a level. Imagine if you are in a department with a horrid boss and trying to switch roles within the company. Such software might draw unwanted attention to your wooing of the marketing department as you tried to escape product management.

Anyhow, creepy or not, Gutelius’ adaptive social computing is a few years away from widescale adoption, and no longer the stuff of science-fiction fantasies.

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Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:01:28 +0000

Last quarter’s big headline in social media and real-time technologies came from Google, which launched Google+, its first social tech product that seems legit. In the third quarter, things were back to normal. Google+ is still growing, but Facebook’s platform update dominated the news. And as Google+ passed 25 million users and won some raves from the digerati, its competition with Facebook intensified. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Zynga, Salesforce, BranchOut and Foursquare. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Focusing social platforms for enterprise collaboration

David Card — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:00:21 +0000

Social media is playing an increasing role in enterprise IT, with companies like Jive Software and Telligent jockeying with IBM, Microsoft and Cisco to tap into corporate IT spending. Today, they build social platforms customers use for both employee collaboration and consumer marketing objectives. Vendors need to focus on optimizing social media platforms for corporate collaboration.

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