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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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Work media tools in 2012 and beyond

stoweboyd — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:15:48 +0000

Welcome to the fast-growing world of work media, a new class of social tools based on the principles of open social networks like Facebook and Twitter but oriented to the specific needs of businesses and professionals. This report provides a brief synopsis of the business context for work media technologies, with special attention on how businesses are confronted with a set of disruptive forces and how they are responding by heading in new directions, which we call disruption vectors. Work media is an element of those vectors, and work media products will be judged based on their utility therein.

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Asana tries to end email frustration with Inbox

Barb Darrow — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 15:00:05 +0000

Asana, the company that wants to help workgroups collaborate efficiently, is adding a new feature to attack what it calls a huge productivity suck: email. And it’s doing so with a new feature ironically called Inbox.

Inbox is a central place for an information worker to aggregate only the relevant and requested files and messages about given projects and share task lists etc. Users subscribe to and unsubscribe from the feeds as they want to see them

Four-year old San Francisco-based Asana, co-founded by Facebook veterans Dustin Moskowitz and Justin Rosenstein and backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark Capital, is betting that social networking tools transformed for the enterprise will not fill the bill. It claims big customers, including Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, use the service to minimize extraneous meetings and to cut down on distractions.

“We don’t really see things like Yammer, SocialCast and Chatter as competitors but we also don’t see them as particularly useful. They just took something popular in the consumer space and ported them over, but research shows many people don’t see the value in them. We’re about a work graph, not the social graph,” Rosenstein said in an interview Tuesday.

Inbox gives users the information about the projects they want to see. “If you click on a message in Inbox, you get all the associated context and information surrounding it,” said Rosenstein. “Inbox keeps your communication directly connected to the shared record of what you’re working on.”

Asana’s service is free for up to 30 users and then is $100 per month up to $800 per month depending on number of users. For more on Asana Inbox, check out this company blog post.

In some ways, Inbox reminds me of what Lotus Notes (now Domino) started out as — a way for workgroups to keep their project information together and communicate about it. Rosenstein agreed with that comparison. “Lotus Notes was ahead of its time. That time has come,” he said. Mitchell Kapor, co-founder of Lotus Development Corp., is an Asana advisor.

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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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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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Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business

stoweboyd — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:01:28 +0000

Work media refers to tools based on the patterns of interaction, influence and communication from social networks of the open web. Today, these tools are being adopted at a startling pace — perhaps the fastest of a class of new software in the business sector since the web itself. And, perhaps even more startlingly, IT organizations seem to be scurrying to pick company-wide solutions that utilize these new tools and ideas. This piece makes a different and largely positive case for the use of work media, based on what we have learned in recent years about human cognition. The bottom line? Work media is key for work productivity and innovation, in large part because it lines up with the way that the human mind works and the way that people’s thinking is influenced by their social connections.

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Socialcast building better businesses with simple social tools

Kevin Fitchard — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:26:33 +0000

A simple emoticon can tell you wonders about the emotional state of your company, Socialcast and About.me founder Timothy Young revealed Thursday at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference. Socialcast experimented with a simple emoticon test in a Japanese factory, at the end of the workday asking each employee in an email to click on a happy, average or sad face, gauging how satisfied they were with the day’s work experience.

It’s a simple test, Young said, but it was also one that all employees could easily participate in. The resulting data points could be used to not only rate an individual employee’s satisfaction with his or her job, but also to help promote cohesion between team members and identify if certain groups or employees, such as graphic designers or salespeople, were becoming disenfranchised.

VMWare recently acquired Socialcast, making Young VP of Social Enterprise. Despite the sophistication of its virtualization software implementations, Young said it has kept Socialcast true to its principles of providing simple business solutions can cut through the normally high level of complexity at an enterprise.

“We’re not really building software here,” Young said. “We’re helping people to unleash their power internally, become heroes and become more affective at their jobs. If we can provide really simple tools — not complex tools inside the workplace that they have to spend a lot of time training on and learning, trying to figure out how they drive value for their own jobs — if we give them really simple tools, they can use them to flourish.”

Watch live streaming video from gigaomnetwork at livestream.com

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro

stoweboyd — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:01:02 +0000

The future of work is already here. It is just already distributed, one might say. The freelance economy, microtasking, mobile workers, coworking spaces, crowdsourcing: All of these point to how work is increasingly shifting from the twentieth-century model of Taylorism (think scientific management applied to labor processes such as assembly-line production and fixed workplaces) to a more flexible, hyperspecialized and connected workforce. This report examines the new world of work, from the devices and software services we use to the growing role of social media, the importance of a group-centric mentality and how the roles of employees, managers and organizations are evolving.

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VMware tackles task management with Strides

Derrick Harris — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:06:40 +0000

The Socialcast team at VMware has introduced a beta version of a new product called Strides, which aims to make task management an interactive experience. Think Basecamp, but more social, and with more visibility into what your colleagues are working on. Strides, of course, is just the latest venture of a new, more application-centric VMware.

Strides lets people create tasks, invite participants, share files, monitor progress and all the other things one might expect from a project-management service, but it also takes it a step further. Users can see who else is online and working with a particular project at any given time, can exchange comments in real time and can filter by a variety of different characteristics.

If we’re going to get people away from writing Post-It notes and holding unnecessary meetings, Socialcast Founder and now VMware VP of Social Enterprise Timothy Young told me, “we need to make the interface really fast and really fluid.”

Young thinks Strides will particularly useful for large companies, inside of which it can be difficult to keep track of everything that’s going on. Department heads and managers, even C-level executives if they’re so inclined, will be able to get a broad view of what what their teams are working on and who’s doing what. And, of course, they can manage the tasks and interact with their employees, too.

Although Strides and Socialcast are separate products, Young said the two ultimately will be integrated similar to how the various Google applications are. Users will be able to open Strides from a link on their Socialcast pages, profile information will be shared between the two applications and, perhaps most importantly for users, Strides updates will appear in their Socialcast streams.

Young views Strides as a move up the stack from Socialcast, which makes it an even higher step up for VMware, which just recently got into the application space. During VMworld, VMware CEO Paul Maritz talked a lot about applications replacing infrastructure in terms of strategic importance, and this approach has garnered many a comparison with Maritz’s previous employer, Microsoft.

Young thinks that’s fair comparison, but noted that we’re talking about a different technology stack than in the previous generation, and users are part of the equation now, too. VMware is trying to bring the efficiencies it brought to computing resources to human resources, Young explained, which means that applications have to help IT shift from just managing devices to also managing people.

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How far can consumerization go for enterprise apps?

Derrick Harris — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:08:52 +0000

During VMworld this week, talk of consumerization — or the rise of consumer applications and devices in corporate settings — was everywhere, stemming from VMware CEO Paul Maritz’s and CTO Steve Herrod’s mobile- and application-centric keynotes. Included in Herrod’s presentation was talk of a new Dropbox-like application called Project Octopus that will let users safely store, access and share corporate documents. It all sounded so promising, and then someone asked me whether it will actually get used.

If employees already use Dropbox, she asked, why would they want to use a different service to do essentially the same thing while at work? The truth is that I don’t know. I can see why employers would want them to use a separate service, but will employees stand for it?

I tend to agree with my colleague Stacey Higginbotham, who noted while reporting on VMware’s mobile play, “While enterprises will love the ability to control who can access their data, employees may not want to give up the ability to use their own tools and choose who they share their files with.” Of course, it’s not so much a question about Dropbox or Project Octopus as much as it is about the role of consumer applications in corporate settings in general.

There’s no denying that consumerization is real. Employees really are demanding the ability to use their personal devices rather than company-issued BlackBerrys and laptops. By and large, employers seem content to let them do so because it takes productivity to a whole new level. That’s one of the megatrends driving VMware’s new focus on mobility and applications: If personal devices can’t be locked down from a security standpoint, it wants to make sure enterprise applications and data can be.

Consumerization even has made its way into traditional enterprise applications, thanks to the advent of Software-as-a-Service offerings. Business users accustomed to clean, simple web-based consumer applications in their personal lives expect the same thing from web-based business applications. As Zendesk COO Zack Urlocker asked in a post last year, “Why buy and manage complex infrastructure or applications when a simpler approach will get results faster and cheaper?”

But there’s a difference between applications that either emerge from business settings or that are only relevant to businesses, and consumer-focused applications that prove themselves useful in business settings. Beyond social tools such as Socialcast and Chatter (no one could legitimately suggest Facebook, for example, as the interoffice communication channel), I’m not so certain it will be easy to get employees to give up the consumer applications they’ve already begun using for business needs.

Dropbox is just one example. Look at Amazon Web Services, which grew popular among enterprise developers despite not having been sanctioned by IT departments. Despite an endless supply of vendors selling private cloud software and alternative hosting providers’ pushing “enterprise cloud computing,” AWS still dominates cloud computing. Maybe that’s because anyone within the organization who has used AWS really likes it and won’t settle for less. Or look to Google Apps, which has wormed its way into many companies by this point.

Application providers aren’t stupid, either. When AWS and Google recognized the money to be made by selling to businesses, they got started with all sorts of security and identity management improvements. They both even undertook the effort to achieve certification for the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) to be able to win lucrative federal-government deals. It seems only logical that other new consumer-based services will follow the money, too.

Given that iPads, iPhones, Android, AWS, Gmail and so many other tools have made the transition from the consumer world to the business world, it just seems a bit off base to suggest that enterprise applications mimicking useful consumer applications will suddenly catch on. Sure, companies might buy them and mandate their use, but that doesn’t mean employees still won’t use their preferred services, or that they’ll be happy about the change.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user Pete Prodoehl

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