GigaOM » Yammer

Elon Musk, David Sacks ditch Zuckerberg’s Fwd.us

Katie Fehrenbacher — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:29:04 +0000

Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg only launched his immigration reform political action group, Fwd.us, last month, but it’s already becoming controversial. On Friday Reuters and AllThingsD reported that the group, which boasted membership by some of Silicon Valley’s most recognizable entrepreneurs and investors, is losing two big names: entrepreneurs Elon Musk and David Sacks.

Reuters said that Musk departed because the group funded ads for senators vocalizing support for the oil pipeline, the Keystone pipeline, and oil drilling in Alaska. Think Progress reported last month that Fwd.us has spent a considerable amount of money on these anti-environmental ads. Various environmental groups have been protesting the ad funding.

Musk is the CEO of electric car company Tesla Motors, and the chairman of solar installer SolarCity. Sacks is the founder of Yammer, which was sold to Microsoft last year. Other members of Fwd.us include Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Dropbox’s Drew Houston and many others including Facebook alumni.

Our own Om Malik weighed in on Fwd.us last month, and took issue to its angle, not necessarily to its fossil fuel ad funding:

If Mark and others really cared deeply about immigration reform on a holistic level then the conversation would involve a whole lot of other people — members of non-engineering and non-technology corps. So, no, I don’t buy that just because an immigrant works on an algorithm make her more important. I know, because I am one. Perhaps FWD.us and Zuckerberg should start actually learning about the whole and real problem: a society disrupted in connected age.

Updated at 1:45 PM PST, on May 13, to correct that eBay’s CEO John Donahoe was not originally a member of FWD.us, and was incorrectly listed on Credo’s petition calling for tech leaders to leave the group, as well as incorrectly reported on various media sites.

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The 2013 task management tools market

stoweboyd — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:36:34 +0000

The task-management market is growing, in part because users need to coordinate with teams via mobile. In this case, heavier-weight solutions like Yammer, IBM Connections, Podio, and other work media collaboration platforms don’t always suffice. But the demand for digital to-do lists that can be shared across project teams is increasing, and there are a range of products to fill the void. For example, team-task-management tools like Do, Trello, and Asana are taking the lead. There are also a host of immature products such as those from Producteev and Astrid that could grow into something substantial. In 2013, expect to see more innovation and new entrants into this crowded and hot marketplace.

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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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Surprise! Consumer apps get IT approval in small businesses

Barb Darrow — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 05:01:31 +0000

In a new survey of 1,200 small and medium businesses (SMBs), LogMeIn found — no surprise — that employees in most of stores use personal applications at work. What was more eyebrow-raising was that IT staff in these businesses are accommodating, if not embracing, many of those personal application choices.

LogMeIn, the company behind Cubby, a business-oriented Dropbox competitor, prefers the term Bring Your Own Apps (BYOA) to the more common bring your own device (or BYOD) terminology.

Perhaps most surprising is that 39 percent of productivity applications — the word processors and spreadsheets that do the heavy lifting in businesses — were introduced by employees. Google Apps is probably a big beneficiary here.
And, 44 percent of collaboration apps — Skype, GotoMeeting etc. — were brought in by workers, not IT departments.
Twenty-six percent of those productivity and collaborative applications ended up being okayed by IT departments for corporate use.
Sixty-nine percent of “social” applications used across the surveyed businesses were brought in by employees. LogMeIn categorizes things like Yammer and LinkedIn as social apps which indicates a pretty straight-laced view of social apps.
And, more than half (52 percent) of cloud sync-and-storage applications now in use in these businesses likewise came in the door via employees. That would be the Dropboxes, iClouds, Skydrives of the world.

Other key findings:

70 percent of companies surveyed said employees “actively” use non-business applications in a work context.
67 percent of IT pros cited data security of these apps as a primary concern.
47 percent of respondents indicated that BYOA can increase business flexibility
89 percent of IT pros said BYOA will require different skills for managing IT environments.

For this research, LogMeIn and Edge Strategies surveyed more than 1,200 companies with up to 1,000 employees in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zeeland.

These findings, along with earlier research sponsored by Nasuni and others, shows that the line between personal and workplace technologies has become all but invisible. That poses real challenges to IT departments that have to deal with all sorts of technology coming in over the transom. But it also opens up opportunities for vendors that design easy-to-use consumer apps to enter the business realm as well.

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Yammer’s Sacks: Raise as much as you can, and don’t be afraid to change

Eliza Kern — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 01:11:13 +0000

Fundraising might not be the easiest thing for a startup, and many founders eschew it completely. But for David Sacks, founder of the social software Yammer that sold to Microsoft this summer for $1.2 billion, the approach to fundraising is clear.

“The risks are hugely asymmetric,” Sacks said Wednesday at the Founder Showcase in San Francisco. “The upside is you prevent the company from dying, and the downside is the company dies and you could have saved it. So because of those risks, I think you should raise more than you think. I think most founders, and I know I have, tend to underestimate how much money they’ll need.”

Fundraising is a time-intensive process, and there’s always the fear that a founder will sell off too much of his or her company, he said. Take George Lucas, for example:

“I’m sure we all wish we could own 100 percent of their companies,” he said. “But the reason why George never needed to raise money was he was the only one who could ever do Star Wars.”

Sacks pointed out that for most entrepreneurs, if they discover something new, it won’t be long before competitors will be at their heels and they’ll have to find a way to stay ahead. Fundraising can help them stay in first place, which is important.

“If you win the market, the number one company isn’t worth just a little more than the number two company,” he said, noting it could be worth hundreds more than the second-place competitor in a space. “So it’s hugely important to be number one.”

And when you’re not number one, or your product is suffering? Unlike plenty of entrepreneurs or investors, Sacks is honest in noting that a pivot isn’t something to aim for. But at a certain point, it’s the best way to go, he said.

“I don’t think pivoting is desirable, but if what you’re doing isn’t working, the best thing you can do is admit it and move on.”

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5 most surprising things heard at Harvard’s Cyberposium

Barb Darrow — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 23:07:12 +0000

There was the usual talk about the excitement of the startup universe and the thrill of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School’s 18th annual Cyberposium on Sunday, so I’ll cut to the chase. Here are the five most surprising, or entertaining, things I heard at the confab which drew about 700 attendees, many of them MBA candidates.

1: Founders who lack co-founders fail.

Okay, that’s overstating the case, but the vast majority of tech startups that go on to massive success have co-founders, said keynoter Lee Hower who, probably not surprisingly, was a co-founder of LinkedIn and is also the co-founder of NextView Ventures, a Boston-based VC firm.

He cited Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin, and, of course, Hewlett-Packard’s, William Hewlett and David Packard as exemplars.

The exception to prove the rule? Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

2: It’s not just the software, stupid.

People are besotted by the latest and greatest software. But — as we’re starting to learn from the tablet revolution — designing hardware to properly surface all that cool software goodness is critical. And making hardware and the interface to that software that is drop-dead simple is tough.

Orbotix’ Spheros look like a ball to consumers but is so much more.

Orbotix’ CEO and Founder Ian Bernstein told a session on hardware and user interface design that his company’s Sphero “robotic” sphere proves the point. “Sphero is just a ball to the consumer, but what goes on inside is just insane, and making that so simple was really hard.”

As Stacey Higginbotham reported earlier this year, that ball packs in accelerometers and a gyroscope and bluetooth connectivity that makes it handy for controlling games, or perhaps for helping patients recovering from surgery make sure they’re doing the right exercizes in the right way for the right amount of time.

3: People love to love to electronic dance music (also the Star Wars theme).

One lesson that came across repeatedly on Sunday is that untested assumptions about consumer preferences often miss the mark. For example, the presumption that electronic dance music is not typically consumed in the home was wrong, said Gary Liu, global director of ad product strategy for Spotify. A company-sponsored survey of 2,000 Brits showed that electronic pop phenom David Guetta made the top 20 list of music people like to hear while having sex. The Dirty Dancing soundtrack was number one, and the Star Wars soundtrack, interestingly, was number 20. (Respondents were between the ages of 18 and 91, split evenly between genders.)

4: Designers use badly designed design tools.

Sadly, the hardware and interface designers whose job it is to create wonderful, well-designed products use tools that are badly designed. Asked why that was, Mariah Levitt, senior usability specialist at Continuum, didn’t mince words: “One of the most embarrassing things in the human factors and ergonomics field is that software products we use are so hard to use.”

One reason is that the market is small. “It’s too expensive for [vendors] to emphasize stuff just for us,” Levitt said. “We need people to get more into design and to speak louder.”

The problem isn’t confined to industrial design, said Matt Rogers, founder and VP of engineering for Nest, the maker of the intelligent thermostat. “If you look at electronic design tools like Cadence — they’re just s*$%t to run. They’re all really bad and it’s because they’re high cost and take years to develop and are used by tens of thousands of people. I’d love for one of you guys to solve this problem,” he told the audience.

5: Enterprise social tools are great if the culture is right.

You’d think that companies deploying enterprise social networking tools internally would welcome the sort of give-and-take such tools facilitate. And you might be wrong.

An Le, VP of business development for Yammer, the social networking company Microsoft bought in June for $1 billion, sounded a note of caution. She related a tale of a friend who worked for a mid-sized company, (a Yammer account) that was acquired by a bigger company (also a Yammer account.) When this person posted a question about why the CEO was paying dividends rather than plowing money back into the company, the CEO, on Yammer, requested her presence in his office. She was fired.

“That’s not where i thought that story was going,” said Michael Scissons, chairman and CEO of Syncapse. By contrast, when Microsoft brought Yammer employees aboard, a Microsoft veteran wondered (on Yammer) why Microsoft bothered to buy Yammer because “it’s the same thing as Facebook.” In that case, the discussion expanded with Microsoft executives — including the head of Office — giving their rationale for the deal. Presumably, no one lost his or her job.

And now for something completely different …

The least surprising thing about the conference was the concern attendees — many of them MBAs — exhibited about the value of their advanced degrees. Several questions touched on the notion of college dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs founding superstar companies. That being the case, the question is: “What is the value of an MBA?” They were probably not comforted by Cloudant’s Sam Bisbee when his big data panel was asked about how MBAs can get into that burgeoning field.

His answer: “Don’t be an MBA … You need a technical background.”

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Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 06:55:54 +0000

Social media technologies continue to permeate marketing and enterprise collaboration, even if investors felt let down in the third quarter by their consumer-facing businesses like Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. So B2B technology offerings in support of marketing and collaboration will soon steal all the social tech attention. This quarterly wrap-up analyzes these events, and provides a near-term outlook for trends, technologies and companies to watch in the next 18 to 24 months.

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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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How emerging technologies will influence collaboration

David Coleman — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 06:55:35 +0000

Workplaces are changing because of trends like BYOD and gamification. But other emerging technologies are also altering not only what our work and space look like but also how we collaborate on that work. This piece delves into the different types of collaboration to provide a baseline of concepts. It then examines how emerging technologies like driverless cars, brain science, and 3D printers are being used to further collaboration in the near and far future. These advancements will not only support more and better types of collaboration in the workplace but will also impact where we work, what a workspace is, what we work on (literally), and how we share our work.

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New Microsoft Office ropes in Skype, Yammer, SkyDrive

Barb Darrow — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 21:40:47 +0000

Updated: As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and company showed off the latest version of Office Monday, they hit all the right marks — a touch interface, cloud storage, VoIP integration and social networking tie-ins.

The new Office (now in customer preview) will be both “ink-” and “touch-” enabled. It will store user documents to Microsoft’s SkyDrive by default. (Microsoft already said it was tying SkyDrive cloud storage closely into its upcoming Windows 8 operating system.) And the new Office Home and Student 2013 RT versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote will ship with Microsoft’s promised ARM-based Windows 8 machines including Surface.

A lot of what was detailed was integration of the new Office with existing (and some more recently acquired) Microsoft products, including Skype for VoIP communication and Yammer for social networking.

Much of the new functionality looks like catch-up — Microsoft knows it needs to respond to the iPad fever that’s overtaken the world, hence the Windows 8 tablets and touch enablement. (If Ballmer et al. mentioned new Office for iPad or Mac today, I missed it, although Microsoft Office is a popular Mac product.) Update: A Microsoft spokeswoman said Mac Office was not discussed today but that Office Mobile will work across Windows Phones, Android phones and iOSand that Microsoft will discuss those plans later. As for ink, Microsoft has been pushing pen computing for a decade with no discernible traction. It’ll be interesting to see if it takes this time around.

This effort is unbelievably important to Microsoft. Office, even more than Windows itself, is what keeps many people coming back to Microsoft — their documents are created in Word and their presentations authored in PowerPoint. But many startups and web companies are taking a good look at free or less pricey Google Apps. If nothing else, that price pressure and the demand for cloud-friendly applications have driven this Microsoft move.

The gamble here is that the drastically different more touch-oriented user interface, which many laud as an improvement over the old Office UI, may confuse or alienate long-time Office users.

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