Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Adoption’

‘Breathe Social’: The New Rules of Relationship Management

Despite the proverbial “the customer is always right,” the relationship between the customer and the company has long been organized for the benefit of the latter. But the ability for companies to completely control this relationship has disappeared.

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management, a report from the Altimeter Group released earlier this month, serves to help companies and organizations understand the changing territory. The report offers a thorough framework with which companies can strategize their adoption of social CRM projects.

Sponsor

Based on research with companies who have pioneered an embrace of social technologies for relationship management, the report lists 18 use cases that serve as entry points for social CRM efforts. These include social customer insights (tracking customers’ preferences via social media sites like Facebook), rapid social marketing response (defending the brand in real-time), and crowdsourced R&D (eliciting real-time feedback to enhance innovation).

The report rates each use case by its market demand and tech maturity, indiced to help organizations see which might be the most expedient and appropriate entry points for their social CRM endeavors. It also lists vendors to watch, pointing out that there is currently no single tool to help organizations track customer data and customer conversations in a world of rapidly changing social technologies.

The report has six recommendations for organizations: Breathe social. Complement existing CRM processes. Measure social CRM projects on business goals rather than solely on engagement. Be prepared for rapid change. Find other social CRM pioneers.

The most important, perhaps: Act now. The report cautions companies against falling even further out of step with customers by not engaging with social technologies to expand their CRM processes. Well-researched and with clear definitions, the report could also help companies avoid undertaking social CRM projects merely for the buzz.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Will OpenID Transform the Enterprise Ecosystem?

One of the most significant developments for Enterprise 2.0 happened last week when Google Apps Marketplace announced that it would be standardizing on OpenID.

Google is leveraging its strength as an identity provider to create a single sign-on ecosystem for third party applications and enterprise customers. This does not mean that we will see immediate adoption of single sign-on across the enterprise landscape. But it does represent a shift that will lead to more seamless application integrations, platform diversity and a sizable community of enterprise customers.

Sponsor

Today, we spent some time talking with Vatsal Sonecha, vice president of TriCipher who gave some perspectives about the impacts of the Google announcement and what it means for the enterprise marketplace. TriCipher offers MyOneLogin, an OpenID service.

OpenID Means Choice

Google Apps Marketplace is the first major platform to adopt OpenID. Salesforce.com AppsExchange provides support for developers that integrate federated identity but they do not have it standardized across the platform. Microsoft’s Federation Gateway does not support OpenD. Google’s move means that competing platforms will have to consider entering the OpenID ecosystem. As more platforms do adopt OpenID, the aggregate user base will diversify and grow. Platforms that do not adopt OpenID will have to convince the market that its proprietary network is more robust and valuable than all the rest.

A Critical Mass of Users

Service providers now have a potential critical mass of users. They are beginning to adopt OpenID but now they have further incentives. The dynamics of demand aggregation now come into play. With a universal identity foot print, a service provider may now reach deeper into the enterprise. Enterprise customers are

The Cloud and OpenID

Cloud computing makes it easier for companies to adopt OpenID. Services like MyOneLogin and OneLogin provide infrastructure for security authentication markup language (SAML) integration and single-sign on with multi-factor authentication. The identity services provider becomes a hub that keeps track of updates, new protocols and the other issues that come with keeping up to date with federated identity issues. With the services in place and a marketplace to explore, service providers will greet an already qualified customer. These customers will be ready to buy without concerns about registering new user names and passwords. It’s like a club. You join once. That’s it.

Watch the Carriers

According to Sonecha , the carriers have a material advantage if they decide to offer OpenID. They have a user base. They understand how to manage scalable systems. And they never worry about captial expenditures. They may borrow a sheet from Google and open their own marketplace or next generation service catalogs.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

The poor don’t care about broadband? Of course they do

By now most Ars readers have been saturated with statistical data about broadband adoption in the United States: who has access, who doesn’t, where, why, and how we compare with the rest of the world. One of the conundrums with which all these surveys grapple is that allegedly stubborn portion of the population—mostly poor, rural, and older—who don’t use the Internet at all, because they supposedly don’t care to do so.

But a new study suggests that this community of broadband outsiders is rapidly disappearing from the landscape, particularly among low income Americans.

Read the comments on this post

Read the whole story…

Brazil: The New Home of Financial Innovation?

Brazil is sort of a strange country to throw into the “emerging market” category. It’s not a particularly young country like India or Israel, nor is it a country like China or Russia that embraced capitalism fairly recently. Brazil is as old as the US and has had a decently built out infrastructure of things like roads and phone lines for some time.

Yes, it’s a growing country with a young and stabilizing democracy that has a long way to go in terms of technology, modernization and bridging a quality of life between very wealthy and very poor. In that sense, it shares enough in common with emerging markets that Wall Street, at least, tosses it in the “BRIC” bucket. Indeed, Wall Street has had a way bigger crush on Brazil to date than Silicon Valley.
That seems to have had two effects on the startup scene in Sao Paulo. The first is that there’s a good deal of innovation in the finance space. Banks in Brazil had to become advanced, many people told me, because of the runaway inflation that plagued the country for so many years. As opposed to other huge markets like Mexico, China or India that lagged in the adoption of checking accounts and other basic services, in Brazil you had to have your money in the bank, because the value of cash changed so rapidly.  So it’s no surprise more of those there’s-a-better-way spin-offs have come in finance than, say, Web 2.0 or mobile. (There’s a ton in agriculture and other sectors outside the cities too, but more on that in a future post.)
My favorite finance company that I met during my February trip to Brazil is called Crivo, and it left me wondering if that great wave of finance innovation might come from our Southern neighbors, not us.

Crivo has developed a way to do lightning-fast, three-second credit checks. Its servers pull information from a variety of sources, including all the places you’d expect but but also sources like utility records to verify an applicant’s address or ensuring that their phone number doesn’t just go to a payphone. “Even a single piece of information can be useful in detecting fraud,” says Daniel Turnini, one of Crivo’s founders. (Pictured above, on the right, with his co-founders.)

There’s nothing like a FICO score in Brazil so, in the past, credit decisions were made based on negative data and positive data. In other words you are “good” or “bad” in the bank’s eyes. There’s little record for positive data in Brazil, because the wealthiest people don’t want how much they paid for a house or a car in public records. It’s a security issue, Turnini says. That only leaves negative data.

So if there’s no information about you, it’s assumed you’re a good credit risk. But miss one payment and you have a “dirty name,” Turini says. It’s a flawed system. Many good credit risks (indeed I’d bet most people) have missed a payment before, and it’s a huge assumption to make that someone with no credit history would be a good borrower. In recent years there have been banks, insurance companies, and similar institutions vying to cash in on Brazil’s emerging middle class and increasingly wealthy upper classes, but had no real way of knowing how to extend credit.

Sound like great timing? It would have been if Crivo wasn’t started in 1998. Back then, few banks in the US would have been early adopters of something like this, let alone banks in Brazil. (Ok, most banks in the US still wouldn’t be.) Nailing that first customer was near impossible. The founders kept thinking they were on the right track because potential customers would freak out when they saw how quickly the software worked, but they’d never quite pull the trigger on a purchase. Always hoping things would finally click the next year, the founders kept bootstrapping the company. Finally, it did. Toyota’s Brazilian financial arm bought their software and used it to rapidly approve people for loans, beating other car makers who were flooding into the growing market. The company has been on a sharp growth rate for five years now. They did roughly $12 million in revenues last year, and expect that to double in 2010, Turini says. Crivo says it has more than 80 employees and 100 customers today.

There are clear ripple effects if Crivo does well. More people getting credit cards helps grow spending and ecommerce, more small businesses can get loans, and more people who can’t afford to pay in cash can buy houses – to name just a few advantages. We’ve seen the benefits of “greenfield markets” when it comes to innovation in telecom and even physical infrastructure, like roads and trains. Might Brazil be able to come up with some greenfield solutions for finance? It’s easy to see how a FICO score could be improved on and, ahem, really easy to make the argument that way too much credit has been extended in the US in the last ten years. But while we have a system in place, who is going to upend the apple cart and force widespread-adoption of a newer, smarter system? It’s South Korea and telecom all over again.

Yes, I realize that to many tech entrepreneurs, the idea of a country amassing an army of middle managers sounds about as appealing as a resurrection ship of Cylons. But a lot of the most talented local entrepreneurs, managers and even investors I met in Brazil had spun out of a year or two in consulting and finance.

An example was Diego Simon of VivaReal (pictured right, working in his tiny home office), a broad Latin American real estate portal that has increasingly been focusing on Brazil. Neither of the founders are Brazilian – or even live in Brazil – so finding someone like Simon was essential. Entrepreneurs from other South American countries say selling to Brazil as an outsider is harder for them than selling to China. That makes Simon exactly the Droid any company like VivaReal is looking for: He had experience running his family’s business, worked a stint for a multinational but left because he wanted to do something vaguely entrepreneurial – although he didn’t know exactly what. I’ve never been particularly bullish on real estate portals, but if VivaReal does well, it will be in no small part due to Simon criss-crossing Sao Paulo in his Fiat extolling the virtues of online listings under the auspices of a common culture and language.

The problem is—like in China and India—the allure of the multi-national paycheck and prestige is strong in Brazil. The management expertise may be there in greater numbers, but convincing someone to take a gamble on an unproven startup for stock is as hard as it is anywhere in the emerging world.

Read the whole story…

10.5 Million Wordpress Blogs Get PubSubHubbub

Last September, Wordpress made millions of its blogs real-time with RSSCloud, but today it has taken real-time a step further by enabling PubSubHubbub for its 10.5 million blogs.

What this means, essentially, is that you no longer need to wait for your news reader to ping your blog every so often to find out if there are any updates – you’ll find out in real time.

Sponsor

PubSubHubbub, also referred to as PuSH, is a decentralized real-time Web protocol that delivers data to subscribers the moment it becomes available. Traditionally, an RSS reader would poll a blog every so many minutes, like an annoying child on a car trip asking if you’re there yet. With a PuSH enabled blog, the blog and the reader both communicate through a hub. When new content is published, the blog immediately notifies the hub, which then notifies all of the subscribers. There is little to no delay. As Wordpress notes in its blog, “In most cases these updates are sent out with in a second or two of when you hit the publish button.”

Unlike the adoption of RSSCloud last fall, there is no need to opt-in or install a plugin for a blog hosted on Wordpress.com to become PuSH enabled – it’s already active. For Wordpress blogs hosted separately, a PuSH plugin, PuSHPress is now available for download.

This is yet another big step in our progression to a real-time Web. Last month, Google Reader went real time by consuming PuSH feeds, meaning they show up on the news site almost immediately after being published to the originating site. In conjunction, this means that any Wordpress.com hosted blogs, as well as any PuSH enabled blogs running Wordpress, will be immediately available on Google Reader and any other reader set to work with PuSH.

This also means that, if you want to be on the razors edge of what’s happening on the Web, you can also receive chat notifications of PuSH enabled blogs. RSS readers can be so last year when you can get a chat notification the instant a piece of content is published.

For a further explanation of PubSubHubbub, read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s article from last year’s Real Time Web Summit.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Just getting started? Focus on this to get to the next level

(Editor’s note: Pamela Springer is CEO of Manta, which provides information on small companies. She submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

As strange as it might sound, the key to success in startups is not always knowing where you are in your revenue and profitability growth cycle. Instead, it’s much more important to keep track of people, strategy and capital – and in that order.

Understanding the strengths of your team – and your leaders in particular – allows you to build the details of your strategy that you can proactively manage.   Aligning your strategy with your team’s strengths increases your chances of staying focused on sustainability.

On-the-job training is expensive, so check resumes and gauge how prospects for key roles have performed in previous jobs. If you have strong generalists, recognize you might need to evolve them into specialists. And keep an eye on balance: Having too many people on the team who have never experienced the start-up life (and the duties and responsibilities that go with it) can be dangerous.  Ideally, you’ve got committed, passionate and experienced leaders who can help navigate the inevitable bumps.

Having said this: Skills aren’t everything. The team needs to work well together. Many people are hired on skills, but fired due to their traits.

It’s very easy for a business to stray from its core mission. A clear focus on your company’s strategic goals is the key to staying on course  - or knowing when it’s time to modify things. Focus initially on “adoption” or revenue – confirming you have a product or service the market wants to buy.  Use the first few sales to gather feedback on missing features and what your customers like. Your next batch of customers will typically be more profitable (since you’ve made improvements and streamlined processes based on initial feedback).

As you start to establish a foothold in the marketplace, you’ll need to determine if your product has the capability to scale and bring a critical mass of customers and revenue to your company (depending, of course, on the market size and opportunity).  If not, think of adjacent markets to leverage or where you can re-package your existing product. (Note, though, that it is foolhardy to expand into a new segment before your initial product is well established.

It goes without saying that it’s important to have appropriate financial resources.  Bootstrapping an early stage company is typically the best option, as it allows you to validate the market and get initial feedback from customers. Once you’ve got a better sense of the market (and have secured a few customers), then it’s safe to begin thinking about outside investment.

Assuming you can find a willing venture capitalist or angel investor, deciding whether to accept a cash infusion ultimately depends on how fast you want to grow your company – and what you have planned for your exit strategy. Keep in mind that it’s best to secure capital when you don’t need it, as trying to raise or find money when you do need it is tough.

Understanding where you are in the maturity curve of each of these three categories will help you position your business better for the future. Cash is obviously important – but if you don’t have the right team and strategy, you’ll never see the capital.

Tags: employees, how-to, strategy

Read the whole story…

Lights Go Out For Streamy, Founders Flock To Facebook And Zynga

Alas, personalized news streaming service / social network aggregator Streamy hasn’t been able to find a buyer willing to pay what the two founders were hoping to get for the assets, so the startup is shutting its awesome Web app down – for now.

In a short notice posted online, Streamy says it plans to “hold” the service and “reinvent it when the time is right”. In the meantime, however, both co-founders of the fledgling company have been forced to go out and look for a slightly steadier job. One has landed at social gaming juggernaut Zynga, the other at social networking juggernaut Facebook.

CEO Don Mosites, for one, is heading to Zynga to work on a “new, special project”. He won’t tell me what it is, but he promises it will be “big”. To be continued, I suppose.

The other co-founder of Streamy, Jonathan Gray, will be joining David Recordon (previously with Six Apart) and Monica Keller (previously with MySpace) and become part of the social networking giant’s open source division.

From what I can gather, Gray will be helping Facebook promote the adoption of projects like HipHop, Cassandra, Tornado, Thrift, and others. He’ll also continue working with HBase, which was the Hadoop-driven data back-end for Streamy.

Read the whole story…

We’re Still Not Facebook: Lessons from Late Adopters

This week thousands of visitors arrived at ReadWriteWeb thinking we were the new Facebook and asking us how to login. The phenomenon came about as mainstream audiences were directed to our story via Google search for “Facebook login”. While RWW’s regular tech readers found the mistake amusing, it perhaps speaks to the fact that there are huge variables in user interaction.

Sponsor

A few months ago Betaworks’ Andrew Weissman wrote an article entitled, Don’t Get High On Your Own Supply where he tells entrepreneurs to step outside of their insular worlds. He writes, “[It] can mean not believing what other people say or write about your service – good or bad – it is the use case that matters, not the chatter.”

In our world of tech media, it’s easy to forget that there is a large group of users who type terms like “Facebook login” into Google search. Could you imagine if we’d written an article entitled, “Bank of America Wants to Be Your One True Password”? We might all be sipping margaritas in the Grand Cayman right now.

If a huge audience can’t understand the difference between a blog and a social networking site, how are we supposed to explain the concepts of OAuth and OpenID? If you’re a startup entrepreneur, step outside of your own world of early adopters and look at your product through the eyes of a n00b. While we didn’t mean to confuse Facebook users, the traffic on this week’s login post is proof that the late adoption audience is a valuable group to consider.

Photo Credit: Dave Olson

Discuss

Read the whole story…