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Posts Tagged ‘Attributes’

How The Godfather Would Pick Enterprise 2.0 Champions

From time to time, we look at how Enterprise 2.0 practices are reaching into companies.

A recent post by Michael Idinopulos demonstrates how the premises for finding Enterprise 2.0 champions is often flawed. Too often the search is for the right personality. Instead, the focus of the search should really be for the people who are “exchanging knowledge, information, and ideas across large parts of the organization.”

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Idinopulos compares it to how The Godfather’s Don Corleone would approach the issue when choosing the right people for the job: “It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.” In other words, people are chosen for their role in the organization not for who they are as people.

Let’s just say the “Godfather,” process is still not widely used. Often, managers look for the “it” factor. Here are a few of the more common things Idinopulos has heard managers say they are looking for:

• The Young and Hip: “Jimmy’s only 28. He grew up on Facebook!”
• The Tech-Savvy: “Mary’s always got the latest gadget. She’s a natural for this!”
• The Connectors: “Martin knows everybody. He’s the ideal social networker!”
• The Visionaries: “Isabel is so visionary. She’ll totally get what we’re trying to do!”

Idinopulos makes the point that these psychological attributes don’t work for a few reasons:

• The premise that just a few have such talents is repudiated by the fact that it gets adopted by any number of people who don’t fit into any one category
• They re not actionable. How can you scale this across an organization of 5,000 to 10,000 employees?
• The signal does not transmit. Do you know the lonely social media evangelist? The one who finally just gives up and says people “just don’t get it.” The enthusiasm has to transfer to the organization.

It’s evident a methodology is emerging for how to make Enterprise 2.0 a deep institutional focus. Companies like the Dachis Group and Pragmatic Enterprise are pioneering new methods to help clients institute technologies and practices that fit with the social enterprise.

Dion Hinchcliffe and Michael Krigsman of Pragmatic Enterprise take a holistic approach. They look at the political, technical and business issues that come with any social Web initiative. They look for executive champions who want to use social technologies to solve a business problem. Once the problem is identified, a process begins that seeks out the spectrum of opinions about the
project and the use of Enterprise 2.0 practices for the group.

The business world is developing its own methods for how it makes social technologies a part of the business process. At times it may be surprising how the technologies get adopted. Idinopulos points to a marketing manager who turned out to be responsible for attracting thousands to a Socialtext environment that Idinopulos and his group had implemented for the company:

“Because the Marketing Manager’s commitment to social media wasn’t a personal thing, it transferred quickly to other parts of the business. Other Marketing groups got wind of the project, and started posting their own content, creating their own workspaces, starting their own conversations. Then it started to spread beyond Marketing, to Sales and Product groups that had initially participated as consumers of Marketing content. Marketing’s cross-silo reach positioned them to involve different parts of the organization, which then went on to do their own thing. That would not have happened if Marketing’s success had been a function of one person’s passion.”

The example is proof that the enthusiasm comes from how the social technologies help people in their work so the business can prosper. As the Godfather would say:

“It’s not personal. It’s just business.”

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TEDxSV: Reid Hoffman On Philanthropic Movements On The Web

We’re at TEDxSV, a Silicon Valley outpost of TED’s conferences on innovation, which is taking place today at Stanford University. First up is LinkedIn founder and angel investor Reid Hoffman, who is addressing the concept of iMovements on the web. I’ll be live-blogging his remarks.

Hoffman says that one of his ambitions is to be a public intellectual, to be able to influence millions of people with innovations and change. Hoffman thinks that the internet, which is scalable and low-cost, is the optimal platform for cause-based organizations. The web is more about people than technology, Hoffman asserts.

When Hoffman invests in a startup, he looks at three things: scalability, margins and the structure. These three attributes are the same things that make web-based causes or philanthropic movements more effective. Three types of cause-based organizations have developed on the web because of this potential, which are non-profits (Hoffman highlights micro-lending platform Kiva.org as an example of this), hybrid infrastructure organizations such as Mozilla or Creative Commons, and companies developing their own cause-based movements on the web.

One of the things that Hoffman finds interesting is that corporations, because they have the reach of millions of people, they can make cause-based initiatives part of their web based platform. This is exemplified by Facebook’s Causes application.

The causes that success capitalize on the internet “peer play” says Hoffman. So how do you coordinate the actions of millions of people in the world to make social change? Hoffman says that micro-groups on the internet can help organize these causes effectively.

The key part of the future of cause-based movements will be the boiling up of problems and issue and the coordinated intelligence and collective ideation on how to tackle these problems. There is a value in the crowdsourcing of ideas to help make social change, concluded Hoffman.

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Building a great iPhone app

Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch

CIO.com has posted an article (single-page reprint here) covering one company’s foray into the app development scene. Recently, clothing retailer Gap held an app development contest. The goal was to develop the “best” app to represent the retailer on the iPhone or iPod touch. Gap partnered with Mobclix, the mobile ad exchange operator (more here), to come up with the contest for the best Gap-branded iPhone app.

The contest ran for three months and had 100,000 submissions. While the winning entry isn’t available for download on the App Store yet, and Gap doesn’t currently have a release plan, CIO.com has a list of 5 attributes that contribute to a quality iPhone app. One of my personal favorites is the consideration for how far to stray from Apple’s UI guidelines. On the one hand you have an easy-to-use app that everyone can understand, but on the other hand you have to consider how “similar” you want to be to everyone else.

I won’t spoil the fun and tell you all of the different attributes, but if you want to check out the winning app, you can see the submission video in the second half of this post.

[via Macworld]

Continue reading Building a great iPhone app

TUAWBuilding a great iPhone app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Get your mix on with Star6

Filed under: iPhone, App Review, Music

Star6 [iTunes link], from Agile Partners, is a beat-mixing iPhone app with a lot of power behind its kitschy interface. While I see it being a fun toy for the casual user, there are some possibilities for great things, if you have the dedication to get good with it. I won’t award it a heap of points for aesthetics, but the interface is highly usable and well thought-out.

You get six pads to which you can assign sounds, either from the array of included kits or from your own wav or aiff samples. Once you’ve got your kit loaded up, you can trigger the sounds in Grain mode, which makes it more of a sound effects machine, or in Sync mode, which will beat-match the samples to keep the rhythm flowing. While you’re playing each sample, you can modify attributes like pitch, gate, speed, jitter and “size” by holding down each respective button and raising or lowering the iPhone. There were times in my trial of Star6 that I just wanted sliders, but the accelerometer-based manipulation has a definite right-brain appeal. Additionally, you can turn effects like delay, filter and distortion on and off whilst grooving away.

Star6 is running a contest right now, with two grand prizes of $500 each. You can see some of the entries by going to the YouTube Group, and join the group to submit your own. Details are available at the Agile Partners page for the contest. I’m a little late on the jump here, but the deadline has been extended to October 25th, 2009. It can’t hurt to try, right?

Star6 is available in the App Store for $6.99US. Check out the gallery below for a few shots of the interface. If it looks interesting, though, definitely head over to the introductory video and samples (play before you buy) at the Star6 website.

TUAWGet your mix on with Star6 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tweetvite: An Events Site Dedicated To Planning And Finding Tweetups

A little over a year ago we saw the launch of Anyvite, a Y Combinator funded competitor to Evite that was looking to streamline event planning. Tonight, that startup is launching a spin-off site called Tweetvite — a site dedicated to helping plan and discover Tweetups.

For those that haven’t encountered the term before, a Tweetup is a real-life get together between people who use Twitter. Beyond that, the rules are flexible: Tweetups can be large events or small gatherings, can involve grabbing a few drinks or just socializing for a bit, and can be planned for in advance or spontaneous. Founder Jeff Morin says that while there are plenty of sites that cater to traditional events, like birthday and BBQs, the Tweetup niche is underserved.

Setting up an event with Tweetvite will be familiar to anyone who has used an event site like Anyvite or Evite. To get started, you enter the name of your event, the location, who is hosting it, and other essential information. But the site includes a few attributes that you won’t find anywhere else: it asks you to designate a hashtag for the event, as well as a custom shortened URL. The site also makes it easy to Tweet out your event, or share it with other services like Facebook and MySpace. Another big difference from traditional events sites is the fact that Tweetvite offers a directory of upcoming Tweetups (given the nature in which they’re announced, they’re generally open to the public).

Once you’ve created your event, you can use the site’s control panel to monitor for any tweets containing your hashtag and see how many people have viewed your page and RSVP’d. The site also offers a widget that you can embed on your blog to inform visitors of your upcoming tweetup.

Tweetvite looks great, with a very polished interface and a streamlined event creation process that only takes a minute or two. At this point the biggest question in my mind is how many people actually throw Tweetups — they may be becoming increasingly popular but are nowhere near as common as traditional events are, so it may be tough to build a business around this niche. That said, Twitter is obviously still in its infancy, so the number of Tweetups may grow rapidly over the next few years.

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Kid-friendly MMO MyMiniPeeps gets $300,000 (in real-world currency)

World of Warcraft aficionados will tell you that, despite the game’s reputation for being more addictive than drugs, it has redeeming value in team building and the pursuit of goals. But it’s hard to justify that when everyone’s killing each other.

Enter MyMiniPeeps, a Massive Multiplayer Online game intended specifically for children ages 6 through 13. Masher Media, the game’s developers, just received $300,000 in angel funding from Tech Coast Angels to keep working towards a pre-alpha release. The company had previously raised $175,000 in a seed round and hopes to get another $200,000 for this round.

There’s no shortage of venues for kids to get their gaming kicks these days, but Masher Media chief executive Sherry Gunther said she knows of no existing game that combines the deep play of an MMO with a friendly, positive atmosphere.

“I think we’re unique in the sense that we have all of the same attributes of a true massive multiplayer online game … but most of those are fairly violent and have to do with shooting things and people,” she said.

A typical objective in MyMiniPeeps might entail rescuing a cat from a tree, or going on a scavenger hunt. These quests could lead to new missions, but they also give the player in-game currency and good will points. These are used to build up the player’s character and unlock new abilities.

Parents will want to keep an eye on their kids, and the game allows them to limit time, approve of buddy list additions and sign off on uploads for user-created content. The game also prohibits the sharing of personal information.

To keep players from misbehaving, MyMiniPeeps has filters and human moderators to prevent bullying and foul language. MyMiniPeeps will also work on positive attitudes by having kids to work together on quests, and by giving them objectives that mirror real-world goals, like recycling and planting trees. Additionally, players can vote for a real charity to receive some of their in-game currency, and Masher Media will pay actual money to the winning charity.

The business model will be subscription-based, at a price of $5.95 per month with discounts for long-term subscriptions, but Gunther said microtransactions and branded virtual merchandise will also help the site monetize. Masher Media currently employs 5 full-time employees for the game, and uses contractors for programming and art.

As with any game, the biggest factor in its success will be how fun it is. We’ll see if MyMiniPeeps can lure children to more positive gaming pastures when it launches in Fall 2010.

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Calling all entrepreneurs…

Thinking of starting a business or looking for ways to grow your recently launched firm? VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner is filled with expert advice on taking your company to the next level 

Here are a few of the most recent stories that you might have missed:

Expanding abroad? Avoid translation travesties – Even big companies can get it wrong when they fail to do their homework before launching in new markets. Localization is key – and it’s never a good idea to take shortcuts. Lingo24’s Christian Arno helps you find a qualified translator.

The ABCs of interviews (and the DEFs) – Do you know what to look for in a good candidate? Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ Eric Ries details the six key attributes of a dream employee.

Interviewing? Look for quick thinking, not ‘right answers’ – Ries continues his look at successful interviewing, noting that to discover those key attributes, you need to carefully structure the conversation. Here’s his preferred method.

Overcommunicate – even in the bad times - It’s easy to share good news with your employees, but it’s just as important to keep them in the loop when things are less than idea. Pacific Biosciences chairman and CEO Hugh Martin stresses the importance of overcommunication and details how he achieves that at his company.

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