Blog Posts

Venture Capital Dispatch

An inside look from VentureWire at high-tech start-ups and their investors - Wall Street Journal

This year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference offers further evidence that large companies are getting serious about adopting the kinds of online collaboration tools that many of their employees use routinely in their personal lives.... Full Article.

In 2001, as the dot.com boom turned to bust, CEO John Chambers of Cisco saw a massive $460 billion of Cisco's overall stock market value evaporate before his eyes. Game over? Not really. At that moment, Chambers started a reinvention of the company — from a "cowboy" mentality where people worked in silos to a collaborative approach. Full article.

Dion Hinchcliffe in a recent article in ZDNet discusses - What if customers were often the best people to help other customers? That’s the basic premise of an emerging class of enterprise software usually referred to these days as “Social CRM” and which I covered in some detail late last year.

Full article - Social CRM

http://www.informationweek.com/;jsessionid=JRMNOWU4SNZJHQE1GHPSKH4ATMY32JVN

By James Manyika, Kara Sprague and Lareina Yee - McKinsey&Company

Knowledge workers fuel innovation and growth, yet the nature of knowledge work remains poorly understood—as do the ways to improve its effectiveness. The heart of what knowledge workers do on the job is collaborate, which in the broadest terms means they interact to solve problems, serve customers, engage with partners, and nurture new ideas.

Full Article

The November McKinsey Quarterly interviews Andrew McAfee.

Noted scholar, blogger and Twitterer Andrew MCafee has just released his first book  "Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges" .

A recent interview provides a very good insight into the contents and direction of this much anticipated book.

A recent artcile by by Steven Davy, discusses how US Politicians are figuring out what social media technologies like blogs, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have to offer: direct access to voters. More than ever before, they can bypass the professional press and deliver an uncensored, unfiltered -- and unchecked -- messages.

This certainly has relevance to the Australian political scene - the full article

The key: Make it easier for them to leave

By ELIZABETH CRAIG, JOHN R. KIMBERLY AND PETER CHEESE

Determined to retain your most talented executives? Well, here's some counterintuitive advice: The best way to keep them from leaving is to prepare them to do just that. - Wall Street Journal

Social Business Software leader Jive Software announced a new round of funding today.

Here is the press release:

Funding To Drive Global Expansion and Rapid Innovation

Portland, OR - October 20, 2009

Company News

• Jive, the Social Business Software leader, today announced that it has received $12 million from Sequoia Capital in its Series B round of funding. Sequoia also funded Jive's Series A round of funding in August 2007.
• Jive will use the proceeds to increase its product footprint through new innovation and product development, expand its partner ecosystem, grow its sales and customer support teams, and to further capitalize on its market momentum.
• In Q3 2009, Jive further expanded its market momentum with more than 100% revenue growth as compared to Q3 2008 -- Jive's fourth straight quarter of record revenue growth -- and the company maintained its financial profitability.
• The funding comes in the wake of the company's most significant period of innovation and growth since its inception in 2001.
  • During the first nine months of 2009, Jive added a number of large enterprise customers, including Cricket Wireless, Experian, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), Lufthansa, McAfee, the National Journal Group's 3121, Premier Farnell, Swiss Re, and Toshiba American Business Solutions.
  • Jive delivered several new products in 2009. In just the past 30 days, Jive has announced Jive Market Engagement, a new solution that combines the power of social media monitoring with Social Business Software, and Jive Connects, a series of modules that will enable organizations to surface content and activities from almost any content management system (CMS) inside Jive Social Business Software (SBS).

Commentary

• "Enterprises want to accelerate collaboration efforts by embracing Social Business Software. The vast majority of employees have already been exposed to social software through the consumer experience, dramatically improving the rate of adoption," said Jim Goetz, Partner, Sequoia Capital. "With Jive's experienced management team, visionary product strategy and customer success, it is poised to lead the corporate opportunity and to transform how work gets done in the global enterprise."
• "Jive Software has been keenly focused on changing the way enterprises look at collaboration, networking and community building to drive better business results - and we're ready to take it to the next level," said Dave Hersh, CEO of Jive Software. "Sequoia has been an ideal partner to guide us on a solid course to execute on our market opportunities and to provide us the resources to build for future growth."

Article from Mckinsey by Jacques Bughin, Director Brussels Office

A recent article by Jake Hird listed some really interesting social media statistics -

• Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.*
• 80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.
• Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week.
• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people... In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
• Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.
• The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
• It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
• The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*
• According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
• The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.
• Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
• Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
• Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.

The level of activity in the health industry is growing rapidly in the US but slowly in Australia. This a promotional piece for the Health Care New Media Conference.

A major part of the transistion to the Obama administration was the formation of TIGR to bring together groups, individuals and industry veterans to deliver new technology to the new goverment. Although the transistion is complete the technology continues and forms the basis for the transparency that the new administration is delivering. The following is an overview of TIGR and what it expects to deliver.

We have mentioned Lynda Gratton - Professor of Management at the London School of Business - work and books several times in the past. Lynda has published a new book called "Glow" which is a follow on to her last book "Hotspots" which looked at many global organisations to uncover hot spots of endeavour and then examined how these hot spots could be developed. "Glow" delves into how the individual can develop and provide meaningful input into an organisation.

This is a link to an advertisement for the book which also provides a 20% discount if you wish to purchase.