Month: May 2007

Brilliant!

tebbo mashup slide

The Brits throw that word around a lot. But, David Tebbutt proves his authentic brilliance in this slide presentation on new technologies. The more I coach new users on adopting enterprise 2.0 tools, I realize it all begins with education. Fantastic visual presentations like this in our body of knowledge makes it so much easier. (Plus, I generally learn something from these presentations!) There are comments on David’s blog to turn this presentation into a YouTube video which could be more easily distributed around the web. I’m all for that. I hope he chooses to do it– for the good of the glorious cause, of course.

Side note: David also did a fairly entertaining podcast with Maggie Fox on her Social Media Today podcasting series. I’ve been catching up on her weekly podcasts on my trips to the gym. David’s interview had me cracking up on the treadmill. I highly recommend downloading all the Social Media Today podcasts. Maggie chooses at least one member of the Social Media Collective to interview every week. The podcasts come out on Wednesdays.

Wow– Software2007 is shaping up to be some gig

A few of our CIO customers (along with Steve P) are going to be on a few panels at the Software2007 conference in Santa Clara this week– May 8-9. Out of curiosity, I asked MR this morning for the media registration list. He sent me a list of over 100 reporters, editors, bloggers, and analysts including A-lists from every genre. I was really impressed. they’re expecting over 2,000 attendees. I had no idea the conference was so well known and widely attended. I was under the impression it was more of an insidery Valley software VC get-together. I don’t know why I thought that. Maybe because of its affiliation with sandhill.com. Now I regret not going!

Oh well, I’ll look forward to the reports, as always.

On other gig news, I got a disappointing call from Francois Gossieaux that the Enterprise 2.0 Rave was canceled. That elicited a big c’est dommage from me and much empathy for poor M. Gossieaux who was in the unfortunate position of having to call a host of influential bloggers and tell them the party failed to draw a guest list. I know they’re still working on some backup plans, so we’ll see if something can be salvaged. In the end, it shouldn’t surprise too many people. It’s a testament to the power of time-tested market research. Take your standard bell curve– Enterprise 2.0 is somewhere in the beginnings of early adoption and Francois had an unusual, innovative approach to enlighten these early adopters– therefore, statistically, about 2 people should have probably registered, which sounds about right judging from Francois’ tone. Aww, I’m just having a little fun with research, but it is true that there weren’t enough people signed up to justify the expense of holding the event, and after all, it was backed by VCs not conference organizers, so they had no problem pulling the plug.

Speaking of VCs, we announced our first round financing today. A nice $20M validation from Silicon Valley (including Foundation Capital and Hummer Winblad) that we’re onto something. I guess I can file my expense report now. 😉

Enterprise 2.0: what’s in and what’s out?

I found myself surprised that Euan Semple is a Facebook user. I asked him about it, and he says it’s not just for kids, “There are loads of my friends in Facebook and it is good at helping us be social.” he replied. And like a select few of the bloggers I follow, I have not succumbed to the Twitter addiction, but find myself a little jealous that Stowe Boyd is now a friend of John Edwards and Barack Obama if only for a few random minutes at a time.

Social media knocked me over again last week reading the reports from my fellow Enterprise Irregulars who were blogging at Sapphire– SAP’s flagship conference for its friends and fans. This screen shot of SAP’s Harmony, an internal MySpace/Linked-in of sorts, got forwarded immediately to our head of HR. We’ve been using Ning for our internal communications– which we are really having a lot of fun with, but seeing this, I realized how much more fun we could have if we customized Ning for our company– and then for our customers.

SAP's Harmony

Harmony screen courtesy Craig Cmehil

What really caught my eye last week was Stephen Danelutti’s initial attempt at drawing up a framework for enterprise 2.0. I comb the web daily for enterprise 2.0 posts and news, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone take a stab at defining what is including specifically in the definition. For instance, we probably all agree that McAfee’s SLATES is included (Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extentions, and Signals). This would include all blog, wiki, and search technology. McAfee talks a lot about predictive markets too, though. I would add mash-ups, most SaaS apps, and anything AJAX-built, no? I don’t have Dion Hinchcliffe’s gift for drawing diagrams, but I’d love to hear some input on this.