Business Two Zero

Two weeks ago I posted about a very “web 1.0″ style PDF twitter guide. I actually think this concept of microblogging short messages, somewhere between IM and email as a means of team communication and collaboration is going to become increasingly important in business.  Just like with particular email services like Hotmail, although Twitter might be the best known example at the moment, there will be many services to choose from, and many software providers including the concept in their collaboration platforms.

Laura Fitton runs Pistachio Consulting, a company that specialises in advising companies on this new trend. On her website she says:

“‘Microblogging’ is the industry standard term for applications like Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku, but many see it as inaccurate and too ‘inside baseball.’ We prefer ‘microsharing’ which reflects the nature a little more accurately, and isn’t as off-putting to ‘non web2.0′”

I definitely agree enterprise microsharing is a better description. She’s just completed a comparison of 20 (yes 20!) tools and services. You can download the comparison as a PDF, or read it on the Srcribd document sharing service (which in itself is well worth going to have a look at as well):

Enterprise Micro Sharing Tools Comparison 11032008

Some of the tools mentioned in this report could be helping your team collaborate better for little or no cost, except the time involved to sign people up, and learn how to best use them. You should definitely investigate microsharing, and if you need any help or advice - just ask here.

Just as I was writing this I noticed a new service called Tweetworks that apparently started less than 3 weeks ago out of Boston.  This could add useful public and private group functionality to Twitter - I’ll be checking it out in the coming weeks. 

For some time we’ve planned to hook CreativeCoffee Club up with a University in London, as well as wanting to get away fro the Height’s Bar at the St. Georges. The Heights Bar has a great view, and means you can regularly rub shoulders with BBC luminaries and producers, but the coffee is lousy and the service even worse. Open Coffee and Seedcamp just hooked up with UCL, and since this is my old university I made contact with UCL Advances. This is the department with a stated aim to stimulate collaboration among researchers, business and investors with an aim to drive innovations that benefit society and the economy - a perfect fit for what CCC is trying to achieve, and with their help we hope to connect with some interesting people. They’ll be promoting what we do in their e newsletter.

I’ve checked out the two places they offered us as a venue, and I’ve decided we’ll start at the relatively new Print Room Café, run by the UCL Union. It’s in the centre of the campus, but easy to find, with good coffee and food, some comfortable sofas and even tables outside in the courtyard if we’re still there next spring. We’ll move there from tomorrow, 12 November from 10:00 to 12:00 and will be there every other week alternating with CCC Leicester as usual.

From the South side of UCL’s campus, which runs along Torrington Place opposite Waterstones, go along Malet Place, passing the new engineering building on your left and under some construction. Carry on to the end of Malet Place, through the arch in to a courtyard. As you walk down Malet Place, you’ll see the Print Room Café through the arch on the other side of the courtyard. You won’t need to go through any security to get in to the campus or the café, and the natives are friendly. If you really need it, here is their map, but I have to say it’s confusing. The café is in the South Wing marked by a coffee cup near the South Junction entrance. In any case, I’ll be there with my mobile switched on (07715 159423) for anyone who gets lost.

Just yesterday (I’m on US Mountain Time, even if my blog isn’t) I was speaking In Zurich at the first SOMESSO conference. I really enjoyed it, and I’ll say more about the content another time. It was a great event in a quality venue (Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute), with classy food, top class audio visual resources, in stylish surroundings, but guess what? - the conference WiFI service failed several times during the show. Now as you know, I’ve blogged about this topic before and Zoli, Ben Kepes and others have picked up on the subject. Now Ben has suggested the Decent Access Initiative. I’m almost going all Networky (pun very definitely intended) and saying “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!”

We have to demand decent WiFi access from our technology conferences. I realize it’s not easy. I realize it’s not cheap. I realize that often it’s provided by the venue or the hotel and you have to haggle a service level with them. Maybe the problem is that these places cater for generic conferences, and don’t realize the extra strain on bandwidth that a bunch of twitter happy, live blogging, video streaming tech conference goers will put on your network infrastructure. But I know it can be done well - I’ve seen it at Ismael’s Office 2.0 Conference. You lose so much value without WiFi. Every conference now has an unofficial Twitter back channel, as well as live blogging, and occasionally live streaming video. I “attended” a London Social Media Camp recently, via Joanne Jacobs Apple Mac webcam - it was awesome to be able to dip in for some of the sessions in between family commitments. I got some great insights from following the Web 2,0 Expo in Berlin a week or so ago. So when WiFi works it provides great feedback for the conference organizers, adds value, content and new conversations for the attendees, and broadens the reach of the conference, allowing people to watch or get a flavour of the show from afar. When it doesn’t - it sucks.

So, please join us in the Decent Access Initiative, and always say DAI to our conference organizers.

Update: I completely forgot to mention that my friend Luis Saurez picked up on the topic too in one of his 3 excellent posts on the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin (sorry Luis!). I know he’s planning to post on the topic again - he gets just as angry as me about it.

The ”micro-blogging” service Twitter is heading towards the mainstream as a means to connect with a network of people you trust and admire for advice, and as a source of information.   It gets mentioned on the BBC, or even Fox News, but there are still plenty in the business community, or even the traditional IT and Communications communities who need some help in understanding what it really is and why it’s useful.  I was presenting to 60 people at a CMA event last week, and less than 10 hands went up when I asked who knew Twitter. I’ve been meaning for sometime to write some form of guide, but now one of my twitter friends has written one, so I don’t have to.

As a quick introduction, Wikipedia says:

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”

Twitter’s own website “blurb” says the New York Times calls Twitter “one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet.” TIME Magazine says, “Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app,” and Newsweek noted that “Suddenly, it seems as though all the world’s a-twitter.”

Dennis Howlett, over on IT Counts has said:

“Laura Fitton has written extensively about this based on her own experiences. When I was in Boston earlier in the month we met and were looking for restaurant recommendations. She Tweeted her 5,300 person network and within a minute, four recommendations came back. Voila! This may sound like a trivial example but I see it repeated over and over every day. Everything from “How do I answer this issue?” to “Help, I’m in trouble!” turn up and within minutes, people receive useful responses, often in the ‘direct message’ channel cof their respective networks. “

My friend Luke Razzell has just written an 11 page paper, which you can download here. The paper explains Twitter, with several examples, like Dennis’s above, of how you can get value from the service and your Twitter friends. It has good quotes, and plenty of links. It’s provided in PDF form to make it easy for you to use the web 1.0 method of emailing it to your friends and work colleagues, or even printing it out as a handout. It’s provided under the Creative Commons share alike licence, so feel free to share and distribute it as much as you like, providing you attribute Luke as described in the terms.

I wouldn’t suggest that your company has a “Twitter strategy” in the way that a few years ago you wouldn’t have had a strategy for a particular brand of email service. However, l do think that plenty of products will be incorporating the Twitter concept, which falls somewhere between Instant Messaging and email, and has enormous potential as a collaboration tool. SocialText have incorporated the approach with Social Signals, and it’s already in the roadmap for our product. I’d be very interested to hear about people’s experiences with Twitter and use of Luke’s guide.

Over the last few days I’ve been watching a frustrated twitter stream from presenters and attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. Apparently there has been plenty of WiFi downtime. You would think an organization like O’Reilly, who actually own the web 2.0 brand when it comes to running conferences, would make sure that the twitter crowd (or tweeple) and the blogging fraternity were well served with access and bandwidth. Sadly this is the norm for almost every technology conference I’ve attended in the last year or more. Most recently at last week’s SAP TechEd 2008 in Berlin there were several periods where the WiFi service disappeared, frustrating the bloggers, analysts and press. There was good service with direct wire connections in the blogger and press rooms, but being able to connect from anywhere is essential, both for the people present, and for those of us watching vicariously. For example this morning I could see JP Rangaswami’s slides that had been loaded up in advance of his session “Web 2.0 vs. the Water Cooler: How Web 2.0 Has Changed the Way We Communicate at Work”. Although I wasn’t there, I was able to follow the #w2eb twitter stream while working in a café in Broadwick Street, Soho and get live commentary from people like @elsua, @elsuacon, @frogpond and @lisaharris. Thank heaven it was working today!

The only conference that has got it right that I’ve attended, spoken at or read about in the last 3 years is Ismael Ghalimi’s Office 2.0 Conference. Since the whole premise of the show is to live in the cloud for your office productivity and computing needs, it is logical that everyone attending would want to connect their laptop, netbook, BlackBerry or iPhone to record the event, so WiFi was top priority. In the main conference room there were WiFi repeater boxes on 5 foot stands at intervals down both sides of the room, and the same sort of set up covered all other presentation rooms and meeting areas. The conference was supplied with 40Mbs of bandwidth by laser connection from the conference hotel’s roof. The whole of this was organized, I understand, by Swiscom’s events division. The result - perfect WiFi that worked for everybody from everywhere throughout the event.

But that’s not all - how many conferences have you been to where the sharp guys and gals get in the room early and are connected in corners, or near walls to the few power points available? With Ismael’s conference there were power blocks wired at intervals along almost every row of the conference room. It was always easy to plug in and get power. (By the way, when is battery technology going to make the leaps and bounds that processor speed and memory has done over the last few decades? Maybe the subject of another post sometime!)

So a big shout for Ismael, and a big request for O’Reilly and other technology conference organizers to match up to his standard!

I’ve just arrived back from a very enjoyable 3 days in Berlin at SAP’s TechEd 2008 conference. The theme was “Connect, Collaborate, Co-innovate” and I could see plenty of connections, some good examples of collaboration, and one stand-out example of co-innovation (called ESME - more on that in a later post). It started with Community Day, a multi-threaded not quite “unconference” with sessions for the SAP Developer Network and the Business Process eXpert communities. I mostly followed the BPX oriented track and was struck by the quality of the people presenting, and the BPM execution tool project Galaxy that SAP has on offer. Craig Cmehill organizing for SDN, and Marilyn Pratt steering the BPX crowd did a great job of putting together a good program on the first day, as well as organizing, respectively, Tuesday’s hackers night and the first Process Design Slam. The Slam was, effectively, a business game built around dropping an egg safely from a great height with a limited set of materials to help cushion the fall - great fun, although my team was one of the many who cracked under pressure.

Last week, because of the current economic crisis, SAP implemented a series of cost saving measures including a headcount freeze, limits on travel expenses for internal meetings, and certain projects being put on hold. Speaking to Zia Yusuf, SAP’s Executive VP in charge of the platform ecosystem, he told me, with some feeling, what it was now like to be travelling in economy seat 57E - the cuts being shared across all levels of the company. I agree with him that the cost cutting is obviously the right thing to do, but he recognizes that they will be criticised from many directions - some saying this is a corporate knee jerk reaction in panic, while others will think this is a necessary wake up call which will address some of the waste that goes on inside a company the size of SAP. Personally, I hope some resources get reallocated internally to things like support of SDN and BPX, because there is such good work going on there.

Some of that cost saving and panic showed through on that first community day, where there were some notable absences of people who hadn’t travelled across the Atlantic, the dropping of “giveaways” that had been handed out in the Las Vegas version of the event, and a number of technical difficulties when PCs wouldn’t connect to projectors properly. That’s not like the slick, professional SAP we are used to at all. Sig Rinde and I noticed that, although there were a lot more senior SAPpers involved handling the somewhat nervous introductions at the start of the day, Craig Cmehill shone as the real leader on stage.

Zia’s introduction to the main conference on Tuesday highlighted some very impressive statistics - 50% of the world’s business transactions touch an SAP system somewhere, 1000 people join the SAP community each day, the conference has 308 sessions, is being attended by 4,500 people from 32 countries and 750 companies, including 32 partners. He noted that the SDN and BPX communities are democratizing innovation. The communities have 1.4 million members, who have asked 1 million questions in the forums, and created 4 million posts. That’s quite a community, and the SAP team should be proud.

The main keynote session from Leo Apotheker, SAP’s Co-CEO, highlighted his sales oriented style compared to outgoing Henning Kagermann’s studied, engineering approach from previous events. It was an entertaining presentation, but I was underwhelmed by the lack of content or new announcements. There were some good customer case study examples - Asian Paints transforming itself from just being a commodity paint manufacturer to an end to end supplier of interior decorating services , or Hugo Boss catching up with the likes of Zara in the fashion industry, using technology and rapid feedback systems to move from 4 collections a year to 52. SAP have a strong story, but it seems mostly incremental enhancements and more of the same. Because I’m particularly interested in Software as a Service, there was one thing that stood out for me. At TechEd 2006 in Amsterdam there was a fair amount of airtime given to what was then code named A1S. In 2007 in Munich, what had become Business ByDesign was a key component in the strategy for winning new names for SAP, and we had separate roundtable sessions on the product, and with key customers. In this year’s keynote Business ByDesign appeared on one architectural slide diagram at the end of Leo’s pitch, but wasn’t even mentioned in the words. In a subsequent press and blogger conference, when asked about the product, Leo gave a primarily political sounding answer saying as little as possible and referring the questioner to announcements earlier in the year, and that there was no change. If I was a Business ByDesign customer or partner, I would be pretty worried by the lack of comment in the current strategy vision or compared to previous events. 

Two very interesting initiatives mentioned, that I’ll be writing some more about, are the SAP EcoHub and their collaboration with Innocentive to provide the SAP Innovation and Technology Pavilion. The former is an Amazon style marketplace for SAP applications - that sounds promising. The latter is different kind of marketplace where SAP Ecosystem members - customers, partners and the SAP organization itself- can post challenges and seek help along with their budget price for delivering whatever is required. Partners or individuals can then connect and make money providing solutions or expertise.  You can also check out videos from the whole event to see some of what you missed.

Lastly, a bit of fun. Wednesday evening culminated in a Steve Winwood concert in the main hall. Now I’m a fan, so this was a real highlight for me. However, considering that the vast majority of the audience were just SAP related guys and gals of varying ages who may or may not have even heard of Steve Winwood, remember Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, or Blind Faith, he did a fantastic job. There was much dancing in the aisles and down front of stage, and I don’t know anyone who didn’t have a really great time. He played early stuff, including a particular favourite of mine (Can’t Find My Way Home from Blind Faith), to please the crowd mixed in with his current Nine Lives album. It was awesome. Particular thanks need to go to Mike Prosceno of SAP, who as well as doing a superb job of organizing the Blogger thread in the conference, managed to get us access to the VIP area down the front.

Back on Wednesday 1 October we had a very successful London Wiki Wednesday meeting, combined with The British Computer Society’s London North Branch meeting . It was an interesting mixture of an audience - a full report to follow shortly. I’m pleased to note that we just seem to have continued the successful run of meetings from last year and the long break hasn’t made much difference. Initially we will be meeting once every two months until the community wants to increase the frequency.

I am delighted to announce that we have a great sponsor and a cool venue agreed for the next meeting, which will be special and the start of something new. The next London Wiki Wednesday will combine with a number of other meetups to become the first meeting of the Network of Networks. This is intended to be a regular, quarterly meeting connecting together London and South East based meetups like LWW, Mobile Mondays, Creative Coffee Club, Tuttle Club/London Social Media Cafe, London Girl Geek Dinners and any others who want to join us. The plan is to meet regularly, building up to a major “TED” style conference sometime in 2009.

For the first meeting we have a great sponsor - NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), at their London HQ - NESTA, 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE. Plough Place is located between Fetter Lane and New Fetter Lane. Nearest tubes are Chancery Lane and Farringdon. It will be on Thursday (not a Wednesday - sorry Ross!) 27 November. As well as being on a non-Wednesday, we will be starting a little earlier than usual at 16:00 going until 20:00. The focus of the meeting will be on the networking, but we’ll still have good content too. For the moment, please sign up on the wiki as usual, and look out for full details and the agenda soon.

Here in the Bloggers Room at SAP TechEd 2008, the Windows users (of which I am one) are consigned to one end of the room. We have to take regular abuse from the Mac fanboys. As you can see, the score is Apple Mac 8 Windows based PCs 3. In the blog world we M$ types appear to be a dying breed.

I’m just completing my first week of living with my new BlackBerry and my conclusion, particular if your phone is for business or heavy email use, is a resounding “go for Bold”! Let me explain why.

In the world of web 2.0, social media experts and Stowe Boyd’s edglings that I inhabit, I’m surrounded by Apple Mac fanboys who love their iPhones. I’ve got 2 kids trying to convince me to switch the family from Vodafone to O² so they can get them. Consequently, over the last few months, I’ve been dropping in to every Apple Store, O² shop or Carphone Warehouse that I pass to have a play with the iPhone. I’ve been a BlackBerry user for some while, first with an 8700, and for the last 18 months with a BlackBerry Curve 8310. I love the simplicity and intelligence of the BlackBerry OS, where the thing you generally want to do next is only a click or a few clicks away. I use my phone for email, sms and twitter every day, as well as regularly using it for note taking on the road or in meetings where I don’t want to open my (Sony Vaio/Windows XP) laptop. One of my worries over the iPhone was whether I would get on with the QWERTY touch virtual keyboard. Although friends told me it would take a few days to get used to it, and then it would be fine, others told me it was worth it for the other iPhone benefits. I practiced a lot in the stores, and wasn’t convinced. I watched the early videos on YouTube comparing iPhone vs Bold, and decided to take the plunge. Here are my thoughts so far.

In terms of size, the BlackBerry Bold is 1mm shorter than the iPhone, but 4mm wider and 2-3mm thicker. In the hand, you notice the extra width, but for me there isn’t a lot in it. It’s bigger than a BB 8300, but almost the same size as an 8800 (same length and width, but 1mm thicker). It’s slightly lighter than the iPhone and the black and silver echoes its look. The black leather effect back adds style, and it certainly looks very cool, in my opinion. In terms of feel and build quality it’s top notch.

For me the slightly extra width turns in to an advantage, because it is one of the factors that makes the keyboard superb. The keys feel great, and tapping out text is smooth and easy. This device allows fast thumb typing and is perfectly practical for long notes or emails, a big advantage over the iPhone touch keyboard. It doesn’t have a touch screen, but the trackball and navigation work well.

The display is absolutely awesome. It has the same 480×320 resolution as the iPhone, but is smaller. However, photos, and particularly videos look exceptional. Showing video side by side with the iPhone, I actually preferred the Bold although it is a close thing - the iPhone’s screen is superb too. Compared to the Curve, reading emails or SMS is a big step up, and the overall interface has been improved with lots of minor tweaks and enhancements. It’s easy to configure the home screen with the 5 applications you use the most, and the rest can be organized on the application menu or in folders. Take a look at this CrackBerry hands on tour on YouTube to get a feel for how the OS works.

The one area where the iPhone is ahead is web browsing. I wish all PDAs and smartphones could be as good, with that multi-touch screen approach to zooming and moving around. On most other phones, like my Curve, I’ve never actually bothered to surf from the phone, as the experience is too painful. The Bold browser is actually a big leap up on the Curve or anything else I’ve used before. The home screen lets you easily type a URL, go to a bookmark, or search Google, Wikipedia or Dictionary.com. In a page it’s easy to zoom in and out using keyboard shortcuts or menus, and move around with the trackball. If there is a phone number on the page, with the BlackBerry OS you can call it with 2 clicks. The browser is a long way from perfect but it works, aided by the high quality screen. I’ve used it regularly all week, for example yesterday searching for the correct courier address for a college in Cairo whilst at my local DHL office, where they were telling me the postcode didn’t exist - I wouldn’t have bothered trying on the curve. I can live with it, and hope that RIM improve things over time.

Both devices have 3G, Quad-band, EDGE, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, and USB connection. They can both handle multiple email accounts, PIM functions, and integration with desktop office applications. The iPhone has 8 or 16Gb storage, whereas the Bold has 1Gb and a micro SD slot. Both can sync with iTunes, and do a great job of handling multi-media files, although the Bold handles more media file types. Both have a 2 megapixel camera with geotagging.

Here are some things the Bold can do, which the iPhone can’t:
• The camera has a flash
• It has a video camera
• You get Documents to Go, so you can edit doc, xls and ppt files, not just view them
• It records voice notes as standard
• View all email accounts in one inbox
• You can swap in a spare battery if you need to
• Use cut and paste - this, for me, is a very big one, and I wouldn’t be without it.

On battery life, there is a potential issue, where you’ll probably need to charge the Bold at the end of each day. My Curve and 8700 would last for a few days, but all the extra functions drain the battery somewhat. On paper the iPhone has more talk time than the Bold. However, looking around the various forums, it looks like both the Bold and the iPhone suffer from the same problem - searching for wifi or a good 3G signal sucks the life from the battery quite quickly, particularly in bad signal areas. I’m not turning off 3G (which would be silly!), but I’ve improved things by turning off wifi and Bluetooth till I need them, and reduced the configurable backlight by 50% (which doesn’t make much practical difference to viewing). That has all helped.

One minor criticism of Vodafone here in the UK. Viewing the various YouTube first impression videos in the US and Canada, it looks like they give you the proper BlackBerry pouch with belt clip in the box. Over here in the UK, they are a little more cheapskate, and you only get the BlackBerry sleeve. I must add, though, that Vodafone’s technical support is excellent, and they have a good forum, with a fast turnaround on answers from both their team and the community.

So for my usage, with a heavy emphasis on using mail, note taking, and the PDA functions, the Bold wins hands down. I’ve added TwitterBerry, so I can make sure I keep more in touch with my twitter community on the run. Put all that together , and I’m very happy wandering around town showing off my new toy.

Following the “rebirth” of London Wiki Wednesday last month, from this point onwards we plan to hold a meeting once every two months. The next meeting will be jointly sponsored by BearingPoint and The British Computer Society, and hosted by The British Computer Society on 1st October 2008 at their Covent Garden Office - my thanks to Andrea Rindler of BearinPoint and Dalim Basu of BCS for the venue, food, beer and wine.

The address for event is BCS, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Nearest Tube is either Covent Garden or Charing Cross (and here it is on Google Map). This event will be strictly limited to 45 people because of space constraints, so sign up on the wiki page on a first come first served basis. As usual, everyone who wants to speak will be allowed 5 minutes on a wiki related topic of their choice. At the last meeting it was decided that we start this meeting with a discussion about the rise of Microsoft SharePoint as a social networking solution in the corporate environment. A number of people are seeing corporate IT wishing to adopt the SharePoint “toolkit”, when simpler, cheaper, or off the shelf solutions might provide quicker results. I’ve got strong views on this, and I’m sure we’ll see some lively discussion.

As of today we already have 17 attendees booked on to the event wiki. I look forward to seeing you there.  As usual, if you are interested in sponsoring or hosting a future event, please contact me.