Skype and the Enterprise

June 20, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

The final morning session at Enterprise 2.0 that I attended focused on Skype and the issues its adoption raises within the Enterprise. Irwin Lazar moderated a panel of Rebecca Cavagnari, VP of Convenos, Lou Guercia, President of WebDialogs and Michael Jackson from Skype.

Skype has become the most popular communications application, with 9.2 million users logged in at any time and hundreds of millions of downloads.

The virtual workplace is here. Nemertes Research reports that 83% of enterprises reported in 2006 that they have incorporated virtual workplaces.

Skype is the first unified messaging application. And it has taken off with individuals and small businesses.
Individual employees have introduced Skype into the enterprise. Skype has developed a Skype for Business product geared to the Enterprise environment. However, adoption by the enterprise has lagged behind individual user adoption.

Nemertes researched the views of enterprises about Skype. Almost half (46%) of their respondents have a policy to block it. (Note that the policy is not universally applied.) About one in ten – mostly nonprofit organizations – actively use it. Overall, there is not a great deal of acceptance by the highest levels in the enterprise, but there is broad usage by individuals.

Corporate concerns include control of usage and security.

Lou Guercia feels that the only element missing from Skype as a unified communications platform is data sharing. His company, WebDialogs, offers a Skype web conferencing plug in under the Unyte brand name.
Skype’s Michael Jackson says that one third of Skype’s users claim that they use it in the workplace.

Rebecca Cavagnari indicated that Convenos also provides a Skype web conferencing plug in.

How do they address the challenge of acceptance by enterprises?

Michael Jackson indicated that Skype is paying attention to the concerns and issues raised by the enterprise market. As they refine the product, they are making changes to take these into account.

Rebecca Cavagnari indicated that Convenos users include a large representation of people who are based outside of the United States. And they use Skype to establish presence and communicate prior to the beginning of the web conference.

Lou Guercia indicated that the conferences that are routed through WebDialog’s Skype plugin tend to be smaller than through its other products.

Skype’s Michael Jackson points out that Skype is never positioned as a replacement for phone service. Instead, they point to the greater capabilities, including video, that Skype enables. Skype uses its own internal uasge of Skype as a testbed.

Lou Guercia feels that the biggest challenge for a consumer-based company like Skype faces is scale. As a B-to-C company, Skype does not have the support system that B-to-B customers demand. He expects that this will encourage Skype to continue to focus on individual users while peacefully co-existing with the enterprise.

Cavagnari agrees that companies that partner with Skype should not expect Skype to change its focus to the Enterprise. Consequently, the partners must rely on their own efforts to ensure that their products that use Skype meet the needs of business users.

Bottom line for Guercia, Skype partners, not Skype, will have to meet the needs of business partners.

Skype’s Michael Jackson tackled the question of interoperability. He suggested that this has not been an issue for Skype’s end users, but more of an issue for analysts.

Skype has ventured into social applications with its Skypecast initiative. This is still very much in its formative stages. The company will wait for the community to develop applications rather than, with its limited size, try to itself push into the edge applications.

Why did Convenos and WebDialog integrate Skype into their products? Cavagnari indicated that Skype presented a superior substitute for the Codec that was in their product. Gueros indicated that they incorporated Skype for branding purposes. Skype gave them a brand awareness that they could not otherwise have achieved. Since December, they have done business in 47 countries – with no sales force and just an eCommerce site.

An interesting session for me. However, there seemed to be a lack of audience engagement. In fact, I had the impression that this session was trying to answer a question that nobody had asked.

Corporate Blogging: The Ecology of Participation

June 19, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Stowe Boyd moderated a panel at Enterprise 2.0 of Anil Dash, Suw Charman, Sam Weber and Oliver Young that dealt with the challenge of corporations embracing blogging.

Suw Charman suggested that the interested question is not whether enterprises can introduce blogs (the answer is yes) but HOW they should do this. Asking whether blogs can be used in corporations is a bit like asking whether pen and paper can be used in business.

The question is what do you want to use them for. What problem do we have that blogs can solve? The answer will be different from company to company and within different groups and levels within companies. The answer comes down to what people need and want.

Internal blogs can meet the need that employees have to know their fellow workers, identify those with information they need and share information with others.

External blogs can fill the need that customers have to peer behind the curtains of the companies that they deal with. Companies can use this to build relationships with customers and to develop a presence within the community.

Blogs are like a hammer. You can build virtually anything with it. A blog can be anything you want it to be. It can put a human face on the company. Ask for customer input on new products. Provide a place for fans to find out information about the product or service. Distribute essential information to employees as an alternative to email (reducing email spam, hurray!), distributing news and background information.

Culture is the key issue in introducing blogs into a corporation. Both ensuring that the culture of blogging and the expectation of the community is understood and ensuring that the corporate culture is able to embrace these expectations and mores.

Oliver Young suggested that a recent Forrester Research study showed that the business value of blogs is still rated fairly low.

Six Apart‘s Anil Dash responded that this is not surprising given how early we are in the cycle of the development of blogs. To even get 17% is an extraordinary success.

Young suggested that part of the problem may be that too many people have unrealistic or unfocussed expectations of blogs. Consequently, it’s not surprising if they become frustrated.

One of the audience members interjected that the “Discoverability” of blogs raises their risk factor. Many corporations are wary of encouraging employees to post information because of the potential that well-intentioned writings may later cause problems.

Charman pointed out that this makes the case for a blog policy that makes it clear to employees about what is or is not acceptable. She also noted that many banks have implemented Wikis instead of blogs because Wikis have a change history.

Oliver Young noted that firms that don’t introduce corporate blogs are not risk free. It is difficult to imagine that there are any companies that do not have any employees who blog – whether the company knows it or not. So, education about social media and a blogging policy should be undertaken by all companies, even those who are not contemplating introducing corporate blogs.

Social = Me First

June 19, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Stowe Boyd focused on social applications in his session at Enterprise 2.0

Social = Me First. It sounds selfish, but there’s an important truth here.

In 1999, Stowe wrote an article in his newsletter, Message, in which he talked about a new set of software which he called “social tools: software intended to shape culture.” At the outset, many people thought the concept was “out there.” Today, it is at the core of social media.

So, what are the underpinnings of social applications?

First, the individual is the new group. The reason that we all use these tools is related to our passions, our desire to connect with people or our desire to connect with markets.

The edge dissolves the center. We, the edglings – the people who are living our lives through these technologies – are dissolving the traditional power centres and redistributing it to the community.

The notion of belonging has shifted to bottom up. I define the groups I belong to through the company and friends I choose, not because an organization has accepted me for membership.

Unique markets can be made out of the wants and needs of the community that I assemble. And this provides an opportunity for innovators.

The buddylist is the centre of the universe. I am made greater by the sum of my connections and so are my connections. And I decide who is interesting to me and what I want to share with them. This is the core idea behind all future successful social applications.

The value of the network application is based on the number of connections that it facilitates and sustains.

It’s really about discovery. Discovery is the primary abiding motivator. They are looking to discover things, places (the Third Space), people (who fill the places) and Self (at the still point of the turning world.) So, the final measurement of success in a social application is how well do you help people discover themselves.

Andrew McAfee – Enterprise 2.0: The State of the Meme

June 19, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Andrew McAfee followed David Weinberger in the keynote session at Enterprise 2.0.

McAfee coined the term Enterprise 2.0 a little over a year ago. In his presentation, he looked at the changes in the last year.

How are we doing with awareness?

Since the term was coined a little over a year ago, it has spread rapidly, finding it’s way into mainstream media and conferences like this.

The concept of social software is beginning to penetrate into corporations. This is accompanied by an awareness of the benefits of network effects as the usage increases.

Enterprises also are beginning to acknowledge the merits of freeform authoring. Users will create that which is useful to them. So, we must come to grips with the need to “get out the way” and let them do this.

One of the huge leaps forward in Enterprise 2.0 is the realization that the users should also create their own metadata. If we allow this to happen without imposing artificial structures, we will find that the information is organized in ways that reflect the users and their needs.

How about the technologies?

The toolkit is growing and overflowing with freeform, collaborative tools. Massive amounts of new offerings are being offered by both startups and established companies. There will be a winnowing out as users select the best of the set and others fall by the wayside. Messy, but good.

On the other hand, the new applications and platforms are not always as easy to use as they must be. And, the new technologies must take into account existing applications, such as email. Email is ubiquitous and meets a functional need. Enterprise 2.0 applications will be more quickly embraced if they integrate with existing applications like email.
How are we communicating results to decision makers inside organizations? We’re not doing so well with this. Case studies are still relatively rare. To build credibility inside the corporation, it will be necessary to build up a broader set of case studies, benchmarks and stories that describe the success of these tools.

McAfee cautions against attempting to justify the adoption of the tools soley in terms of ROI. Early estimates are likely to be contentious. He instead suggests that the focus should be on telling the story of what they do. This will appeal to decision makers who make their judgments on factors beyond ROI.

He concluded his presentation with a proposal to create a repository of Enterprise 2.0 efforts. This could be generated by the Enterprise 2.0 community through a Wiki. And it will provide a map of the evolution of Enterprise 2.0 that advocates and decision makers can draw on.

David Weinberger – Everything is Miscellaneous

June 19, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

David Weinberger opened Enterprise 2.0 this morning with a rapid fire overview of the thinking he lays out in his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous.

In the face of the rapid change that we have been experiencing, why aren’t we drowning in the ocean of information. The answer lies in the metadata.

The real world requires that we order things within finite, defined spaces. Think of the front page of the newspaper. Power and authority is conveyed upon the person who commands the ability to determine what goes into these spaces.

We have imported the concept of physical limitations of organization into digitization. But the digital in fact frees us from these limitations.

Key thoughts:

Leaf as many branches as you can. Information can be tagged in unlimited ways.
Messiness is a virtue. All sorts of connections that make sense to individuals are possible and good. There is no need to force these relationships and connections into a predetermined pattern.
There is no difference between clean data and metadata. When you go online, this is not so much the case anymore. With Search that draws connections between data, everything is metadata.
Unowned order: Users own the organization of the data that is meaningful and useful to them.
Take all of these things together and the user can draw meaning from data to meet their immediate needs and context. Everything is Miscellaneous.

In this new environment, authority is distributed and attributed by the community. Authority embraces fallibility. Contrast the self identification in Wikipedia of entries that require further attention or editing by the community with the self declared indisputable authority of traditional media like the New York Times or the Encyclopedia Britannica. By acknowledging fallibility, by acknowledging mistakes, authority is actually enhanced.

The Future of Entertainment – the people formerly known as the audience

May 30, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

I ended my mesh day with a panel of McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves, Amber MacArthur and Ethan Kaplan moderated by Jian Gomeshi.

Jian Gomeshi: Two Sams come to mind. Sam Sniderman or Sam the Record Man as we know him. It was announced this morning that the flagship store of the once iconic Sam the Record Man store will be closing. The end of an era. Things have changed.

So, what’s the biggest change in the last 12 months that will affect the future of entertainment.

Ethan Kaplan: A new focus on the fact that things will not return to the way things were in the pre Napster era. There’s a renewed effort to create a new avenue for the music industry. Different value propositions must be created that don’t try to undermine the direct relationship between the fans and access to the music.

Amber MacArthur: Last year, she was at this conference as a broadcaster at G4Tech TV. This year as a blogger and podcaster at CITY TV. This is an indicator of the trend of movement from the traditional broadcast media to the new online media.

Jain Gomeshi: How valid is the notion that the audience of today is more actively engaged than the audience of yesterday? Are people investing more or less now in their entertainment?

Amber MacArthur: People are dividing their attention. So the length of video clips is decreasing. They also seem to jump ship between things quickly. Facebook is big today. But will it still be big in six months?

Ethan Kaplan: Passive acceptance and passive consumption was a fiction that was maintained by the major media companies. It was driven by hubris. And the notion has collapsed on itself. What’s really happened is that content has become agnostic to representation. There’s a lack of differentiation between the mode of the content. Now fans are more focused on the agent that is originating the content.

Jian Gomeshi: Does the ease of acquiring art, music devalue it or make it more disposable?

Amber MacArthur: Content is available to a global audience. You should try to get your content in front of as many people as you can around the world and then figure out how to derive revenue from it.

McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves: The social network that have grown up around artists show that fans really value those artists.

Jian Gomeshi: How do you get people attached to an artist?

Ethan Kaplan: We’re to the point where we have to embrace the notion that the duplicability of the content and the ready availability of the content has made it necessary to think creatively about how to market the content. Taking Michael Buble, for example. You must treat him as a personality and then market the record as an extension of the personality. The campaign began six months beforehand. No flash Websites. Have a blog friendly Website. Then begin to publish creative elements, such as photos, in the lead up to the release of the record. Treat the release of the record as an event.

Jian Gomeshi: How do you differentiate small, new artists?

McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves: Bloggers have shown that one person with a computer can build an audience. Use the viral tools to assemble an audience anywhere that people gather. Artists can build an audience by using the social networking sites.

Jian Gomeshi: Have the responsiblities of audiences changed?

Amber MacArthur: Artists must now know their audiences likes and anticipate them and respond to them. Tom Green has reinvented himself by actively engaging directly with his audience through his blog and his nightly online program.

Michael Geist: What about Digital Rights Management software?

Ethan Kaplan: DRM is a very small piece of a larger problem, the fact that what you have today is the availablity of both for free and for pay content. The larger issue is how to make sure that artists are compensated along a long value chain that includes any reproduction device.

McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves: The DRM genie is out of the bottle. What’s going on is a little like the war on drugs.

Barbarians at the Gate: New Media and Old Media

May 30, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

The afternoon sessions of mesh kicked off with a panel of Rachel Sklar, Cynthia Brumfield, and Loren Feldman moderated by Mark Evans.

Mark Evans: Picking up on Mike Arrington’s session … print newspapers seem to be in trouble. Is the San Francisco Chronicle staff layoff an isolated incident or a sign of something broader?

Rachel Sklar: It’s a sign of a bigger trend. But in every big change, there are opportunities. So for people who are creative, it’s an amazing opportunity. Look for how newspapers adapt. The good ones will be able to do this.

Mark Evans: Are newspapers prepared for change or are they merely scrambling for anything that sticks?

Rachel Sklar: Many of them are scrambling. You can see this as they reach out for new people who can do many things. But at the same time, they are laying off many of their elder statesmen, the people who have been there, done that and seen the evolution. The really smart media will be the ones that recognize this strength and preserve it.

Mark Evans: How about the broadcasters? Are they more willing to experiment and get ahead of the game?

Cynthia Brumfeld: Jumping into the Internet doesn’t really cost broadcasters a lot. They already have the video technology and the advertising relationships. However, the traditional broadcasters are losing audiences to cable as well as online. And they’re beginning to look like the dinosaurs of the industry.

Looking at newspapers. Their dependence on revenues from subscriptions to physical distribution of products contributes to their vulnerability to the online media. To the extent that you are dependent upon subscriptions for physical product, you’ll be hurt more by the Internet.

Loren Feldman: The Internet is not just little TV. There’s room for both. “You won’t watch people like me on TV. I do 60-90 second bits.”

Mark Evans: How about the impact of Google and RSS feeds? How do traditional media deal with these?

Rachel Sklar: “I don’t really use RSS. I don’t admit that often. I work hard on my own site and it’s presentation.” Computers don’t have the same feel as tangible media. Working with your computer is a much more solitary experience.

Cynthia Brumfeld: Traditional media will go the way of the dinosaurs. She uses the example of her parents who gave up a newspaper subscription because they could now access it online. The Internet has opened up the geographic reach of what you can reach and watch. Google adds to this. Suddenly, there’s not only one game in town. There’s twenty newspapers, twenty blogs – a multitude of sources that are immediately available.

Question: How will ownership of the pipes influence the shape of new media?

Loren Feldman: “As long as my stuff gets out, I don’t care who, how, what. Just get it out.”

Cynthia Brumfeld: The phone companies led the charge in the U.S. for tiered access. It’s too late. That train has left the station. Carriers will find a way to charge people more for access.

Mark Evans: Does that make the newspaper industry more at risk because they don’t own any pipes?

Cynthia Brumfeld: If Comcast loses subscribers to other media, it can charge its remaining subscribers more to make up for that loss. Newspapers can’t do this.

Question: Do you see your content being used differently by younger generations?

Loren Feldman: We’re in an attention economy. My videos rarely go over 2 minutes. I think that time will decrease to hold onto the attention of a younger generation.

Cynthia Brumfeld: I watch my teenage daughter and her friends. And it seems to me that they stay within fairly limited spaces. MySpace, then FaceBook. They don’t cruise. They don’t explore broadly. They stay within the area that is occupied by their peer group. And that puts limits on the number of different sources demanding their attention. Their world has shrunk as opposed to expanding.

Loren Feldman: It’s ironic. It’s a throwback to AOL.

Rachel Sklar: Quality and ingenuity are factors. Look at Harry Potter. The release of the final book will command and hold attention broadly when it is released.

Loren Feldman: Newspapers will be here in 200 years. People are tactile. They like to touch and hold information. It’s instant. It’s accessible. And remember, lots of people don’t have computers. I like reading a newspaper when I’m in a diner. I don’t want to sit there with a computer. To save themselves, newspapers have to change their content. They won’t be about breaking news. They’ll be about in depth analysis.

Question: What advice would you provide to old media in managing their concept of old media against the user generated concept of popularity.

Rachel Sklar: There’s value in being right. I’d rather be right than first (see Mike Arrington). Being right confers credibility. Every provider determines what resources to put into fact checking and background research.

Loren Feldman. The New York Times shouldn’t worry about things like Wikipedia or Digg. They are a joke.

Cynthia Brumfeld: One of the reasons newspapers were so blind-sided was because they didn’t think that competition was possible. Hubris was one of the big downfalls of traditional media.

Loren Feldman: The one hustler – a Drudge or an Arrington – is a greater threat to traditional media. Because they don’t have the overhead and they are able to build quickly. And once established, the leads and tips come to them.

Question: How do you get traditional journalists to prepare to be online?

Loren Feldman: Just tell them that they won’t have anything to eat.

Cynthia Brumfeld: I’d be very surprised if you had to convince any traditional journalists any longer about the value of being online.

Rachel Sklar: Teach them how to check their Technorati stats. Ego is a good motivator.

Mike Arrington brings TechCrunch to mesh

May 30, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

The mesh conference kicked off with a keynote conversation between TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington and mesh co-founder Mathew Ingram.

Some things that stuck with me:

“I know that when I write a post, it’s far better to be first than to be second. Because if I’m first, I don’t have to be witty, intelligent, insightful. I just have to be first.”
The best thing that traditional journalists can do is to start wrting their own blogs and to build their own brands. This will protect them against downsizing in traditional media.
On Feedback: There’s a discussion on TechCrunch everyday. Arrington gets to set the discussion topic and have first say. Then he watches the comments flow in. He says that he finds the comments to be more interesting than what he has to say.
Arrington admits that some of the comments get under his skin. And he enters into the conversation, sometimes with some heat.
In fact, we got a real like illustration of this. Ted Murphy of Pay Per Post is attending mesh. He tried to ask Arrington a question. “How’d he get in here?” replied Arrington, who then proceeded to tell the crowd how he feels about Pay Per Post. Pointing to Murphy, Arrington said, “he’s the most evil person in this room.”
The future of social networking sites? Three dimensional. Facebook is here to stay. But they will also incorporate elements of the three dimensional experience of Second Life. The future of MySpace is less certain. They could blow it and do a “Friendster.”
If you are an entrepreneur thinking of your own startup, you should be thinking of the barriers to entry that will prevent others from following you in and competing with you. In addition to the traditional barrier of superior technology, network effects can provide a substantial barrier to entry. The advantage of developing popularity and a large community of users can make it very difficult for others to follow you in. So, new startups should be looking at having either a technology edge or taking advantage of the network effect.
The future of TechCrunch? Video? Audio? Arrington feels that rich media is difficult to create. It takes time to record, schedule, edit and post. It’s also harder to consume. So, right now, text will remain an important part of what Arrington does.