AideRSS unveils new recommendation engine at DemoCampToronto14

Do you have enough time every day to sift through all the posts on all of the blogs and newsfeeds that you’ve subscribed to? I don’t.

AideRSS offers a solution for newsfeed overflow. It filters your newsfeeds and presents you with a feed of only the most highly rated articles culled from all of your subscriptions. You can view this on the AideRSS site or import the feeds filtered by AideRSS into the FeedReader of your choice. The AideRSS site supports the most popular readers, including Google Reader, Bloglines, NewGator and others.

Since its launch in July, Waterloo, Ontario-based (the home of RIM) AideRSS has generated much positive coverage.

AideRSS’ Chief Architect, Ilya Grigorik, and Chief Marketer, Kevin Thomason, gave the attendees at DemoCampToronto14 an advance peek at a new Recommendation engine that will be added to AideRSS in the next few weeks.

After the presentation, I recorded a short video interview with Kevin Thomason. He provided an overview of AideRSS and then talked about the coming Recommendation feature.

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I also captured the DemoCamp presentation on film. Ilya’s preview of the Recommendation feature starts at 2 minutes and 50 seconds into the video.

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Smart posts by smart people about Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0

The final day of Enterprise 2.0 was a bit of a bust for me. I just didn’t connect with the speakers in two of the three panels I attended. And the scheduled speaker for the third session was a no-show!

But the good news is that the conference was heavily blogged and many of the other posters found a good deal of value in the sessions they attended. So, for my final post about the Enterprise 2.0 conference, here are some posts that I think are worth reading:

And for something extra, read these posts:

  • Jeffrey Walker reports on one of those dinner discussions that make attending an event really worthwhile, this one on the ROI of Enterprise 2.0.
  • Alec Saunders offers reflects on what’s really going on with Enterprise 2.0. And he thinks it’s something big.

So, that’s it for me here in Boston. Air Canada’s calling my flight and I’m heading home to Ottawa.

Ross Mayfield and Kim Polese push Enterprise 2.0

Don Tapscott’s presentation at Enterprise 2.0 was followed by rapid fire presentations by Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource along with Joe Schueller, Innovation Manager of Procter & Gamble Global Business Services.

Ross Mayfield:

Complexity is in th social network. Vendors tried to put it in the software. Social Software keeps complexity in the social network, where it belongs, by only encoding simple rules.

Mayfield sees a power law of participation applied to social software: all people may engage in the basic tasks of reading, favoriting, tagging and commenting, but very few will climb the curve of participation to write, refactor, collaborate, moderate or lead.

By opening our systems to participation, people will find their appropriate level of participation.

So, what to Wiki? First, effective collaboration requires a goal.

Apply it to small group communication. Create a living Intranet. See what happens when people have access to the edit button.

A good place to start might be the creation of a global glossary, FAQs, How-tos to capture the language, practices and wisdom of the people who “do” within your organization.

Apply the Wiki approach to Processes. Think about a help desk. Their task is exception handling. A Wiki is a great means to capture both the experience and the wisdom in identifying and handling these exceptions. If the entire company contributes answers, the full expertise of the company will generate solutions.

Kim Polese

Gartner suggests that collaboration technologies will be widely adopted within five years.

Enterprises do not want point solutions. They want integrated or Suite solutions.SpikeSource has developed a product called SuiteTwo, which integrates a stack of social software into one Enterprise 2.0 solution.

Don Tapscott talks about Wikinomics & Enterprise 2.0

Don Tapscott, co-author of Wikinomics, delivered the afternoon keynote at Enterprise 2.0.

Don TapscottThe idea that there is a New Enterprise has been around for a while. It is based on the notion of an open networked enterprise, not a closed hierarchy. Tapscott wrote about this in his 1992 book, Paradigm Shift. “Nothing like and idea whose time has come.”

Tapscott see four drivers of change:

Web 2.0

The new Web is based on XML, a standard not for presentation, but for computation. The Web is becoming a giant computer and it’s enriched for services.

The Net Generation

Our children are the first generation to grow up digital. They have no fear of technology because to them technology is like the air. It’s all around and it’s just there.

This is the first time in history that children are an authority on something important. And this has led to a situation in which we don’t have a generation gap, but instead have a generation “lap.” And the kids are lapping their parents.

The Social Revolution

This flows from the interaction of Web 2.0 and the Net Generation.

MySpace has eclipsed Mtv. Craig’s List has eclipsed Monster.com. Flickr overwhelmed Webshots.

They are all tapping into people’s instinct to self-organize.

The Economic Revolution

The dot com bubble is being followed by a period in which the real value, the workable solutions and the viable companies are driving an economic revolution. Consider the digital conglomerates: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, amazon.com, ebay… These are a new species of business.

What’s happening? Wikinomics

Collaboration is beginning to change the architecture of the organization.

We have progressed from the industrial age corporation and practices of Ford and Taylor through the Extended Enterprise of the multinationals through the Business Webs of the 90s to Mass Collaboration.

Today people cannot only socially gather, they can socially produce. Peers outside the boundaries of corporations or corporations acting as peers or peers within the boundaries of a hierarchy can collaborate across boundaries.

This yields the four principles of Wikinomics:

  • Peering
  • Being Open
  • Sharing
  • Acting Globally

Consider a company that won by embracing these principles – GoldCorp: A 50 year old mining company peers, opens, shares its proprietary data and acts globally in a bid to transform itself and explore the extent of a rich new find.

New models
Peer Pioneers: Think about Linux. If you can create an operating system through open source, what else can you create in this way?

Ideagoras: Open markets for uniquely qualified minds. Think of P&G, which has opened its problems to solutions from people outside of its corporate walls. Half of P&G’s innovations will come from outside of the company by the end of this year.

Prosumers:  Turn your customers into producers. Consider music mashups and remixes. Look at writing the final chapter of Wikinomics through a Wiki.

The New Alexandrians: The sharing of science. Consider the release of the human genome results.

Open Platforms: Consider the Amazon platform. It has over 200,000 delivers attempting to create value on this platform.

The Global Plant Floor: Consider Boeing’s revolutionary approach to create the 787 in partnership with suppliers who shared risk, benefits and development of this revolutionary plane.

The Wiki Workplace: Developing value in the workplace through the application of Wikis and Wiki principals. Consider Geeksquad labelled products at BestBuy.

Crisis of Leadership

This is a paradigm shift. New paradigms are met with coolness and even hostility. Those with vested interests fight the change. And this challenges our leaders to leave that with which they are comfortable.

The time has come for a new Web and a new generation for whom this is their birthright and a new model of how companies and organizations deal with the world.

Enterprise 2.0 Day One Roundup

One problem with a great multi-track conference is that you have to choose between sessions being held at the same time. I attended some great sessions today.

But, as I look at the coverage on other posts tonight, I realize that there were other first rate discussions going on in the adjoining rooms.

Here are some of the better posts:

John Eckman covers a panel with Greg Reinacker, Ross Mayfield, Chris Alden and David Cassidy talking about user adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Michael Sampson offer his notes on the Instant Messaging 2.0 session.

And, just for balance, a contrarian view from Jevon MacDonald of Canada (yep, Canadians get a free pass to think independently.)

🙂

Skype and the Enterprise

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.

A Vision for Presence

Melanie Turek moderated a panel session at Enterprise 2.0 featuring Alec Saunders from Iotum, Nick Fera, Paul Haverstock from Microsoft, Jabber’s Joe Hildebrand and David Marshak of IBM.

Companies are looking for new ways to take advantage of “presence” – knowing where their employees are, what they are doing… This is closely tied to realizing the potential of the virtual workplace. How do we stay in touch with people with whom we are working but who are working in a remote location?

Of the panelists, fellow Ottawan Iotum‘s Alec Saunders stood out – both for his clarity and his pragmatic, readily available solution.

Saunders pointed out that your chances of speaking to a human being when you make a phone call are only 18% and people have to try 4.15 times on average to reach the party they want. Fixing this would enhance productivity greatly.Right now, presence is indicated in IM by wiggling our mouse (and having our computer come alive). This is a problem (why be interrrupted when we’ve just started working?) We need a people-centric model.

Saunders pointed to his New Presence paper that he published on his blog last year. He suggested that we look at a range of clues relating to our relationship with the people attempting to contact us. Iotum has developed a solution based on managing presence in light of a variety of factors incorporating your relationships with people and the range of activities you might be involved in at any time.

A free trial of Iotum’s Talk Now is available through download. I think I’ll try it.

Social Project Management: Everything is small again

Leisa Reichelt led a session at Enterprise 2.0 on how the bottom up organization and team building approach of social software might be applied to project management in the enterprise.

Project management software in the company is one of those love/hate things. You can’t work without it. You hate to live with it. The effort required to set up a project and then the tyranny of following the plan are the bane of many people’s existence.

Reichelt points to the ease of connectedness made possible by social media applications such as Facebook and LastFM. Social media has also eased access to information and sharing of that information. There is no requirement for technical knowledge. Virtually no cost.

Reichelt suggests that the new collaboration and sharing capabilities of social software have the potential to replace functions currently embedded exclusively in enterprise project management solutions. Look at 37 Signals’ Getting Real for an early example of the potential for this. A different methodology (build the core quickly, go to market, then build in the rest.) Yes, 37signals is dealing with social software, not enterprise software. But their success does point to the fact that approaches other than the orthodox enterprise project management approach are possible.

What are the hallmarks of the social project management (2.0) approach?

  • Small teams: a developer, a designer and a sweeper.
  • Made up of smart, motivated people.
  • Limited planning. Non-essential documentation and highly detailed specification are dispensed with. Sketching and agreement on fundamentals are the focus.
  • Minimal scope: Less is more. Build less.
  • Multi-skilled teams: Look for people with multi-disciplinary skills.
  • Fast pace: Speed is essential to produce results within a limited budget.
  • Rapid release: Take it out to the community quickly and ask them to participate in alpha and beta testing.
  • Feedback: End user feedback is sought to refine the product.
  • Responsiveness: Speed and close contact with users leads to quick reaction to feedback.
  • Iteration: Constant change.

This approach is similar to the Agile Software Development approach.

Project 1.0 focused on large projects with large budgets and enormous teams.

  • Top down: an extensive hierarchy with information trickling down. But getting the information back up is difficult.
  • Gantt Charts: The bigger, the uglier, the better. Reichelt notes that these are enormously optimistic. How often do they have any resemblance to reality?
  • Many stakeholders: The project manager seeks out all of the stakeholders and the stakeholders put in as many requests as they possibly can. One problem of project management is that too often it seeks to satisfy stakeholders. This is different from satisfying end users.
  • Complex dependencies: Escalating demands leads to complexities which leads to delays.
  • Risk registers: !
  • Horizon & beyond timelines: Planning a project now that will be useful and realistic in 18 months. How often does this really work?
  • Expected failure: This kills team morale. But is it all too common.

Do these projects fail? Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, Accenture, IBM Global Services. How many of their projects are delivered on time, on budget and to the original specs? Reichelt feels that the large 1.0 “large scale,” top down projects fail spectacularly – all the time.

But, of course, they don’t “officially” fail, because the Gantt Chart has been updated along the way.

Traditional project managment doesn’t match the way we really work. It forecasts a “waterfall” linear progression from data collection through analysis, through plan formulation to implementation. In reality, we work in a much more iterative way, revisiting earlier phases as we progress through experience.

But how does this apply to large scale projects? You can’t build the Space Shuttle using the “Getting Real” stripped down methodology.

Reichelt points to a new generation of project tools such as Basecamp and GoPlan.

But does it scale? Reichelt’s answer is, “Yes, to a point.” She believes that what we should be looking to develop is a composite of the corporate with the virtues of the new more agile, leaner social project management approach.

Reichelt suggested that project managers today can apply some of the practices of social project software management today – listening to teams, breaking projects down into smaller initiatives.

Reichelt acknowledged that her perspective on social project management is rose-coloured. It made a lot of sense to me, but as I looked around the room, I saw a fair amount of skepticism on the part of the enterprise project managers. But I hope that Leisa doesn’t give up. Her vision has potential. And if it is not yet fully attainable, that just creates opportunity for innovators and entrepreneurs.

Corporate Blogging: The Ecology of Participation

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

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?

photo of Stowe Boyd by Brian SolisFirst, 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.