Andrew McAfee – Enterprise 2.0: The State of the Meme

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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.

Heading to Boston for Enterprise 2.0

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Enterprise 2.0
I’m heading to Boston for Enterprise 2.0, which bills itself as “The Collaborative Technologies Conference.”

I decided to attend this year because of the interesting mix of traditional proprietary enterprise software with the new breed of social software. I’m interested in seeing how the purveyors of the big ticket systems are being affected and influenced by the emergence of the open source, community driven collaborative platforms.

There’ll be a great lineup of speakers over the next three days. In particular, I’m looking forward to sessions on the first day with Stowe Boyd, Andrew McAfee, Anil Dash, Greg Reinacker, Ross Mayfield and David Weinberger (I packed a copy of Everything is Miscellaneous to read en route.)
I’ll try to blog from the conference or at least daily after the close of business.

I’m also looking forward to meeting Bryan Person while I’m in Boston. If you are reading this and would like to join us for a drink Wednesday evening, send me an email.

Mike Arrington brings TechCrunch to mesh

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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.

You can go to Canada's Web Conference

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MeshRegistration for mesh07 opened today.

The line-up of keynote speakers at this year’s event includes Richard Edelman head of the eponymously named PR firm, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, GiveMeaning‘s CEO Tom Williams and tech entrepreneur Austin Hill.

Last year’s mesh conference was a colossal success. Great speakers, great participants. Fantastic discussion.

I wholeheartedly recommend mesh for anyone who is interested in exploring the leading edge of social media and the new communications. I’ve registered. You can do it too by registering online.

Riya: Another glimpse at the development of a web 2.0 company

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RiyaBlog readers continue to be treated to an unusual peek behind the scenes in the development of a web 2.0 company.

Last spring, Riya launched with much fan fare in the blogging community, largely due to the ground-breaking social-seeding efforts of Tara Hunt.

Shortly after launch, Tara left the company to pursue her dream and Riya CEO Munjal Shah began a fascinating series of posts about the first months of the company’s public beta. The series culminated with Munjal indicating that the company had decided it needed to change its strategic direction. The beta experience was showing that the market for Riya was someplace else than Munjal and his team had thought it would be.

Munjal’s blog has gone dark for the past several months. Now, he has emerged again with a short post pointing to a substantial post by Riya Board member Peter Rip.

Rip’s post suggests that early stage investing is a bit like “hunt and peck” typing:

Riya’s approach to search is a perfect metaphor for early stage investing.  Eighteen months ago I couldn’t describe the business with any real precision.  We had some great ingredients in a field of opportunity. I figured I’d know it when I saw it. 

And Riya 2.0 will be significantly different than the beta site launched just a few months ago:

…Riya 2.0 is nothing like the Powerpoint we saw in Q1-05.  And it bears no resemblance to the stuff that was on our whiteboard in the Fall of 04.  But this is the nature of early stage consumer.  Change Happens. Iterate. Pivot. Evolve.

The key aspects haven’t changed. The core of the business is still image  analysis and  classification.  We now have 14 researchers just on this problem – perhaps the largest image analysis pure research team in the world – and a huge intellectual property portfolio.  The biggest changes are in how and where we apply the technology. Perhaps the best move we have made is to signal to the photo, social networking, and community sites that we are not in their business at all, enabling us to work together with them and exploit some real economic synergies.  It’s just as important for the world to know what you’re Not as what you Are.

We are in the process of re-defining image search.  The core premise of what we are doing is that there are lots of things humans can’t describe well in text, but we “know it when we see it.” We aren’t so much about searching for images as much as we are about searching with images.   This is really a different kind of search experience. Faces are the most extreme case. Our brains are highly tuned to recognize the most subtle visual dues, but humans can’t verbally describe faces with any precision at all (except for the occasional scar or mole.) 

Fascinating. I’m looking forward to continuing to follow the Riya story. Will they be able to pull off a business success? Stay tuned.

Riya prepares to launch new site

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Munjal Shah has posted some screen shots of Riya 2.0.

Riya 2.0

Munjal’s vision is for Riya 2.0 to be a

web-wide (public) visual search engine that uses face and image similarity to search the web. We are calling this new kind of public web search: Visual Search. Why? Because you will be able to search by clicking on / submitting a photo instead of having to type in text.

The screen shots suggest that Riya will, in fact, enable searches both by image and by text.

Munjal’s post today indicates that face similarity and image similarity will not be turned on at the outset. This is the the crunch capability. We’ll have to wait and see how this works in order to know whether Munjal can fully realize his vision.

Good luck Munjal. I for one am looking forward to using Riya 2.0.

Is this my company's next inter-office meeting?

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This past Monday, my company held a day long leadership retreat in Kingston. That required people from Toronto and Ottawa to trek from Ottawa and Toronto to a hotel mid-way between the two cities. Almost as much travel time as face time.

Neville Hobson last night participated in a meeting that may well point to the way that companies like Thornley Fallis cut out the travel time in the future.
Neville reports on a panel session that was conducted in Second Life. The session drew marketing and new media professionals like Joseph Jaffe and Mitch Joel for a serious discussion of avatar-based marketing.

Meeting in Second Life

This is a picture of the meeting taking from Neville’s perspective. That’s him in the foreground.

According to Neville,

… this was something quite extraordinary. Here was a group of people getting together in a virtual world for a business meeting. You didn’t know who anyone really was, whether who they say they are is who they really are, where they’re from, and whether it really is a man or a woman you’re talking to.

But none of that matters. It’s part of the experience and interactions in a virtual world.

Neat. And for the folks at Thornley Fallis who are reading this, don’t be surprised if the next interoffice meeting you’re invited to requires only that you travel as far as your computer to sign into Second Life!

Shel Israel outlines Global Neighbourhoods; asks for comments

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Shel IsraelShel Israel has posted a preliminary overview of his new book project, Global Neighbourhoods. And he’s asking readers for advice about how he can make the book stronger, tighter and more useful.

Israel introduces the new book in the following way:

In some ways, Global Neighborhoods will be a sequel to Naked Conversations. I have great pride in the last book, but was never completely happy with the last section in which we attempted to paint a big picture that went beyond blogging into something called a Conversational Era. While accurate, the term has not caught on, nor do I think it is suited to describe the enormous fundamental change being created by a connected world. Global will attempt to paint a bigger picture of what the world, and large organizations will look like a few years down the line from today.  Naked Conversations examines the cause of the change.  This time I am more concerned with the effects of the change.

Read the rest of Shel’s overview and give him your input. It’s our chance to shape Shel’s thinking before he leaves for his world research tour with Rick Segal.

Peek behind the scenes of the launch of a web 2.0 company – Riya

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Munjal ShahMunjal Shah, the CEO of Web 2.0 start-up Riya, is writing a series of posts recounting the first two months following the launch of the company’s public beta.  Riya offers “face recognition technology [that] automatically tags people in photos so you can search for just
the photo you want. In your albums. In your friends’ albums. In our public albums.”

In his introductory post, Munjal provides a taste of what is to come:

The last 60 days has been just a whirlwind. In the next eight/nine blog posts I’m going to recount the last sixty days of Riya in detail. Each blog post will cover a week.

I will recount the days following our launch, the cocaine like high and subsequent crash of the Techcrunch effect, the final analysis on whether Riya’s technology worked, the feedback we recieved from users, the competitors we beat (at least in traffic), the flaw in the Riya business strategy we uncovered, the crisis it precipitated, the concern I developed for the entire Web 2.0 industry as the numbers rolled in, the search for a new strategy as Azhar, Burak, and I sat in a conference room for almost 10 days straight, the customer data that lead us to a counter-web 2.0 and counter intuitive strategy, the board meeting and debate about it, and the first execution around it.

They say consumer Internet companies are all about launching, getting feedback, and iterating. Well, welcome to Riya Iteration 1.

Today, Munjal posted Episode 1: March 21 6am PST to March 28 6am.

Thanks to Tara Hunt for pointing to Munjal’s posts.