Archive for September 2006 -- Ken Yarmosh

Your Blog is (or should be) a Coffee Shop

September 29, 2006

Many of us enjoy the free WiFi offered at today’s Coffee Shops…but Coffee Shops are not popular because of WiFi. In some ways, they are not even popular because of coffee. After all, you can get a Cup of Joe at 7-11, Dunkin Donuts, a local Deli, or any number of other locations. The defining draw of the Coffee Shop is the environment it offers – an escape from the real world, the secluding corner to read a newspaper, or the “private” area to talk with friends.

Coffee Shops are very much a place for discussion. Just visit a Starbucks or a Panera Bread. It’s humming with caffeine and conversation. While some business execs do visit these joints and hold an afternoon meeting to get a kick-start, most people visit them for friendly chats. They are there to do something they enjoy – like read a book or to perhaps meet someone for the first time.

Visiting a Coffee Shop is a low pressure outing…it’s a way to get know someone better and have meaningful conversation. And that’s exactly what your blog should be. Your blog is (or should be) a Coffee Shop. It should be a low pressure way for someone to get to know you, your interests, or passions better. It’s not your Office. Other parts of your site or perhaps a different site all together should be considered the place where people can learn more about your business.

If you are using your blog for business purposes, I’d encourage you to begin to think about it in these terms. Utilize your blog to allow potential customers to get to know more about your company and its business. Allow your blog to be a Coffee Shop, a place where potential customers are dialoguing with you. If they like what they hear, they can swing by the Office (i.e., your website). But don’t try to pitch them over a Caramel Macchiato…that’s just bad manners.

Central Desktop Live – Low Cost Alternative to Web Meetings

September 28, 2006

If you do web meetings with any regularity, you may want to give Central Desktop Live a try. From my research, they probably offer one of the lowest monthly fees on the market (in consideration of the feature set provided). Central Desktop Live is available at $35/month, whereas GoToMeeting goes for $49.00/month (WebEx recently followed suit, providing a similar offering at the same monthly rate).

For those who work with software or technology for a living, I highly encourage you to begin utilizing tools like Central Desktop Live, GoToMeeting, or WebEx. There is no better way to show what your software can do then to actually show what your software can do.

The old saying applies – a picture is worth a thousand words. A demo of your product or service to a potential client can really help them understand the value of your technology. And with tools like Central Desktop Live, you don’t even need to jump on a plane to do that.

tagged under central desktop live, gotomeeting, webex

Basecamp Integrates with Harvest

September 26, 2006

In a world of more focused or niche based web services such as Harvest, integrations are going to continue to be key (as I’ve noted in the past).

Time tracking tool Harvest is now integrating with Basecamp. From the Harvest Gazette:

If your organization currently uses Basecamp in conjunction with Harvest for time tracking, things just got a whole lot easier. Harvest admins can now avoid any form of double-entry when it comes to setting up users, clients, or projects. Simply pick the people or projects you’d like to import from Basecamp and you are ready to go. Imported users will receive an automatically-generated Harvest welcome message along with their temporary password.

Basecamp is in many ways set to be what SalesForce’s AppExchange is becoming in the CRM space - one of the definitive places for project management based integrations.

tagged under basecamp, harvest

Exclusive: Michael Arrington Shares Details on Future TechCrunch Network Blog

September 22, 2006

We were lucky enough to speak with Michael Arrington at TNNI. Mike shared some details about his forthcoming new addition to the TechCrunch Network – a blog focused on the enterprise.

In this clip, Mike shares some thoughts on why “Enterprise 2.0″ is now gaining attention, some of the players in the space, and who will be authoring his newest blog.

A special thanks to him for sparing a couple of minutes with us.

tagged under michael arrington, techcrunch, enterprise 2.0

Other Perspectives on TNNI

In addition to Doug Kushin (who assisted me with video production), I had a couple of friends helping me out at TNNI – Dennis McDonald and Joseph LeBlanc. Each have very different backgrounds and thus different perspectives on the conference.

Joe is a talented Joomla programmer, who recently is back to freelancing now. Here were some of his thoughts:

There were two takes on Ruby and Ruby on Rails: 1) The 10 to 1 productivity gain is irresistible. 2) Programmers comprise a very small fraction of the overall IT budget. However, as a developer, I felt that these views were missing some key points. First, a productivity gain of that magnitude makes it feasible to implement a new idea several different ways, get feedback, and debug the top choice all in the time it would take to write it once in another language. Second, if you can save your developers that much time, they be able to build more tools to help the IT department save money. Finally, great developers love using good tools. You have a much better shot of attracting and retaining talent if developers have the flexibility to choose the best solutions for each situation.

Dennis on the other hand looks at things from a much more strategic and managerial perspective. He writes about one of the Technology Showcase competitors Voxant:

Voxant has developed content licensing relationships with a variety of video, image, and text news sources including CBS, Fox News and Bloomberg. Voxant re-licenses the content, including built-in advertising and streaming video, to individual web sites and blog operators.

…

Assuming this all works as volume and complexity scale up, what Voxant is doing is, in effect, developing a new distribution platform that “traditional” news outlets can use that balances the needs of monetization with the “viral marketing” model where participation, sharing, and relationships drive ever-growing volume.

Thanks to Dennis, Joe, and others who helped me out at the conference.

Andrew McAfee on Enterprise 2.0

September 20, 2006

Andrew McAfee – Harvard Business School Professor – is talking about a term he helped coin, “Enterprise 2.0″.

He notes, “Web 2.0 is not a revolution…revolutions are usually very violent and very quick…we are undergoing a transformation…we don’t know how long it’s going to take.”

Two transformations have occurred: one on the Internet and one in the enterprise.

Inside the enterprise, managers have been ganging up on pushing new technology on users.

Web 2.0 is successful because technologists figured out what users wanted:

1. To interact w/each other

2. As little structure as possible during interaction and use of technology

…and the result was that

3. The outcome of getting out of the way does not mean chaos

On the enterprise side, for the first time, all three constituents of technology have begun working together: managers, technologists, and users. Enterprise 2.0 does not equal blogs plus wikis behind the firewall. That is entirely too limiting.

Uncertainties

What is the appropriate role of the management constituency in Enterprise 2.0?

How big does an organization need to be to tap into all the good things that would come with Enterprise 2.0?

Trends

- Rates of innovation are going to be very high.

- Bridging the gap between current established infrastructure and the less structured collaboration of new web.

Check out Andrew’s Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.

tagged under enterprise 2.0, andrew mcafee, web 2.0

Rajen Sheth on Tags and Privacy

Here is some footage from Rajen’s discussion this morning…these particular clips focus on tags and privacy:

tagged under rajen sheth, google, privacy

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Ken Yarmosh – Product Strategist and Technology Connoisseur