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Business internet social networking

Speeches 2 b reduced 2 140 chars at nxt election

We all have to suffer over exposure to politics during the run up to an election. It is going to get worse!  The next UK General Election will be played out in minute detail and in glorious Web2.0 technicolour using Twitter.

In fact there is now a website dedicated to furthering this cause.  Tweetminster.com is a wonderful resource for those actually interested in politics. The site concentrates the tweets of MPs, sorts by party, constituency and by subject matter and even has a tweetometer that indicates who is ahead in the tweeting game on any particular issue.

You will be an expert on MPs views like never before and the resource makes it easy to engage an MP in debate on a specific topic.

One wonders how we will cope with the sheer volume of information that will be coming at us, other than by switching off of course.  There is definately something advantageous to be said here about the British election system when compared with that of the USA.  At least we will only be getting a few short weeks of it rather than the protracted years they take across the pond. 

I can see another spike in internet bandwidth usage coming..!

If anyone is interested I did a search for the topic “expenses” on tweetminster and came up with 161 references 🙂

c u l8r

Categories
Business internet

Unified Communications Web2.0 Style

Unified Communications ’09 is on next week at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. I anticipate there will be 70 or so businesses there pitching their wares, including Timico subsidiary KeConnect which has a joint stand with Cisco.

UC09 is a business to business show. It is worth reflecting on the fact that in the consumer world UC  is racing ahead of what is typically available to business. Lets look at my son’s radio programme as an example.

Tom, as regular readers of this blog will know, has his own weekend breakfast show on Siren FM, a local community radio station  in my home town of Lincoln (England).  He has a website and a Facebook home page.  The Wake Up To The Weekend homepage has 318 fans as I write and each show gets around 100  listener contacts/interactions.

Tom’s listeners are by and large teenagers in the Lincoln area. They listen to his show on their laptops whilst lying in bed on Saturday and Sunday mornings. When they want to conatct the show to request a song or enter a competition they send an IM via Facebook, or leave a message on the show’s wall.

Listeners also communicate via SMS and email. I doubt that many make phone calls but if Facebook had an embedded voip client then this would overcome a teenager’s cost objections to talking. The radio presenter could then escalate an IM request to a voice call – to talk to the winner of a competition for example. The show can also post photos, videos and recordings of bands they have had in the studio on the Facebook page.

So where is this leading to?  For radio show read business.  Companies are more and more going to have to move into this space.  Corporate websites are going  to change to reflect Facebook and Twitter-type functionality and begin to interact with their customers in real time in new ways.

Integration of a corporate communications strategy with Twitter has already been shown to be highly effective. Initially the domain of large corporates, smaller companies should easily embrace it.  Customer care and marketing teams will sit “on the internet”.  I anticipate doing this at Timico sooner rather than later.

As a footnote Tom’s biggest fan, me aside, is a person in Lincoln named Les. Les enters every one of Tom’s competitions and has frequent interactions with the show. Looking at his picture on the Facebook site it can be seen that Les is in fact probably in his sixties.  This then is not just the domain of the teenager!

PS if anyone is at UC 09 and wants to meet up drop me a line.

Categories
Business internet

Is The UK An Innovation Backwater?

I’m sure this is a subject that has raised its head on many occasion over the past decade or two. It struck me this morning that all the futuristic development work that I am looking at is based on technologies and services that have originated outside the UK.

In particular Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Digg it Yahoo, Google etc etc etc are all North American inventions. The one British equivalent that springs to mind is Friends Reunited which looks as if it has missed the boat big time on the social networking opportunity yet it was probably the first in the space. Certainly I never used it seriously because there was a subscription cost.

Not only is the innovation in the USA but all the conferences that you might want to go to to network and discuss innovation are in the USA. I used to work for a company that had offices in San Jose and when visiting could always sense the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation that pervaded the whole community. 

Now it is true that due to the nature of the internet and thanks indeed to the ability to communicate and innovate that web2.0 has brought (bit of a generalisation I know) the world is a lot smaller. However there still lacks the forum outside of the USA for getting together with like minded people to discuss and progress.  Jeff Pulver’s “Breakfasts” are a good start and I will be attending the one in London on January 28th.

I periodically hold a “Friday Lunchtime Session” in the office at Timico HQ where innovation is discussed. If there are any like minded people in the UK who want to get together on a periodic basis to discuss innovation, technology, Social Networking, Web2.0 et al please get in touch.

Categories
Business internet

Animoto

Animoto is a company that takes your digital photos and turns them into a slideshow whilst adding music as a backdrop. Their platform employs an algorithm that analyses the content/colours in a photo and applies what it deems to be a suitable soundtrack. 

The product looks pretty cool. I understand that their principal claim to fame is that when Animoto was launched on Facebook the demand was such that their use of virtual machines went from around 30 to 4,000 within 48 hours.

If true, and I have no reason to believe otherwise, this illustrates the power of Web2.0. Most Facebook applications of course disappear into obscurity but this type of success story is what keeps people developing.

It’s also what makes me keep playing golf. One good shot…

 

Categories
End User internet

Theatre Royal Update

I mentioned that I would chart the progress of the “Save Lincoln Theatre Royal” Facebook Group. The diagram below shows the membership growth over the past 12 days.

I’m not saying this is a stellar recruitment campaign nor making any point other than an observation on how this particular effort is going. The Group has however been publicised on BBC Radio Lincolnshire and its exposure is increasing.

What seems clear from the Group membership is that the demographics of Facebook are still squarely set with the younger generation.

What is also interesting is the difficulty I have had in recruiting Facebook friends from the UK ITSP community for the ITSPA Group – currently standing at 16 members after a few weeks of trying.

ITSPA is a closed group with membership by invitation only. However this is still slow progress. Most company representatives in the ITSPA world are in their thirties or forties I would guess and likely not comfortable in the Web2.0 space.

Business still has a long way to go with Web2.0.

Categories
Business internet

The Web2.0 Theatre Royal Experiment

Experiment is probably the wrong word to describe it but last Friday I mentioned that a Save Lincoln Theatre Royal group had been created on Facebook. After the first day it had 609 members. Two days later it has 1175 members. I think I’ll graph it this week.

A business would bite your hand off to get that kind of publicity/exposure. Lets hope it helps the theatre.

Categories
Business internet

The Power Of Web2.0

Yesterday it was announced that the Theatre Royal in Lincoln would close because the local council had decided to withdraw its funding. Times are hard and people have to prioritise, clearly.

Today on Facebook there is a “Save Lincoln Theatre Royal” group with 609 members only one day after it was started. Remember the population of Lincoln is around 85,000. This is going to be a good group to follow – to see how Web2.0 and viral marketing has its place in today’s society. Having looked at the membership (and joined the group) it looks so far as if the membership is comprised of us younger generation. Up the revolution.

I will report on progress but in the meantime please lend the your support and sign up. When I was younger than today I trod the boards in a couple of two week runs at this theatre,

Categories
Apps Business UC voip

Ribbit & BT – Unified Communications

BT has bought a company called Ribbit based in Silicon Valley, California. Why is this interesting or significant to the UK business community? Maybe it isn’t.

However there is a chance that in the UK we will see the effects of this acquisition in the next year or two. Ribbit provides the hooks to make voice calls from different applications. In itself this isn’t anything special – Timico could do the same thing using it’s Nortel 5200 platform given the time and inclination.

Ribbit has tried to make it easy for 3rd party developers to do so and as a company whose sole reason for existence seems to have been to do this then one must assume that they would be doing a good job of it.

I think my one observation relates to what BT expects to do with the platform. It seems to me that Ribbit is set up as an applicaton for a wide community. I suspect BT might just use it to develop their own embedded voice applications. This to me would be a lost opportunity. Here BT has the chance to position itself at the centre of a Web2.0/VoIP2.0 world in the UK but it needs to keep Ribbit open to all to do so.

In the world of voice, at least in business voice and Unified Communications, it is also important to keep the activity and platform UK centred when selling to UK parties. This is why I believe that a Webex service with a voice platform based in the USA will never have a huge market reach in the UK. The same applies for the apparent efforts of Microsoft with hosted OCS.

Timico is based in the UK, offers UK services and telephone numbers, and I believe will be going head to head with Microsoft and Cisco in this space. Of course in other areas we will be partnering them. Interesting times…

Categories
Apps Business UC voip

Ribbit & BT – Unified Communications

BT has bought a company called Ribbit based in Silicon Valley, California. Why is this interesting or significant to the UK business community? Maybe it isn’t.

However there is a chance that in the UK we will see the effects of this acquisition in the next year or two. Ribbit provides the hooks to make voice calls from different applications. In itself this isn’t anything special – Timico could do the same thing using it’s Nortel 5200 platform given the time and inclination.

Ribbit has tried to make it easy for 3rd party developers to do so and as a company whose sole reason for existence seems to have been to do this then one must assume that they would be doing a good job of it.

I think my one observation relates to what BT expects to do with the platform. It seems to me that Ribbit is set up as an applicaton for a wide community. I suspect BT might just use it to develop their own embedded voice applications. This to me would be a lost opportunity. Here BT has the chance to position itself at the centre of a Web2.0/VoIP2.0 world in the UK but it needs to keep Ribbit open to all to do so.

In the world of voice, at least in business voice and Unified Communications, it is also important to keep the activity and platform UK centred when selling to UK parties. This is why I believe that a Webex service with a voice platform based in the USA will never have a huge market reach in the UK. The same applies for the apparent efforts of Microsoft with hosted OCS.

Timico is based in the UK, offers UK services and telephone numbers, and I believe will be going head to head with Microsoft and Cisco in this space. Of course in other areas we will be partnering them. Interesting times…

Categories
Apps Business UC voip

Calliflower

Well I have been bowled over by an application that I saw today for the first time on Facebook. I was responding to an invite of an old friend Carl Ford to attend an online conference call on Alec Saunders’ Squawkbox. The subject was “deploying globally, regulated locally”.

Regulatory stuff isn’t really what turns me on but the exciting bit was the Calliflower application that was being used to host the call. This an online conferencing app that can be buried in facebook. You use the web interface to see who is online, their pictures and put your hand up when you want to say something.

The great thing was that you could also use your facebook interface to send IMs to people on the call and to write wall posts in real time.

This is a great example of what is coming along in the web2.0/voip2.0 world. The application wasn’t perfect. You either called in using Truphone or Skype or used a paid for number in the USA or France. However as an example of what can be done it was brilliant.

Immediately after the call I set up my own call (in seconds) and had a play with it with a colleague Dean Bruce. You could even press a record button and download the conference to your pc when it had all ended.

Now I’m not quite sure yet how this is going to be monetised and there are quite a few missing features compared with some commercial “Meet Me” and collaboration services such as those provided by Cisco/Webex and Nortel. Integration with your company systems, video and collaboration to name but a few.

However Dean and I walked away from the office in quite a state of excitement. It must have been because I was going home for my tea :-).  Check it out on http://apps.facebook.com/calliflower/.

If you aren’t in facebook go to http://www.calliflower.com/Index.html.

Categories
Business UC voip

Cisco SMB day, generation Y and Unified Communications

Very interesting time at the Cisco SMB day held at the Mercedes Motor Museum in Brooklands.

Bernadette Wightman, SMB Operations Director said Cisco are expecting SMBs to be worth $1Bn to them in 2009 and today’s channel event is their first big push towards getting there. The gradual migration of the Linksys brand to Cisco is also an indicator. Cisco have traditionally been too expensive a solution for the SME market and it will be interesting to see how this changes.

Unified Communications and Web2.0 was a big part of their messaging with a big focus on the change in demographics about to hit business.

The biggest users of Web2.0 are those consumers of social networking sites belonging to generation Y. In other words those born after 1980. Currently the decision makers belong to generation X, those fortunate enough to have been born on or after 1964. As someone who came into this world in 1961 I must therefore fall into “generation W” which is somewhat disconcerting.

The point it that the biggest users of Web2.0 will within 4 years represent 20 million of the workforce in the UK. As the SMB sector (under 250 employees) represents 62% of the UK workforce Web2.0 technology will have to be to be an important part of the product offering of vendors in the communications space.

The second keynote was by Anthony Hilton, Financial journalist and former Managing Director of the London Evening Standard. He suggested that whilst some market sectors such as banking and house building were being hit hard during the current financial uncertainties, other parts of the financial services sectors such as insurance and savings were doing well as consumers stopped borrowing and started saving their money.

I asked him how he saw the technology markets being affected compared with the last post 9/11 and dot com bubble bursting recession. He expects that the current financial crisis will drive business towards adopting Unified Communications products that will save them money and improve productivity. However the likelihood is that these products will be based on fairly mature technology that has been around and in use for the last five years.

Much of what is being discussed as being targeted for business is still some way off being a production item. This is despite the fact that Web2.0 in theory allows for rapid introduction of new features and products. Witness the statement that 5,000 Facebook applications were built by 90,000 developers in 7 weeks.

On display was a mockup of Webex Connect, the next gen Web2.0 offering from the hosted provider. Webex’ biggest take up has been in the SMB space but what we saw, which was a convergence of much of what is Web2.0 was not slated for production until 2010. Look out for “dusting” which is where content on the screen of your mobile device is waved or “brushed” onto your desktop when you arrive at the office.

I can’t help but think that one day these elongated product development cycles will be a thing of the past. In fact I can see the day where companies are unable to come up with product roadmaps beyond 6 months because the pace of development will be so fast that no-one will be able so see further out than that.

That being said Cisco is making all the right noise in this space and is clearly putting its money where its mouth is. One of its biggest challenges will be to recruit a channel that faces SMB customers where traditionally its big partners have gone after big Enterprise money. This fact will potentially easy open the door for new entrants into the Cisco reseller space as there is less likely to be competition from the incumbents.