Categories
datacentre End User internet social networking

@tref on Twitter…Two Years, Ten Weeks, Two Days and Counting

I joined twitter 802 days ago on 17th May 2008. Since then as @tref on Twitter I have sent 2,623 tweets, an average of just over three a day. Not too bad for anyone who thinks I spend too long on the site.

In June, according to twitter COO Dick Costolo twitter had 190 million users, growing by 300 thousand a day. These users were generating 65million tweets a day – that’s enough for twitter to be building its own brand new datacentre to handle all the traffic.

Categories
End User internet

Zi8 is a stunner and will drive internet bandwidth usage

Following on from the Jeff Pulver #140 Conference in London yesterday I’ve been trying out a new toy.

This is the Zi8 HD digital video camera by Kodak and I have to tell you it is a stunner. Presented to me yesterday by Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO of Kodak the HD video quality is outstanding and it is extremely easy to use.

My kids have already latched onto it and started playing with it though rapid adoption by children is not necessarily a pointer to how easy a gadget is to use – technology comes naturally to them.

The camera facia comes printed with the YouTube and Facebook logos, which is a strong enough hint for even the dumbest of users.

I’m not going to bore you with the camera spec. What I will says is that the 75MB of the 59 second video below is well within the 2GByte allowance that YouTube gives for a single video!

The video is presented below for all to see. It’s no professional production and I note that I should have combed my hair first – I’m desperate for a haircut. That’s showbiz folks.

The Zi8 is groundbreaking and although I’m no expert I have no hesitation in recommending it after just a short test.

You may have noticed that this blog doesn’t major on gadget reviews.  The point here is that this another contributor to the growth in bandwidth usage as people start to upload more and more HD footage to sites such as YouTube. What goes up once of course gets downloaded many times, assuming it is any good. It’s a worry for those of us having to manage ADSL backhaul bandwidth but that’s progress for you.

Categories
End User internet social networking

#140conf London – a melting pot for realtime communications

Today I’m with Jeff Pulver at his #140 conference at the O2 Indigo. Jeff originally (not that long ago actually so to use the word originally seems a little strange) started the #140conferences in February as a vehicle to capitalise on the Twitter revolution.

Very quickly the theme of the conference has moved on to real time communications, rather than Twitter specifically although Twitter is still mentioned in every other sentence by every speaker.

Sitting here listening to the talks what strikes me is the complete diversity of people appearing on the stage – ranging from international media stars (ie Stephen Fry) the Chief Marketing Officer of Kodak, a farmer, an off license owner, a teacher, and a policeman to name but a few. Big business is here and so is small business

I’m not going to dwell on specific talks, although Stephen Fry interestingly uses the example of the invention of the printing press to compare with what is happening now on the internet with Twitter. I’m sure he pinched it from me because that is what I use for my new starter induction talk at Timico 🙂

Notably Kodak also ran a competition to name a new camera on Twitter. It was a  fast way of running a focus group with a huge number of people.

The biggest take away for me so far is the use of the word “authenticity”.  There is so much rubbish out there on the internet (Twitter, Facebook, blogland, everywhere) that you have to really have something to say to make an impact. Just rehashing other people’s stuff isn’t good enough, although I am always grateful for “retweets”. 

Being ruthless I have on occasion “defriended” people who indulge in uninteresting status updates.  I’m sure people have done the same with me – you have to be able to take the rough with the smooth.

Categories
Business events internet social networking

#140 characters conference London

I’ve just left a networking event organised by my friend Jeff Pulver to promote his forthcoming #140 characters conference (#140conf )in London.  Scheduled for November 17th/18th the event will take place at the O2 Arena.

This will be the third such do organised by Jeff after the first in New York earlier this year and the forthcoming one in Los Angeles.  What astonished me was that there were more people from London at the New York event than from New York itself and London is considered to be the twitter capital of the world.  Hence the London conference.  LA was second in terms of origin of attendees.  I even met someone from London at the bash who had spoken at the NY event – Kate Arkless Gray or @RadioKate.

The number of attendees at tonight’s event was also impressive.  When I signed up for it two days ago there were 70 or so people registered.  Jeff was expecting a total of 90 but in actual fact he ended up with 190!  There is clearly something happening here. Didn’t realise that Jeff is also an investor in twitter.

Anyway I’ve signed up as part of the cast of characters for the #140 character conference.  In my mind it is definately worth taking a look at attending.  If you don’t know what it is all about just google it or visit http://140conf.com/

Categories
Business voip hardware

Interview with Dean Elwood of voipuser.org

deanelwoodDean Elwood runs the industry leading website voipuser.org. Over the 6 years this has been going Dean has come into contact with most of the major thought leaders in the communications space. He has also seen many of the new developments in VoIP play out in the form of discussion and comment on the website’s forum which has given him an unique insight into the workings of the VoIP industry.

TD I understand that for many of us there was life before VoIP and that you were in the legal profession. How did this enormous career step change come about?

DE Organically. 16 years of corporate law has its way of taking toll on you. I always maintained an interest in technology and looking back that’s really where my heart was. The defining moment happened in 2000 when I originally built a GSM conferencing system for two-way radio. VoIP User came about because of that in 2003.

TD VoIP has gone from being in the domain of the technology enthusiast (quite a long time ago now) to being mainstream. Has the growth in voipuser.org subscribers reflected this and how has the nature of the discussion topics changed in this time?

DE That’s an interesting question and one I re-visit myself from time to time. VoIP User has experienced a growth rate average of 50 new members/subscribers per day and it has not deviated from that in 6 years. It’s still the same as it was at day one. I’m not sure I can explain the reason why, other than to say that I feel VoIP User is an attraction to the early adopter and this maybe represents the rate of growth in the early adopter space.

We have noticed a change in the discussion topics to more mass market type threads however. I’ve noticed that in particular in the business space – a lot more IT professionals realising they are having to become PBX specialists due to the fact that telephony is more and more falling into their remit. These days if you’re an IT manager, that will typically involve you in voice services. 5 years ago that was a role relating to PC hardware and software management. That’s a change which is very obvious when you look at some of the threads in our Business Forum.

TD Would you say that you had had a scoop of any kind on voipuser?

DE Several over the years, but recently as we’ve become a bit more mainstream we tend to get embargoed. I had the scoop on GrandCentral/Google Voice back in December but was asked (very nicely) not to publish as it would interfere with Google’s marketing plan. So I obliged which is what we typically do. We do not wish to be seen in the same light as traditional media – we’re not here to interfere with marketing plans, we’re here to inform users. So with that one we waited until it was public and then talked about it. What I did do was have a detailed piece pre-written and ready which sat on my laptop for about 2 months awaiting the go-ahead. I prefer it that way. Making scoops can mean making enemies of marketing directors 😉

TD In the early days VoIP service providers had pride of place at conferences such as Voice on the Net (VON) and would attract the attention of every single device and handset manufacturer in the world. Nowadays there are hundreds if not thousands of ITSPs and almost as many device manufacturers. Do you think that it is too late for new players to get in the game.

DE I don’t think being too late is the issue; I think the issue is understanding what “the game” is. From my perspective there are huge opportunities. For example, the compliance and regulatory space is wide open. Life is getting tougher on lawyers and accountants to produce audit trail evidence of conversations.

There are plenty of ways that a niche specialist could build a business in that space alone and there is precious little out there serving that customer base. I think a product that serves those specific industries and integrated SMS and voice call trails into existing systems (MimeCast for example) would do extremely well.

That’s a simple example of providing a solution to a very real-world problem and I still feel there is scope for that approach in this space. Niche yourself, attack a specific market and do it extremely well. Long gone are the days of wanting to be the next Vodafone or IPO or Skype level sale, but that’s not to say that there is no room left. I think there’s plenty.

TD What in your mind have been the major milestones in the VoIP industry?

DE I could say the obvious – Skype sale to eBay, ubiquity of broadband and of SIP etc. But the truth is I don’t feel we’ve really seen any major milestones yet from a consumer perspective. VoIP as a technology is still yet to prove it’s value in terms of offering advantages over TDM.

At the moment it remains an alternative technology for voice and that’s all (with most providers playing on the cost-saving end). It’s not yet become an alternative *product* in it’s own right. That needs to happen. That would be a real milestone.

TD What is the recipe for success for a VoIP business today?

DE  Understand your customer. Release products that are a direct reaction to their specific requirements or solve their specific problems. Don’t release products or buy other companies simply because your engineering department thinks it’s a “cool” technology.

Technology is meaningless without a valid product reason for its existence and a sales channel to get it out. We saw a lot of meaningless and/or cheap minutes plays in 2008. The only things that people will buy from you in 2009 are products that solve specific problems your customer or target market is experiencing.

Martin Geddes (BT Director of Product Strategy) is someone that understands this very well. His headline statement is “People are expensive, minutes are cheap”. If you can get an employee off the phone 20 minutes more quickly then your customer (as an employer) will be quite happy paying you 5p/minute more than your competitor is charging because the customer saves real money, not pennies. That’s where the profits lie in this business, not in cheap minutes. If you’re in the latter space, watch out for the price wars and high customer churn rates. VoIP as a technology is actually an enabler to doing clever things like call avoidance and dynamic call control and routing.

TD VoIP has come a long way since the beginning. Quality of Service has all but disappeared as an issue and we are now starting to see VoIP calls with much better sound quality than traditional PSTN calls. How much farther do you think VoIP has to go?

DE I’m not convinced that QoS has all but disappeared. I still have clients experiencing this issue today when not in control of the last-mile of connectivity (where most of the QoS problems actually arise). Timico solves this problem because you’re in control of that last-mile as an ISP, so QoS is something that you can offer your customer and perhaps it’s therefore something you don’t see anymore. That’s a good place to be in, but many are not in that position and have to look elsewhere for their value adds.

Moving further forward, I think hi-def audio is a good place to be in. That really makes a difference, especially in conference calls or when you’re speaking to people with strong accents or native language differences. The clarity of hi-def solves the problem of understanding someone in those situations. It is something that requires the support of hardware manufacturers though, for obvious reasons, to really come to fruition.

Most ITSP’s that I speak to really want to do hi-def, but don’t have the hardware support to make it possible for their customers. It’s a critical mass/chicken and egg problem but I do think that loop will be broken. Jeff Pulver is going all out to try and break that loop at the moment as you know.

TD Do you think the term VoIP has had its day? The world seems to have moved on to using the term Unified Communications and even this in my mind is inadequate as a description of the experience that users are going to get with new communications technologies and tools. How should we be describing this new experience?

DE VoIP as a buzzword and sales point has definitely had its day. If you take 100 consumers and ask them what VoIP means 95 of them will respond with “Skype” in the sentence. The other 5 are early adopters/technology enthusiasts. Skype achieved that brand position by productising the technology. Unified Communications is an inadequate expression only because the 95% don’t understand what you mean. Nobody has productised it yet.

If you say to an accountant that their voice calls can be logged into the same compliance system as their email they’ll understand the point and see the value to them. That’s what productisation is. I don’t believe there is any single expression that will make that point to the mass market. Like Skype, I believe this movement will be product-led and not technology or catch-phrase led. There is an opening right now for a brand to immerse itself into the UC space in the same way that Skype immersed itself into the VoIP space or Google in the search space.

TD We do live in a world where volumes are almost the be all and end all. Who do you think will be the major players in the global VoIP game. A couple of players seem to be nosing ahead of the pack, in the consumer market at least.

DE I only see one player ahead of the pack at the moment in the consumer space and that’s Skype. Everyone else, as Jeff Pulver remarked at the ITSPA 2007 event, is “just noise”. Whilst there is money to be made in the noise it’s becoming much harder in the economic downturn that we’re experiencing. I honestly don’t believe for a moment that many of the tech-household names that we know in this space will be around in Q1 2010. I still feel the market is wide open for a clever product play and I think it will take that to ensure survival.

TD You personally produced an embedded client for Truphone for Facebook. Where else are we likely to see such clients and will we recognize them as such? Is the VoIP enabled fridge any nearer happening (it being one of the trendy futuristic uses of VoIP for almost the whole 10 years I have been in the industry).

As soon as the VoIP enabled fridge is available you and I will be buying one, so there’s two customers! I don’t think we need to recognise what they are, as consumers, I think we only need to recognise value in the product. We don’t really care what’s driving it or how it works, just that it adds value somehow. If that value is simply that I can make hands-free calls from my kitchen then that’s great. That might be all that device needs to do to satisfy me as a customer. In that case it could be my toaster – we don’t have to stop at fridges!

I do think we’ll see more voice oriented applications within the social networking space and there is definitely an opportunity to be capitalised on there. Second Life is currently routing one billion minutes per month between its users, for example.

TD Where is it all going?

DE Voice minutes are a commodity. I think many business models exist with a long history that shows us what happens when a service gets commoditised so we don’t really need to guess, we can just look back.

Aviation is one such example. When you look at times in history when the airline industry has hit rock bottom (through price cuts in times of trouble), a few go bust, several consolidate and a scarce few do well. The ones that do well are the ones that are selling an expensive service with a value add. They rise above the commodity price by adding value to the raw service.

During a terrible climate for the aviation industry between 1999 and 2003 the airlines that did well looked at user-experience and made changes there. They did video on demand. They created rapid check-in processes. They saved you time (see Martin Geddes quote above) and gave you good in-flight entertainment which meant the time you had to spend (in flight) at least had some value. A good end to end user-experience.

That’s all they needed to do to pursuade flyers that it was worth spending the extra money to fly with them. They started selling expensive airmiles, coupled to value-adds focussing on the value of peoples time.

I see the telecoms industry going the same way. But while everyone else is jumping on to the cheap minutes bandwagon and causing commoditisation the best thing to do is the opposite. Be in the expensive minutes business with a value add and great user-experience that saves your customers more money than cheap minutes alone. All of this really just equates to recognising the value of your customers time and recognising that VoIP is a technology that has the capability to rise above the low-end proposition of cheap minutes.

Categories
Business internet

#G20 summit security kept crowds away

The G20 summit has been all the news this week.  I had planned to go to a Networking Brainstorming Breakfast co hosted by my friend @JeffPulver,  @PaulWalsh and Lauren Feldman.

I was concerned that the level of security surrounding  the G20 would be prohibitive for travelling to London but I went anyway and to my surprise there was no one in town!  No traffic, no queue for the taxi, no problem:-).

This was my first time at an event organised by Paul Walsh and I was pleasantly surprised.  85 or so people turned up with an impressive roster of CVs from the new media and communications community. 

Now here are some interesting stats:

all of the attendees were on twitter – no surprise there
45 of the attendees had their own blog  (I even met some who read this blog which was quite pleasing)
40 of them were either founders or CXO of businesses
Ireland and the USA was represented as well as the UK

A significant number of people present, a third maybe, were in the media and pr game with a slightly lower count from the communications/telecom world.

I met some interesting people including @dailytwitter, @jobsworth, @stevekennedyuk, www.patphelan.net, Andy Evans of NetCommunities and others.

I can’t tell you where the new world of communications technology is taking us but I can tell you that there is a lot going on in London in this space right now.  It is like the VoIP industry was back in the late 1990s.  Many newbies,  many of whom will fall by the wayside but some exciting new businesses will come out of it.

Categories
Business internet social networking

140 Characters Conference – pulver on twitter

I spent some of this morning with our marketing team discussing our twitter marketing strategy.  This is a very new field and it is interesting to see how people go about getting exposure on the site.

For example I get people I’ve never heard of signing up as followers.  This prompts me to take a look at their profile and as often as not I sign up to follow them.  Voila – their marketing approach worked. I was amazed to see people with 20,000+ followers – who were following similar numbers.

Jeff Pulver, who has appeared before on this blog has launched a call for speakers for a new conference called the 140 Character Conference (if you don’t understand where the name comes from I’ll explain offline 🙂 ).

This is perfect timing in my book.  I could have done with it before our marketing meeting this morning because we were learning it and making it up as we went along – “it”  being the science of twitter based marketing. 

The conference is in New York New York so it is unlikely that I will be going.  I will however be following it on line, on twitter of course which I successfully did for Jeff’s SocComm conference last month.  Jeff is going after 140,000 online followers for the event. 

You can see the conference call for papers announcement here on facebook or sign up for a place here.

Categories
Business internet

Interview with Jeff Pulver for "Hardcopy", newsletter of ISPA

Jeff Pulver
Jeff Pulver

The Digital Britain report dominates current debate in the UK internet related industry. Its aim is, broadly put, is to promote universal use of broadband and to stimulate the digital knowledge economy thus keeping the country competitive in the 21st century. Although facilitating the plumbing of this digital economy, the Government quite rightly leaves the innovation of new ideas for delivery down the pipes to industry.

New York based innovator Jeff Pulver was a prime mover during the pioneering years of the VoIP industry. He started the Voice On the Net conferences and was founder of the company that evolved into Vonage, the US based VoIP telco. Jeff has since moved his attention to helping to create the wave of the Social Networking technology revolution. Both areas of technology, whilst requiring an underlying network to support them, hinge on the development of new ideas and applications.

TD: What parallels can you see between what was happening in the early days of VoIP and today in Social Networking?

 JP:  Social Networking has been part of the human experience since there was documented human experience. My focus is on the evolution of social communications, something I call: SocComm and what happens next as the world shifts from a dial-tone generation to a presence based one.

Back in the early days of VoIP we had dialup and slow computers and limited quality for the voice experience but it did not hold back a generation of people who were hobbyists by night but technology explorers by day who experimented with the technology and understand the power of what it meant when voice could be an application and no longer be a utility service.

I believe the advent of the widespread availability of social networking platforms such as Facebook and twitter are going to have a more profound impact on the future of communications in the next 5 years ahead than what we have seen in the VoIP space in the past 15 years.

TD: Aside from the by know well known business models associated with advertising, where do you see the moneytization of Social Networking?

JP: I am not a fan of pushing business models into nascent industries. Business models are disruptive to innovation and should never be forced into an ecosystem. What we will see emerge is another example of how disruptive technologies change the face of business in ways that were obvious to some by blindsided by others.

I believe presence will be moneytized with the advent of social communication. Presence will emerge to be a 25 billion dollar business.

TD: The battle against regulation of VoIP in the USA has been a feature of your career activities over the past ten years. Is there a similar debate to be had in the space you are in now?

JP:  The fight is about to begin. Any platform which attracts 175 million active users (and growing) will get the attention of the government. My challenge is to see this space remains regulation free for the foreseeable future. (Maybe this is the foreshadowing of a future unannounced statement from me. hint hint)

TD: The UK has traditionally been strong in the production and delivery of content such as music and TV and this is recognised as a strength that our Government wants to maintain. Do you see any signs of internet innovation coming out of the UK in other areas?

JP: There were other signs in the late 90s and the post dot-com bubble but at the moment there are not a lot of hi-tech UK companies on my personal radar. I would like to change that.

TD: Can you paint a picture of life in the new Socially Networked world

JP:  It is world where people are more real, we know the identity of the people we are communication with and a world where each of us contribute daily to the social sculpture known as the Internet.

TD: Whilst initially slated as a consumer oriented technology, Social Networking has now been adopted by large corporations as a marketing tool. Do you have an example of where this has worked successfully?

JP:  Just ask the CEO of Zappos – @Zappos on twitter. They did a billion dollars in sales in 2008 and they have just about their entire organization focused on social media and on twitter. The Blue Shirt Nation of BestBuy is another example. This is the case where BestBuy launched their own internal social network for 130,000 people. These enabling technologies can and will change the world.

TD: Thank you very much for your time Jeff. You have had a punishing travel schedule over the past few months promoting Social Networking and have now started to raise the bar with conferences such as SocCom. Please accept my best wishes for the success with this activity.

Thanks for the opportunity to be read today. If you would like to learn more about my activities, please visit my blog – http://jeffpulver.com/ and follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jeffpulver .

Categories
Business internet

Interview with Jeff Pulver for “Hardcopy”, newsletter of ISPA

Jeff Pulver
Jeff Pulver

The Digital Britain report dominates current debate in the UK internet related industry. Its aim is, broadly put, is to promote universal use of broadband and to stimulate the digital knowledge economy thus keeping the country competitive in the 21st century. Although facilitating the plumbing of this digital economy, the Government quite rightly leaves the innovation of new ideas for delivery down the pipes to industry.

New York based innovator Jeff Pulver was a prime mover during the pioneering years of the VoIP industry. He started the Voice On the Net conferences and was founder of the company that evolved into Vonage, the US based VoIP telco. Jeff has since moved his attention to helping to create the wave of the Social Networking technology revolution. Both areas of technology, whilst requiring an underlying network to support them, hinge on the development of new ideas and applications.

TD: What parallels can you see between what was happening in the early days of VoIP and today in Social Networking?

 JP:  Social Networking has been part of the human experience since there was documented human experience. My focus is on the evolution of social communications, something I call: SocComm and what happens next as the world shifts from a dial-tone generation to a presence based one.

Back in the early days of VoIP we had dialup and slow computers and limited quality for the voice experience but it did not hold back a generation of people who were hobbyists by night but technology explorers by day who experimented with the technology and understand the power of what it meant when voice could be an application and no longer be a utility service.

I believe the advent of the widespread availability of social networking platforms such as Facebook and twitter are going to have a more profound impact on the future of communications in the next 5 years ahead than what we have seen in the VoIP space in the past 15 years.

TD: Aside from the by know well known business models associated with advertising, where do you see the moneytization of Social Networking?

JP: I am not a fan of pushing business models into nascent industries. Business models are disruptive to innovation and should never be forced into an ecosystem. What we will see emerge is another example of how disruptive technologies change the face of business in ways that were obvious to some by blindsided by others.

I believe presence will be moneytized with the advent of social communication. Presence will emerge to be a 25 billion dollar business.

TD: The battle against regulation of VoIP in the USA has been a feature of your career activities over the past ten years. Is there a similar debate to be had in the space you are in now?

JP:  The fight is about to begin. Any platform which attracts 175 million active users (and growing) will get the attention of the government. My challenge is to see this space remains regulation free for the foreseeable future. (Maybe this is the foreshadowing of a future unannounced statement from me. hint hint)

TD: The UK has traditionally been strong in the production and delivery of content such as music and TV and this is recognised as a strength that our Government wants to maintain. Do you see any signs of internet innovation coming out of the UK in other areas?

JP: There were other signs in the late 90s and the post dot-com bubble but at the moment there are not a lot of hi-tech UK companies on my personal radar. I would like to change that.

TD: Can you paint a picture of life in the new Socially Networked world

JP:  It is world where people are more real, we know the identity of the people we are communication with and a world where each of us contribute daily to the social sculpture known as the Internet.

TD: Whilst initially slated as a consumer oriented technology, Social Networking has now been adopted by large corporations as a marketing tool. Do you have an example of where this has worked successfully?

JP:  Just ask the CEO of Zappos – @Zappos on twitter. They did a billion dollars in sales in 2008 and they have just about their entire organization focused on social media and on twitter. The Blue Shirt Nation of BestBuy is another example. This is the case where BestBuy launched their own internal social network for 130,000 people. These enabling technologies can and will change the world.

TD: Thank you very much for your time Jeff. You have had a punishing travel schedule over the past few months promoting Social Networking and have now started to raise the bar with conferences such as SocCom. Please accept my best wishes for the success with this activity.

Thanks for the opportunity to be read today. If you would like to learn more about my activities, please visit my blog – http://jeffpulver.com/ and follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jeffpulver .

Categories
End User internet

Twitter in action at SocComm

I already posted about SocComm which is happening in New York today. Well I just caught up with it via Twitter and I’ve been blown away with what I saw.

You can follow it at the SocComm web address http://www.soccomm.com/twitbuzz.html.

When I looked it was during the government and regulation session and the tweets all address this. The main concern I could see from the tweets was associated with what the US government might do in terms of regulating personal privacy issues and whether this might suppress development of Social Networking.

I was going to say Social Networking Technology but I hesitate to use “technology” because it seems to be much more than about the engine/platform that makes it all happen. It is more philosophical than that.

The information is coming in think and fast. It is really a speed read. Jeff Pulver told me he had 25 twitterers lined up in the audience but I can believe, undertanding the nature of the conference, that most of the audience is Twittering. The conference goes on all day New York time and if you miss it I imagine you will be able to catch up at a more leisurely pace .

PS it is too late I’m sure to invent another word for it but twitter is a bit irritating ! 🙂 .

PPS SocComm has just flashed up as the 3rd most active event on Twitter at this time

Categories
Apps End User internet

Defining Moment In Social Networking

I’ve been conversing on Facebook with Jeff Pulver and am somewhat gutted that lack of time keeps me from attending his SocComm conference in New York this coming Tuesday, 10th February.

Jeff has a lot of experience in running such events and is confident that this one “will represent a defining moment” in Social Networking. His line up of topics is very interesting covering a range of areas such as regulatory, marketing, communications, mobility and investment.

What is also educational is the line up of sponsors, (ZiXi | Vivox | Phone.com | Pathable | Ripple6 ) fairly short this being the first time this show has been staged, but also an example of where people think there might be money to be made in this space.

I’m sure Jeff will be running other SocComm events and I look forward to the time I will be able to attend. In the meantime if anyone who is going wants to give me some feedback that would be great.

You can follow the event on Twitter at #sc09 and #soccomm. Jeff has a team of 25 twitterers lined up in the audience.

Categories
Business internet

Jeff Pulver Social Networking Breakfast & The Death Of Email

I have just been to one of Jeff Pulver’s breakfasts and was completely bowled over with how effective his networking techniques are.  Jeff, as he told us in his speech, is naturally a very shy person. It’s taken me ten years to realise this. In order to overcome his shyness he has developed a technique for getting conversation going.

This involves sticking bits of paper on yourself with a statement about you that is meant to be an ice-breaker. The person you are talking to, during the course of your chat, writes a comment on a small piece of sticky paper and sticks it on a label that you have positioned on your chest, and vice versa. This can be somewhat awkward if that person is a she but hey ho. The sticky note effectively works like the “wall” on Facebook

The point of these breakfasts is not to learn how to network though. Apart from Jeff, who I already know, I didn’t meet a single person who might be described as shy. Everyone there was an entrepreneur and interested in how the whole Social Networking technology movement, if I can call it that is going to change the way we work.

I can’t say I have all the answers although I am working on it. What I did pick up on though was Jeff’s comment regarding the death of the email. He has a point. Most of the younger generation (Y), me included of course, now communicate more by IM and the use of sites such as Facebook than by email.

The Timico Network Operations Centre is not at the Newark HQ and during the day I will have many conversations with the team via IM. In fact I probably only use email to open tickets to get specific jobs done. The team is largely always online whatever the time of day.

This is so much the case that if there are any developers out there working on IM products can I suggest that we need to be able to drag and drop IM conversations into folders. This is how I store emails for later retrieval. I’m not going to patent this idea (it wasn’t mine originally anyway).  Consider it to be my contribution to the open source movement 🙂 .

Many photos were taken during the breakfast so I’ll see if I can get hold of one. I have to say though as a breakfast it was a complete failure.  I was too busy talking to eat anything 🙂

Categories
Business internet

Jeff Pulver Social Networking Breakfast & The Death Of Email

I have just been to one of Jeff Pulver’s breakfasts and was completely bowled over with how effective his networking techniques are.  Jeff, as he told us in his speech, is naturally a very shy person. It’s taken me ten years to realise this. In order to overcome his shyness he has developed a technique for getting conversation going.

This involves sticking bits of paper on yourself with a statement about you that is meant to be an ice-breaker. The person you are talking to, during the course of your chat, writes a comment on a small piece of sticky paper and sticks it on a label that you have positioned on your chest, and vice versa. This can be somewhat awkward if that person is a she but hey ho. The sticky note effectively works like the “wall” on Facebook

The point of these breakfasts is not to learn how to network though. Apart from Jeff, who I already know, I didn’t meet a single person who might be described as shy. Everyone there was an entrepreneur and interested in how the whole Social Networking technology movement, if I can call it that is going to change the way we work.

I can’t say I have all the answers although I am working on it. What I did pick up on though was Jeff’s comment regarding the death of the email. He has a point. Most of the younger generation (Y), me included of course, now communicate more by IM and the use of sites such as Facebook than by email.

The Timico Network Operations Centre is not at the Newark HQ and during the day I will have many conversations with the team via IM. In fact I probably only use email to open tickets to get specific jobs done. The team is largely always online whatever the time of day.

This is so much the case that if there are any developers out there working on IM products can I suggest that we need to be able to drag and drop IM conversations into folders. This is how I store emails for later retrieval. I’m not going to patent this idea (it wasn’t mine originally anyway).  Consider it to be my contribution to the open source movement 🙂 .

Many photos were taken during the breakfast so I’ll see if I can get hold of one. I have to say though as a breakfast it was a complete failure.  I was too busy talking to eat anything 🙂

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.