Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World – Richard Kimber

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I’m at Day One of Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World, where I’m chairing the plenary sessions and enterprise streams.

Other posts:

Rebekah Horne, head of Fox Interactive Media Australia and Europe, presentation

Francisco Cordero, GM Australa, Bebo, presentation

CEO panel

Paul Slakey, Google

Enterprise stream – Part 1

Enterprise stream – Part 2

Ross Ackland, Deputy Director, World Wide Web Consortium

Laurel Papworth, Director and Social Networks Strategist, World Communities

Paul Marshall, CEO, Lassoo.com.au

Government stream – part 1

Government stream – Part 2

The Law meets Web 2.0

Conference Twitter stream

Partner event: Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum on 24 February 2009

First up is Richard Kimber, who until recently was Managing Director – South Asia for Google, and very interestingly moved over to become CEO of Friendster a few months ago. Below are some notes from his presentation. Particularly interesting were his broad perspectives on the space from very deep experience, and what’s happening with Friendster in Asia.

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Who is going to take the lead in corporate virtual worlds?

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Since virtual worlds commenced, the promise of using virtual worlds in corporate settings has been evident. The first wave of business involvement in virtual worlds was primarily about marketing and customer engagement – I have written about marketing in virtual worlds and was interviewed on ABC TV about virtual advertising.

From here, a key focus will be how to use virtual worlds for meetings. I have no doubt that in the next decade it will be extremely common to hold meetings in virtual worlds. However those virtual worlds will be a world ahead of what we have experienced so far, being closer to merging high-bandwidth telepresence conferencing with the experience of immersion in a room of people from different locations.

Second Life essentially hasn’t gained ground for eighteen months, maintaining a dedicated core of users, but gaining few new users. The latest news is that Reuters is pulling out its Second Life reporter. Eric Kangel, who used to play that role as Eric Reuters, has some solid advice for Linden Labs on how to grow, including the interesting suggestion to ‘abandon the idea that Second Life is a business app,’ mainly because Second Life is not robust enough for enterprise use.

Since Second Life has been experiencing it’s well-known challenges, I have expected that new companies would emerge to take the vanguard of corporate virtual worlds. This is not to write off Second Life quite yet, which recently launched a corporate meeting offering, but the odds are in favor of new participants taking the lead in this space.

Some of the emerging companies that are looking promising include:

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The Age: Social networking can help business

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The Age has just published an article titled Social networking can help business, based on our Executive Insights into Enterprise Social Network Strategy report, released yesterday.

Much of the article describes the report, and takes some of the executive quotes used in the report. Then at the end, taken from a follow-up interview with me, it says:

Chairman of company Future Exploration Network Ross Dawson said there had been a transformation in the corporate attitude towards social networking over the past year.

“An initial scepticism and caution from executives has now shifted dramatically where they recognise that these can be extremely valuable for helping organisations perform more effectively,” Mr Dawson told AAP.

Some Australian companies were not so positive about using social networking technology in the workplace, Mr Dawson said.

“There’s a lot of diversity in the opinions of senior executives, some are still both extremely sceptical and extremely cautious.”

That’s the state of the nation. There absolutely has been a dramatic shift in attitude by senior executives towards social networks and similar tools in the enterprise over just the last year. However within many organizations there is a strong divide in perceptions, often meaning that relatively little happens.

The pace of change in how executives view social networks certainly suggests that this is not far from becoming truly mainstream in the enterprise.

Launch of the Enterprise Social Network Strategy report: what senior executives REALLY think about social networks inside the organization

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Today we are releasing our next major report, which distils – through unattributed verbatim quotes – what senior executives REALLY think about social networks inside organizations.

Future Exploration Network created the report for IBM, hosting a select group of top executives at a Roundtable discussion, and capturing the key talking points from the conversations.

Download the Executive Insights into Enterprise Social Networking Strategy report.

Enterprise Social Network Strategy

I usually don’t put press releases on my blog, but the one we released this morning gives a good summary of the report:

For immediate release: 20 November 2008

Australian senior executives say social networking has “real power” to change business

The majority of large Australian companies are trialing social networks within their organisations and senior executives believe that, rather than being a waste of employee time, there is substantial value to be harvested from connecting with Web 2.0, a report released today says.

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Gartner on the Distributed Social Web

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Last week I dropped in to the Gartner Symposium in Sydney, and managed to catch the session by David Cearley talking about the distributed social web, one of my favorite topics.

Overall it was a very good presentation, swiftly moving from the basics to a quite detailed view of the distributed social web, including pertinent views on the challenges of data portability. The presentation was entirely from a corporate perspective, looking at how companies should be thinking about integrating open social networks into their websites and customer interactions.

This issue is only now getting onto the radars of consumer marketing companies, and it will be a while before we see significant corporate initiatives in the space, with the social networking platforms themselves still working out where the space is going. However the open social web will become an increasingly prominent topic for consumer-oriented companies over the next few years. David’s conclusion – that the biggest risk is to fail to engage – is absolutely correct.

The style of David’s presentation, as for many research vendors, was to throw out a lot of detail, clearly to convince their clients that they can’t work it out for themselves and need consulting assistance. I suppose this is probably quite true in this particular space, where it’s extraordinary difficult for people even at the center of what’s happening to get their arms around it. However I will have a go myself over the next few months, in creating a successor to the Web 2.0 Framework that will look at the layers of social platforms and how to engage with them.

Below are the notes I took during David’s session:

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Rhetoric and realities of transparency

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In my blog post on financial transparency in start-ups a couple of days ago I referred to a blog post I wrote last year on how Path101 was becoming a ‘naked start-up’, blogging their Monday meetings and being fully open about their business. Nigel Burke pointed out in a comment that Path101 had soon discontinued this, and questioned how much of the supposed transparency was hype. Fair point.

I have put a comment on the Path101 blog to ask them about this – see below.

In short, certainly some of the shift to openness and transparency is rhetoric rather than reality (noteworthy being large companies that are nominally supporting initiatives such as dataportability but are in fact reluctant) . However there is still a very real ongoing trend to openness in business, including in start-ups. Balsamiq releasing its sales and Graham Dawson revealing his iPhone app revenue may be very small examples, but they are far from being alone in being willing to share. I absolutely believe that there are tangible advantages to what I call ‘strategic openness’, and this will be made clear by the leaders on this path.

Comment on Path 101 blog:

Hi guys,



I’m one of the people that blogged about Path101 as a ‘naked start-up’ back in October last year (https://bit.ly/aCeM).



I’d like to know, in what way are you a naked, transparent start-up now? Your blog is now just like any other start-up blog, sharing ideas and promoting yourself, but not giving any real insights into your journey as a company, or any details of your planning, fund-raising or anything else.



Blogging your Monday meetings was a very cool idea. So why did you stop doing that in December of last year?



Did you decide it was a bad idea, or did you just lose motivation to do it? I’m very interested to know.



There’s nothing wrong with being like other start-ups, but it is disappointing to see your early rhetoric of transparency and sharing what you’re learning on your entrepreneurial path quickly disappearing. Hopefully you’ll resume on your original transparent path, or if not others will take the lead on this, demonstrating to others why it creates value to be open.

[UPDATE 1:] Nigel Burke of Rusden who pointed out that rhetoric is not always matched by reality says that he has decided make his start-up naked, at: https://rusdensupdates.tumblr.com/. He says:

Following on from my comments on Ross Dawson’s blog I am moving to becoming more “naked”

I’m hoping to post my objectives, stats etc here at least once a week. I am also opening up my project hub where I keep my to-do’s and milestones; email projecthub@rusdens.com if you’re interested in a log-in.

The aim of this site is to produce feedback and develop relationships with potential peers, suppliers and customers.

Would love to know what you think – email nigel@rusdens.com with your comments

Fantastic.

[UPDATE 2:] Charlie from Path101 has responded to my comment and I’ve replied again.

Detailed financial results from an iPhone developer: what they are earning

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Following my post yesterday on financial transparency my brother Graham released complete sales and financial details for his OzWeather iPhone app. This should prove extremely useful to those who are developing iPhone apps or considering doing so.

Covered in his detailed post are daily revenue data since the app’s release, estimates of development costs, and comparison with advertising revenue from the initial web app.

ozweathersales_20081115.png

The upshot is that Graham is currently earning around A$220 per day from the app, and if sales continue on current trends, he will get a pay-back on development costs of 2-3 months (though in this calculation he has used a per diem rate that is far less than a market rate for his skills).

Clearly the OzWeather app is a particularly high-quality app that meets a consumer need (though it has competitors).

Hopefully more iPhone and other software developers will release financial information, as Graham requests in his post. It makes it far easier for the entrepreneurial community to assess where they should be investing their energy, benefiting everyone.

The ‘Minority Report’ user interface is here

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The film Minority Report featured a user interface in which Tom Cruise’s character controlled computer screens and information using gestures, while wearing special gloves.

This was at the time the best representation of what I have long thought was a natural and inevitable direction for user interfaces. I’ve written about the shift to richer computer interfaces extensively over the years, including featuring Interfaces as one of the three technologies that will bring the networks to life in Chapter 2 of my 2002 book Living Networks, describing New Interfaces as one of the Six Trends that are transforming Living Online, and looking at the future of interfaces in mobile and home environments in the Future of the Media Lifecycle framework.

The film below shows the ‘g-speak’ technology in use. This is still transitional technology that will lead to broadly-used commercial applications, but definitely shows where things are heading.


g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Thanks to Engadget.

Financial transparency drives business results

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When solo developer Peldi Guilizzoni launched web design mock-up tool Balsamiq in July, he promised to disclose his revenues, reports ReadWriteWeb.

He has just announced he has hit $100,000 in revenue in the last five months, with revenue on a very significant uptrend.

I am a big believer in business transparency, absolutely for public companies, and also in many cases for private companies. Transparency is one of the Seven MegaTrends of professional services I described in 2005, one of the Six Facets of the future of PR, central to investor relations, while the naked start-up is becoming more common.

Clearly Guilizzoni is going to make a lot more money because of his financial transparency, given the attention it’s attracting.

Secrecy has its place in business, but it is highly over-rated. In most cases there is no valid reason not to share information, just a disinclination to give away things. We are going to see transparent models increasingly favored moving forward. Certainly I find the reporting and accounts of many public companies to be extraordinarily opaque, giving little insight into the real drivers of business performance (a case in point being most non-US media companies). The most significant result is that investors shy away and shareholder value is lost.

‘Open book management’ is not a new idea, but the majority of companies are slow to shift on this front. I’m toying with the idea of a business model which includes publishing all company accounts on the web – hopefully this will be becoming more common by the time I get to this.

Check out Online Social Networking and Business Collaboration World on 24-25 November (and Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum 2009 on 24 February!)

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The Australian event industry is quickly getting better from what was until recently a very low base. There are more quality events than ever.

A few months ago I was planning to run an Enterprise Social Network Strategy event in early December. Then I found out that a very similar high-quality event was already set for the week before. As such I cancelled my event and rolled what I was intending to cover into my next Enterprise 2.0 conference. I then spoke to the organizers of the November event, AC Events, to see if we could collaborate. We have worked out a great arrangement whereby we are together bringing two highly complementary events to the market.

Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World on 24-25 November 2008 is a two-day conference covering social media for marketing, enterprise and government, organized by AC Events. I will chair the plenary sessions and enterprise stream at this event.

Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum on 24 February 2009 is an intensive one-day executive summit organized by Future Exploration Network on how to create value with Web 2.0 tools inside organisations. It features leading international speakers, Australian case studies, and highly detailed insights into implementation.

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