Blog – Page 155 – Ross Dawson

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?

By Ross Dawson

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

By Ross Dawson

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

By Ross Dawson

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.

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

By Ross Dawson

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

By Ross Dawson

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.

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

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