May 1st, 2008
Spigit mashes up social software to reveal innovation
Take the idea of community, sprinkle liberally with process, add a dash of prediction market thinking and a soupcon of reputation analysis, stir gently without too much mashing and you have InnovationSpigit.
I really like this idea because it solves one of the main problems facing large organizations attempting to figure which are the best ideas to take forward. How do you find the best ideas and the people behind them? Spigit describes its solution as a ’social productivity platform’ but in reality, it has more affinity to prediction markets and game theory modeling.
The idea behind prediction markets is not new - Google has been using it for years - but systemetizing it in a way that engages people and yet allows for a high degree of success has been somewhat elusive.
In a recent McKinsey round table (registratoin required) that included Bo Cowgill, a product manager at Google, Todd Henderson, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School, Jeff Severts vice president and general manager of Geek Squad and James Surowiecki, author of Wisdom of Crowds, the consensus was that used with care, prediction markets can yield valuable results. Whether you are skeptical or otherwise, there’s no doubting that Spigit has thought through the various issues.
Several features make InnovationSpigit stand out. There is a built in reward system that can be used to hand over real world value. The idea is that rewards encourage greater participation and serve to overcome the 90:9:1 Nielsen rule of participation inequality that bedevils so many social software projects.
Ideas can fall into one of several category buckets so people can see how an idea is progressing or not, providing a Darwinian feel to the service as ideas are played out.
The role of experts in these communities is somewhat murky but InnovationSpigit believes there is a genuine necessity to engage experts early into the game. This is a matter of individual choice but ratings that help identify experts can be used to build reputation as a genuinely accountable and visible part of the innovation process, rather than simply relying on Digg like popularity.
InnovationSpigit can be used across entire business communities and in order to ensure an appropriate level of security, Spigit includes LDAP authentication.
Recently, the company augmented InnovationSpigit with IdeaSpigit, a lighter weight version of InnovationSpigit that allows companies to gather and track community feedback.
Although the company would not name customers, it says eight Fortune 500 customers are either in production or evaluating the product which is offered in both hosted and fully ‘behind the firewall’ versions.
May 1st, 2008
Intelligent search with Attivio
As much as people talk about information relevance in search, it’s not much good unless tied to an activity. Attivio is seeking to solve this problem with its Active Intelligence Engine. Rather than restricting itself to one or a small number of data types, Attivio is providing an enterprise search sieve for multiple data types that can then be deployed to solve specific problems. One example problem might be increasing order value by ensuring finer grained product relevance based on real time market events. Depending on the requirement, data can be taken from enterprise applications, databases, documents and content creation engines like CMS’s.
This is no mean feat but the company believes it has found a way of making search relevant by bringing the fuzziness of search together with the precision of SQL querying. This ideahas led to a product that allows business to navigate and explore data in order to find the most relevant pieces related to the job in hand.
Google doesn’t do this. It presents a range of possibilities but struggle when given complex queries. It cannot for example cluster based on commonalities.
In enterprise environments, search is often characterized by the way people look for related information in the context of events or processes with which they are interacting. In order to make search as relevant as possible, Attivio offers an initial consultancy and then sets up a data mashup agent that learns how people search and the kinds of information they then use. It does this by tracking clicks across all data sources the user groups touch.
Attivio is at an early stage but is seeing strong interest to solve the types of problem outlined above. In its most recent, embedded form, Attivio only takes up 10MB of disk, can index 100 million documents per server with the index typically taking up 20-40% of the source data.
While implementations are presently measured in months, Attivio expects to compress this down to weeks as the service is developed. Current pricing, which depends on the demands made on the system and type of configuration range from $2,000 to $50,000 per month.
April 29th, 2008
Will Egnyte set you alight?
When I first heard about Egnyte I was underwhelmed. How many more file storage systems do we need? That was a gross under estimation of what Egnyte can deliver for the smaller business. Described by Vineet Jain, the company’s CEO as ‘information infrastructure’, the company sees storage as one of an enabling set of technologies that can help the small business save on capital expenditure while providing a way to collaborate in the internet cloud.
Announced earlier today, Egnyte has added continuous backup and business collaboration to its original storage offering while also offering what could be a compelling business model for those companies that routinely share information. Rather than offer per GB pricing, Egnyte has moved to a ‘power user’ and ’standard user’ model, removing all storage restrictions. Power users cost $15 per month each while standard users are free of charge. The difference between the two sets of services is easy to understand from the following graphic:
I can for example see medical practitioners and tax lawyers considering this service as a way of securely distributing and sharing information that might otherwise be contained in large files. Having a service that acts as a continuous backup takes away the pain that arises when hard disks fail.
Egnyte keeps the interface simple and clean by using the well understood notion of file folders. The service has real time indexing which means the entire database of files can be searched within 20 seconds. That’s not stunningly fast for an individual user but good enough for a service of this kind.
Egnyte has built its own infrastructure rather than use alternatives like Amazon S3. Jain says this is because: “Constant uploading and downloading of numerous files becomes expensive with S3 so we felt it weas better to develop our own service layer.”
At present, the company is using direct channels to reach the market and has paying users. Longer term, it believes it needs channel partners and is in current negotiations with three undisclosed distribution channels that cover at least two geographies.
Given today’s buzz is around cloud computing, you have to wonder whether there is a long term market for this kind of service. Jain brushes such concerns aside: “Files are not going away and if you think about it, different media will demand more rather than less file storage. We’re not in the content creation business so we don’t compete with a Google so we’re comfortable this is a service that will last.”
Egnyte is currently self-funded and the company is not currently looking for funding.
April 28th, 2008
Zoho’s pivot and macro capabilities: tipping point?
Today’s addition of VB Macro and pivot table support to Zoho Sheets is possibly the most important step forward for the Zoho suite of business applications.
These two capabilities are top of list for keeping Microsoft Office customers loyal. Pivot tables are extensively used by finance people in all sizes of business as a way of creating complex reports and analyses. Some consultants I know have built entire businesses devoted to this aspect of Excel alone.
Adding in native support for VB macro creation is equally important because it allows users to create re-usable and repeatable processes inside the spreadsheet. An example might be the ability to insert a specified number of rows without disturbing the overall structure. While Zoho admits it is only supporting around 50 per cent of Excel Classes and VBA macro functionality in the current release, the direction is clear.
Once Zoho is able to spread macro capability across its other applications, we can envisage a level of web based process automation that would normally only be available in commercial grade business applications. That holds the potential to be a genuine game changer. What I’d now like to see are app developers like Freshbooks, Twinfield, CODA and FreeAgent pick up the cudgel and use these services to enhance their own applications.
These are not the only improvements which include named ranges (another productivity booster), the ability to hide formulae and freezing panes (usability improvement.) I’m with Zoli Erdos when he says the ability to share within groups is a big winner. It means I can use my business hierarchy to determine who sees what - a small but incredibly important privacy element.
In the meantime, I have to wonder how long Microsoft will stand by and watch vendors like Zoho nibble their lunch.
April 24th, 2008
Zoho’s Chinese bet
Zoho today announced it has entered a white label distribution deal with Baihui for distribution of its applications in China. Today, the deal includes Writer, Sheet, Show and CRM under Baihui’s branding. Assuming the deal works well, then it is understood the arrangement will be extended to include other applications.
This is how the branding will operate:
- Zoho Writer - Baihui Xiexie
- Zoho Sheet - Baihui Gege
- Zoho Show - Baihui Xiuxiu
- Zoho CRM - Baihui CRM
Apart from CRM, which will be charged at 99RMB per user per month from the fourth user onwards, the other services will be free of charge.
It’s easy to forget there is a very large global market. As Zoli Erdos notes:
China…has surpassed the USA as the No. 1 nation in Internet users., so of course it’s a huge market that SaaS providers would love to enter.
Given reported levels of piracy in China for Microsoft software, free offerings make good business sense. What interests me is that Baihui believes the concept of CRM travels to the point where it represents a viable business proposition in China. Assuming the deal is commercially successful, it will give encouragement to other vendors looking for ways to enter the world’s largest business software market.In the meantime, I hope that Zoho will keep us updated on takeup in that geography.
April 24th, 2008
Twitter turmoil: when does it end?
The news that Twitter’s lead architect Blaine Cook and Lee Mighdoll, VP engineering have left should be no surprise. Let’s be blunt. Despite the neutral language used in various posts, they were fired. One has to wonder whether Jack Dorsey is next, especially as he doesn’t seem to understand the problems of scaling the service.
In the past, Twitter blamed Joyent for its outage problems but I suspect that’s not true from things I’ve been told under non-disclosure. More to the point, how can you credibly assert that a service architecture is responsible when outages continue long after you’ve allegedly moved on? As Mike Arrington observes:
Cook was directly responsible for scaling Twitter, and he very much failed in his job. A year ago he spoke
at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference about scaling Rails applications. His presentation
Twitter’s problems are not difficult to understand though it is fair to say the solutions are in the realms of rocket science. From what I know and have heard, the failures arise out of the way Twitter was orginally architected combined with in-fighting about how things should be taken forward. Dumping the two people most responsible for that situation is only part of the answer. A fundamental rethink is necessary. To quote Curt Monash from a thread on Scripting News earlier in the year:
Complex event/stream processing (CEP) could easily handle it at a central site, and then the rest is standard redundancy. What StreamBase does for Wall Street or the spooks is 1-2 orders of magnitude more demanding than what Twitter needs today. (Coral8 can do the same things.) That’s a lot of headroom. http://www.dbms2.com/2008/01/16/twitter-could-e… has some details.
At the time, Larry Dignan questioned whether Twitter needs to be reliable, leaning towards ‘yes.’ Earlier in the week, Arrington went off the deep end declaring that Twitter’s persistent outages may not matter. As we now know, they matter to Twitter’s investors who at least recognize that any hope of monetizing the service rests upon reliability at scale. Therein lies the salutary lesson for all application developers working in this ‘good enough’ service world. If you don’t get it right from day one, admit that early, change and move on.
In the meantime, one has to wonder whether the current management changes are too little, too late. Only time and the adoption of alternative competitive services like FriendFeed will tell.
UPDATE: Larry Dignan offers this opinion:
The big question: If Twitter were built today would it have used the same infrastructure? If the answer is no that means Twitter in its short life is already saddled with legacy technology and that’s a project management nightmare. You only get one shot at an IT greenfield and Twitter may have guessed wrong.
April 21st, 2008
SalesView from InsideView: feature or product?
I’ve had several conversations with InsideView in an effort to understand how its recently released SalesView product fits into the scheme of enterprise applications. Described as leveraging the convergence between social media and enterprise applications, SalesView is designed to provide sales people with fine grained information about prospects. The theory runs that the more information at a salesperson’s fingertips, the less likely they are to waste time and the better equipped they are to handle sales prospects.
SalesView provides sales people with details about who they’re talking to at the point when that information is needed. This will typically occur in a call center but could easily apply to the lone salesperson. It acheives this by mashing up internal, structured sales information from whichever CRM system it is integrated (Salesforce.com or sugarCRM right now with more to come) with some 20,000 external data sources. These sources include paid subscriptions like D&B and Hoovers along with unstructured sources like publicly accessible blogs and wikis. The software then applies some intelligence to ensure the aggregated data relates precisely to the person concerned.
According to the company, headline customers like Ariba, Cisco and SuccessFactors are enjoying high ROI by:
- Making sales strategy faster and more efficient by standardizing the prospect identification process
- Accelerating lead qualification
- Huge reductions in pre-call research efforts/cold calling. Salespeople connect and engage with the only the most targeted, researched folks. Rearden Commerce’s inside sales reps were able to up their sales call throughput to make more than 60 calls per day.
- Customers are able to build a single dashboard that provides insight into sales performance and other benchmarks from data already stored with sugarCRM or Salesforce.com rather than needing multiple tools and processes
In discussion with the company, I wanted to figure out why a CRM provider would not simply pick them off. Rand Schulman, CMO of InsideView was unequivocal: “CRM providers are not a threat to us. By adding a technology layer that intelligently presents information, we’re more like a meta-content provider across the horizontal application. If there is a threat then it’s either the search or content people.”
In keeping with current trends, there is a free version that provides useful if limited capability. The solution is only useful for US prospects although the company says it plans to move into European markets over time. That will present significant challenges as data sources are more restricted in international markets.
It is early days for content providers moving data into the CRM space. The fact InsideView has found value, added 65 customers in Q4 2007, has 125 customers in total and more than 1,000 seats suggests this nascent market has some distance to travel before it becomes highly visible. In the meantime, the company, which has raised $8.4 million is working towards a B round.
April 17th, 2008
SocialText moves the collaboration goalposts
I caught up with Ross Mayfield, president of SocialText today to discuss its new products, SocialText Dashboard and SocialText People. Ross believes that wikis are the foundation for collaboration within the enterprise and that Dashboard and People represent the next iteration in the way people will work. Rafe Needham says this version represents SocialText’s efforts at including social networking features. While that statement is true, it belies where SocialText is going with its software and how it goes to market.
Stepping back a moment, it is clear that business is not going to get to Enterprise 2.0 by implementing a list of features like blogs, wikis, RSS and so on. While they represent facets of how an enterprise might collaborate, they need bringing together in a way that allows business to solve a multitude of problems. It is for that reason that SocialText has created four solution set scenarios. According to the press release:
- Collaborative Intelligence for sales and marketing, as implemented for market leaders including Humana and SAP
- Participatory Knowledgebase for service and support, as implemented for market leaders including Symantec and Microstrategy
- Flexible Client Collaboration for professional services, as implemented for market leaders including MWW Group and CoActive Marketing Group
- Business Social Networks for partners and customers, as implemented for market leaders including United Business Media and Epitaph Records
The solution sets represent ways of using SocialText for specific problem types. We discussed for instance how Business Social Networks might be used in supply chain situations as a way of assessing supply chain partner performance for future product assembly.
SocialText is adopting a similar approach to that of Jive, HiveLive and others by putting people at the center of the technology offering. In its case, SocialText provides a lightweight tagging capability so that people can create internal social graphs that track individual and group activity such that patterns of behavior can be discovered. In the enterprise world, who is editing what or commenting where is important at many levels. For instance, understanding how particular people are behaving helps surface talent and could be used as a way of reputation hunting.
SocialText is also including a clutch of widgets that can be loaded into the dashboard. These include a list view of Salesforce.com generated prospects, a Newsgator widget and Google News news alert. I will be interested to see whether the likes of SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft recognize the value of mashing up information included in SocialText Dashboard (as an example) with transaction data. That could provide significant efficiencies in both service and supply chain operations where the ability to connect with people inside business processes but across organizational boundaries usually requires going outside the process to an email system.
SocialText is on to something here. It is elevating the notion of the wiki to something that has demonstrable and obvious business value. It is now up to the big transaction engine providers to get with the program and leverage these capabilities for the benefit of customers.
April 15th, 2008
Coghead Gallery signals new opportunities for developers
Paul McNamara, Coghead’s CEO briefed Phil Wainewright and I the other day about today’s announcement of the Coghead Gallery. While the concept of code exchange has been around for a while, to date there’s not been an efficient way for the small development shop to discover code it might wish to re-use in larger applications or distribute.
McNamara claims that the smaller development shop, which he defines as 2-20 people, rarely has the capital required to establish itself as a provider of anything other than custom code. As a consequence, it is often difficult for these shops to break out and provide applications into the general market place. Coghead is endeavoring to change that with the Gallery, supported by extensive infrastructure based on Amazon web services.
While Coghead doesn’t meet the full definition of platform as a service, it is going firmly in that direction with its Gallery offering. Coghead offers two models for developers to select. The first is what it calls an ‘open definition’ where developers offer code that others distribute, modify or use. This leans towards the open source model of computing albeit within the framework of the Coghead services platform. McNamara is keen on this model as he believes it paves the way for small shops to acquire code they can then mashup or extend to business specific applications for targeted markets.
The second model: ‘protected definition’ allows the development shop to protect its IP and use Coghead as the storefront through which its applications are sold. McNamara says that customers can switch between both models and is enabling that through a BSD style of license.
Since Coghead is providing the infrastructure, I was interested to learn how it plans on protecting both itself and its customers from developing rogue code along with potential Amazon outages.”We architecturally constrain users to prevent out of control processes such as a recursive action that ends up spinning a lot of threads. We can detect and kill those and notify the developer. We’re replicating to S3 so if there is an Amazon outage then the only impact is on the replication service,”said McNamara.
Coghead’s business model is based on the assumption that as we move towards cloud computing, that applications will migrate towards being lighter in weight, with fewer features and requiring zero infrastructure. While the idea makes sense, developers will need to be laser focused on their target opportunities in order to turn this idea into a viable business.
April 14th, 2008
Project execution gets more social with Clarizen
Project management is an art rather than a science and that software to manage projects exhibity many problems. Clarizen hopes to change that with version 2.0 of its service. Rather than concentrate on project creation and forecasting (which never goes to plan), Clarizen attempts to keep projects on track by managing the execution element from a people rather than task oriented approach.
Rather than compete directly with Microsoft Project, Clarizen hopes to appeal to a much broader audience than the usual tech centered suspects. According to CEO Avinoam Nowogrodski:”We see a wider variety of potential customers outside IT or professional project managers. We’re thinking of marketers and manufacturers who need to work in teams but don’t necessarily need the cost or complexity of a Microsoft Project.”
Sarah Perez recently wrote a comprehensive round up of the new features. I’m more concerned about usability and adoption.
Clarizen has its own internal ProjectMail feature that allows users to notify others about progress and to receive updates outside the application. This means some users need never touch the app and so don’t need to pay for its use, which at $50 per month is fine for small teams but becomes uncompetitive once you get beyond say 20 users. Today, pricing across many of these types of application is in what I would call ‘early adopter’ stage so while Clarizen is attractive, it will need to figure out a business model that allows for negotiation in large rollout situations. The company says that today, it is looking for those companies that can progressively roll out the application. ProjectMail is part of that strategy, allowing users to ’sniff’ the application before they buy. While there is no ‘freemium’ model, there is a 30-day trial. That should be enough for people to get a good idea of what Clarizen can do for their business.
Many of the features are very easy to use, a big plus for software that can get very complicated, very quickly. I like for instance that users can easily attach notes to tasks, that it has a wiki feel and that managers who need reports can export to Excel. It may seem trivial but these are the small things that matter when thinking about adoption.
Clarizen contains the basics needed to make collaborative project working less of a chore. It has the potential to spread across value chains but I wonder the extent to which different organizations will be willing to give up their existing tools for this kind of service. It is a natural for vendors like Microsoft to venture into and I suspect that once we see more vendors invading their space, then we can expect to see a wave of consolidation.
Some industries like realty and construction management would be ideal candidates for this type of application. However, to get the best utility, they’d need to have the service embedded into billing processes. That is something the ERP players like Agresso have already done with significant success. Offering this level of integration at the SMB market would be a considerable advantage, especially as Clarizen is a clear step up the ladder from Basecamp and HighRise.
In the meantime, Benchmark Capital and Carmel Ventures think Clarizen has enough potential to throw $7 million at the company. Clarizen has 150 paying companies, including Qualcomm and registered 4,000 customers. That’s a good achievement gien the company was founded in 2006 and operates in a market that only has one brand of significance.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Recent Entries
- Spigit mashes up social software to reveal innovation
- Intelligent search with Attivio
- Will Egnyte set you alight?
- Zoho’s pivot and macro capabilities: tipping point?
- Zoho’s Chinese bet
Most Popular Posts
- Twitter turmoil: when does it end?
- Zoho's pivot and macro capabilities: tipping point?
- Spigit mashes up social software to reveal innovation
- Intelligent search with Attivio
- Zoho's Chinese bet
- Will Egnyte set you alight?
Top Rated
- Project execution gets more social with Clarizen+10 votes
- Zoho's pivot and macro capabilities: tipping point?+2 votes
- Will Egnyte set you alight?+1 vote
- SocialText moves the collaboration goalposts+1 vote
- Twitter turmoil: when does it end?+1 vote
- Jive Clearspace 2.0: a clear improvement+1 vote
- Intelligent search with Attivio+1 vote
Premier Vendor Content Whitepapers, webcasts & resources from our Power Center Sponsors
- ZDNet News Videos
-
Tech news covering the latest in products, conferences and blog commentary, from ZDNet video.
- Watch the latest video >>
- Now Available: Crossbow Beta
-
Crossbow provides the building blocks for network virtualization and resource control by virtualizing the stack and NIC around any service, protocol, or virtual machine. The source code and binaries are available now.
- Download Crossbow beta today >>
- Performance Results: Intel Centrino with vPro technology and Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
-
"Intel® Centrino® with vPro™ Technology and the new 45nm Intel® Core™ Duo processor delivers greater than 2x the performance over older generation Intel® Centrino® components when your system is multitasking.
- View, compare, and get smart>>
Archives
Favorite Links
ZDNet Blogs
- All About Microsoft
- The Apple Core
- Between the Lines
- BriefingsDirect
- The Core Truth
- Dev Connection
- Digital Cameras
- Ed Bott's Microsoft Report
- Emerging Tech
- Enterprise Alley
- Enterprise Anti-matter
- Enterprise Web 2.0
- Googling Google
- GreenTech Pastures
- Hardware 2.0
- Irregular Enterprise
- IT Facts
- IT Project Failures
- John Carroll
- Laptops & Desktops
- Lawgarithms
- Linux and Open Source
- Managing L'unix
- The Mobile Gadgeteer
- On Sustainability
- Rational Rants
- The Semantic Web
- Service Oriented
- The Social Web
- Software as Services
- SOHO Networking
- Storage Bits
- Team Think
- Tom Foremski: IMHO
- The ToyBox
- The Universal Desktop
- Virtually Speaking
- ZDNet Education
- ZDNet Government
- ZDNet Healthcare
- Zero Day
Popular white papers
- Live Webcast: 5 Key Strategies for Making Sales the Engine for Growth AchieveGlobal
- Executive Report: The Path to Sales Effectiveness AchieveGlobal
- Travel and Procurement: The Convergence Concur Technologies
- Avoiding the Compliance Trap for Travel and Expenses Concur Technologies
- One Touch Business Travel and the End of the Expense Report Concur Technologies
- A Step-by-Step Guide to Starting Up SaaS Operations OpSource
The Green Enterprise
-
- A look into the enterprise to explore eco-friendly practices and innovations. In this ZDNet video series learn about what's motivating green tech, and how green technologies are impacting IT. 0:42
-
Harnessing the power of waves
3:13
-
Planting solar gardens
5:06
-
Fill your car for $1.10 a gallon?
1:43
- All series videos »
