Jeff Pulver has once again given me a reason to believe he is one of the greatest people I know. He is offering scholarships to 20 people to attend SocComm, his latest iteration of future technologies in social media conference, and all you have to do is email him or facebook message him. Here, read it from his blog.

Jeff Pulver is an awesome man. He stimulates my brain, but he does more than that. he inspires hope and even at times awe. I know those are strong words, but in truth there isn’t another person I identify more with, with regard to future thinking in technology. No, that doesn’t mean I have the same great ideas, what it means is I think Jeff has the ability to look further down the road than most and I definitely aspire to that myself.

Anyway, in case you don’t know, Ken and I are friends with Jeff…in real life as well as online. We’ve had some interesting adventures, or misadventures if you’d rather. Don’t miss this opportunity to get in on a conference that will give you more food for thought than you can get any other way.

WTG Jeff!

Technorati Tags: Jeff Pulver, SocComm, scholarships

I keep hearing strains of Huey Lewis and the News singing that this morning as I read Twitter and blog notes – the chatter of Dell and the new “me too” smartphone. Or maybe it’s MePhone. I think they should brand it Me2 given that Dell has never innovated a single thing, but utterly mastered monetizing the me too space, but I digress…

Everyone’s abuzz with the “news” (and what do we call it when it isn’t new, interesting or noteworthy?) that Dell may be entering the smartphone market (Dell to sell smartphones or Should Dell Smartphone Tackle BlackBerry or iPhone Fans? or Dell may enter smartphone arena as early as next month).

It struck me that this is normal, natural and something easily forecast years ago. It’s not newsworthy or revolutionary in an way.Think about it. Think about the computer evolution, a natural evolutions with a twist or two along the way.

Let’s start with a visual and talk through some evolution:

In the beginning there was the mainframe, and it was good. A direct descendant of the stone age computer shown on the far right, the mainframe weighed tons and required a safe environment. And as was noted at the time, there would never be a need for more than perhaps ten of these in the world.

Times changed and the System 36 behemoth from IBM begat the AS400. Mainframes began a trend toward what gradually became known as minicomputers. And they were good too. Vendors made minicomputers in different flavors and variety became the spice of life, just as the lack of interoperability became the bane of our existence.

Time passed and minicomputers shrank further to become microcomputers. The wizards in marketing quickly figured out that the market could be enlarged by humanizing these intimidating electronic devices – by making them personal. Personal computers became the trendy pet of the day – expensive to buy, feed and maintain, but oh so trendy. Vendors proliferated and the names got sexier. One could become the love of your life – I think her name was Lisa.

Compaq, one of the many manufacturers in the market, introduced something powerful and compelling.

Yes, at a mere 28 pounds, portable computing was born. If you wanted to be the envy of business travelers everywhere, you had a computer to carry with you. (Aside – I did. It was neither fun nor productive. It was like carrying a boat anchor)

But competition for money drove the sizes smaller and smaller. We saw laptop computers become notebooks. Smaller was sexy. Smaller was actually more useful and productive (yes, useful tools are a byproduct of manufacturer competition for market domination). Now they’ve become netbooks. Small. cheap computers we can carry more easily.

In the evolution, we also so divergent paths converge. As computers shrank, the idea of PDA took hold. Computer networking finally found a standardized framework for sharing information in the TCP/IP protocol suite. At the same time, telephony moved toward mobility.

We saw cellular phones rise, and shrink. Early cell phones were in a shoulder bag. That shrank to a brick. Later it shrank to the Motorola StarTAC, a tiny device at the time. Today mobile phones proliferate and come in every shape, size and color imaginable. They’ve also undergone some standardization evolution in the fight between CDMA and GSM.

Today we hear the term smartphone, and I think it’s a flawed term. Smartphone is a marketing term for what has emerged today as the picocomputer. A picocomputer might used CDMA or GSM for telephony. And it might use EVDO, EDGE or some 3G network for data transmission, but it’s simply the next step in the process we started calling convergence ten years ago. Like everything convergence itself evolves.

Picocomputers aren’t something my mom will buy. It’s scary. It sounds technical. Intimidating. So for the moment we call them smartphones. But they aren’t smart at all. They are simply the convergence of voice and data coupled with the shrinkage driven by mobility and the desire to communicate anywhere at any time. They further fuel the trends we see underway.

CEBP or Communications Enhanced Business Processs is a big scary formal term. So is Software as a Servce (SaaS). So is Software Oriented Architecture (SOA). These are buzz phrases the tech sector uses because they create fear, uincertainty and doubt (known as the FUD Factor). If I as a salesperson can make you afraid, then convince you that I know what all this means, you’ll trust me to some degree. If I’m good, you’ll trust me enough to buy whatever flavor snake oil I’m trying to sell you today. You should know, I’m good. I’m very good.

We hear the term mashup today too. I don’t like it. I think of mashup as simplified FUD. It seems to me like a nice way to make you feel like an idiot so you’ll believe me and buy something from me. “You don’t know what a mashup is? Let me explain.” It’s simply another way of creating industry jargon terms so that we can control the conversation, enlighten you, and sell you stuff. (See the ultimate reference on stuff for a dose of reality when you’re done)

I’m digressing again, but the reality is, the industry uses a cornucopia of words to all say the same thing in a different way. Let’s just be honest. Vendors, manufacturers, solution providers (I suppose we could just call them peddlers) all differentiate themselves as a way to gain consumer confidence to win the sale.

Our world is shrinking very quickly. The Internet is shrinking too. For those in the tech sector, we recall how we used to talk about the Internet in terms of how many servers, how many users, how many web pages, how many networks were connected. That was a great way to build fear and intimidate people. “You need my expertise because I understand just how big and complex the Internet is.“

I’m here to tell you it’s a lie. Wanna know how big the Internet is?

It’s that big. I carry it around in my shirt pocket every day. And every day it gets smaller and lighter, while it keeps getting bigger, faster and stronger in functionality.

What we call smartphones, are simply picocomputers. Isn’t it nice that after all this time, they’re still just a PC? No matter what we call them, they’re just the PC we carry in our pocket or purse or on our hip. For some of us, this PC is already our primary computer.

That means there’s a lot of change in how we work ahead. I believe in three years many business people won’t get a laptop-like computer at work. They’ll get the iPhone/Blackberry picocomputer flavor of the month and it will be their primary computer. Their main tool. People already name them and personalize them. One friend refers to his iPhone as My Precious, which is a little scary.

Our world is shrinking quickly. Geography is losing relevance. Our networks of people are global and diverse. Evolution is natural, and we are evolving.

Some steps in evolution aren’t interesting. Dell entering the smartphone market? Monetizing a known commodity by mass production scaling isn’t revolutionary. It’s simple evolution. Just a small next step. One that proves my point that our world is shrinking.

Technorati Tags: It’s a Small Small World, mainframe, minicomputer, microcomputer, personal computer, pcicocomputer, smartphone

For a long time now the twitter buzz has been kept alive by a myriad of posts beginning with, “Top 10 People to Follow” or “Top 100 People” or “Top…” anything. I did a post like that myself.

This morning I was reading my feeds through Gist. I came across an article which is really the 3rd in a series for the author, entitled, “My Experience with Twitter, Part 3″. It’s an interesting article and one I think makes some good points, but one I’d like to at least engage in a dialog about because I think something is missing.

My Experience with Twitter, Part 3

A few weeks ago, I posted on my experience with Twitter, Part 1.  That post was retweeted by Robert Scoble, the traffic came, got a bunch of new followers on Twitter (welcome folks), and a flurry of passionate comments on the post, including 3 comments from Guy Kawasaki.  Then, I posted on my experience with Twitter, Part 2.  Today, I’ll discuss my final thoughts on Twitter, which includes a quick analysis on the top-100 folks on twitter.
Read the rest of his article here

I do not want to argue or discuss the methods this author used to make an assessment about twitter. He certainly researched more than I intend doing. No, my thoughts are more simplistic and really a question about the value in being considered a ‘Top’ anything on twitter.

Ken and I have seen and used a number of different applications associated with finding influence, such as twinfluence, twitter grader and friend or follow. We check things like this out because like everyone else we’re curious what they do and what the results will be. The problem isn’t in playing around with these applications, and that is what they are, applications not tools, it’s in placing value one something that may not have any pertinence to your life.

So what does that all mean? Only this – Twitter is a fine place to build a network, an exceptionally simple way to communicate with others who are like minded, or at the very least engage with us in conversation. But with regard to the influence of a person, my thinking is that the influence is only inside the specific network we are a part of.

Taking that to the next level let’s talk about network. A network is really just a group of people engaged in some sort of conversation. But the truth about one’s influence has to do more with visibility. Let’s use Euan Semple as an example. Euan follows 393 people as of my writing this post. He has 1626 followers. He has updated twitter 4163 times. His stats are fairly respectable. He’s not looking for undue attention, his network isn’t exorbitant, he definitely engages on twitter without the numbers someone like Laura Fitton, aka Pistachio. Laura has 18422 people she follows, has 16657 people following her and has updated 22647 times.

Why does Pistachio have more perceived influence than Euan? Do numbers really talk? Then I ask the next obvious question, why? You see what I know is that Euan Semple held a senior position with the BBC, having spent a career in that industry. He is a provocative writer, has contacts most of us can only dream of, knows high profile personalities, attends society functions, travels and is a global entity, but Laura is assessed more higly according to twitter statistics. Laura is a consultant who works hard at what she does, but how do the numbers impact her position in twitterland? Why do more people pay attention to her, based on the numbers listed above, than a person who is a known entity in the technological world?

I think it’s back to the old idea of being in the right place at the right time, coupled with the desire to be visible and having intuition about what people find valuable today.

Still, numbers are skewable, and influence subjective. If I didn’t have either Pistachio or Euan in my network the question of their influence on me would be null and void. There would be no influence in my world.

It’s up to you how much value you place on these applications and their results. I think I’ll just keep looking at them from time to time but accept there are limits. And I think I’ll hang onto my association with both Euan and Pistachio, but I’d like to qualify their value in my world. I have not one time had an interchange with Pistachio. Oh, I made a comment or two about something she twittered, but as for actual shared communication, there has been none. Euan and I have shared video conversations, emails, explored new applications using the other as a sensor of sorts,  sent private messages and in general had real conversation. Who do you think I place more value on in MY network? The answer should be obvious, pun intended Euan, and no statistics out there will change that reality.

Isn’t twitter simply the infrastructure to support my network? The value is whatever you place on it. My network is intact and thriving. My influence, not so much, at least according to the statistical data these applications provide.

Technorati Tags: euan semple, laura fitton, shmula, twitter, gist, the obvious

Earlier today we sat in in a really interesting webinar. Our friend Euan Semple interviewed Clay Shirk in a series of questions about community, social interaction and collaboration. It was part of the build up for FASTforward09, a conference about engaging end users. The conference is in Las Vegas, February 9th to 11th.

The conference itself looks fascinating, but it’s another conference we just find we can’t attend.

The MP3 of the webinar call is online in Clay Shirky, with Euan Semple, on social media, collaboration, the future of the enterprise and more.

There were some points in conversation today that are in some cases so intuitively obvious, yet easily overlooked. I took notes, and we’ve downloaded the MP3 so we can listen again and catch portions we missed, but here are some keys I took away from the session.

The problem of the digital divide isn’t as large as the participation divide. Our hardware capabilites about now made it possible for most adults in the world to make a phone call. Mobility is the biggest reason behind this. There are now over 3 billion mobile accounts worldwide.

One driver behind the participation divide is the gap between the legacy electronic grid (especially Internet-based services) and the basic mobile services of voice and SMS. We must design services for people whose primary access to any network is a basic mobile phone. That’s not a 3G iPhone. Making an application work for the simplest user enables the greatest global spread.

In talking about community and collaboration, Euan and Clay brought out some obvious points that we don’t think about. Our typical business structure provides no incentive or reward for cooperation. None. The power dynamic we’ve all be socialized to simply doesn’t drive sharing. We’ve adapted the hierarchical mode of operations that drove early businesses.

On our jobs, we are too busy following process to collaborate. We don’t experience being part of a network. We’re constrained to our local environment. And business sharing tools, like Microsoft Sharepoint, aren’t really collaboration tools designed for sharing. They’re document repositories designed to maintain control and ownership.

Paying people to collaborate doesn’t work. It’s not incentive. Making their jobs easier, making the work go well through sharing is what makes collaboration work. The best way to make sharing easier is to be more open.

Being open presents a small degree of risk, but the payback in both efficiency and effectiveness is well worth the small risk. The sharing technology doesn’t reduce productivity or create problem in business. It abends the illusion of control.

Community is something that is earned through people showing up. We can’t create a community and assign it that label. It simply doesn’t work that way. A community is a community by nature of the people who show up and engage. You cannot create a community and assign members. Pigeonholing people that way is simply assigning workgroup tasks. And size for a community is irrelevant. Community is not about managed or predictable conversations.

Communities of co-creation don’t require linear participation. The most effective ones are a balancd ecosystem between those intensely involved and those barely involved.

In business, we must change the bias from efficiency to effectiveness. One major change of corporate culture has to be lowering the cost of failure to promote new discoveries.Today failure is too painful – the price is too high. The mentality of ROI/low hanging fruit/early wins in business are completely counter to the premises behind social media and cooperation. It’s far better to rack up early losses and learn something. Build portfolio of successful learning by loss. Encourage exploration by savoring losses as learning discoveries.

I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts as some of the ideas filter in to how I think about social media and communications technologies, but I wanted to write them out and share them.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, cooperation, social media, community

We got a really cool email note from our pal Pat Phelan earlier, in his words, a bit of good news. MAXroam and Dopplr have partnered up together to provide an online roaming solutions through Dopplr’s online travel shop.

This is a mashup of two of the best. Pat’s MAXroam has been helping mobile roamers save money and Dopplr is the hottest sharing site for travelers who want to connect with friends and colleagues on the road.

We see this as a real win for both MAXroam and Dopplr. Congrats guys!

Cubic Telecom partners with Dopplr to help travelers save thousands on roaming mobile user

MAXroam, the mobile roaming product from Cork-based Cubic Telecom, will be available in Dopplr’s online travel shop. Dopplr is an online service for smarter travel that helps the world’s most frequent travelers meet up with their trusted friends and colleagues around the globe.

Today Dopplr announced an online store with MAXroam as one of the key products. The store, which is available to all Dopplr travelers, contains a number of special offers on products and services to make travel better.

Speaking about the partnership, Cubic Telecom’s CEO Pat Phelan stated “We’re delighted to be working with Dopplr. MaxRoam’s SIM card will enable Dopplr travelers to save a minimum of 70% on their mobile travel bills.”

Within nine months of its launch in September 2007, MaxRoam had saved travelers more than $1 million on their roaming mobile bill and almost $1.7 million to date. These savings will now be extended to Dopplr members with a Dopplr SIM and website to manage their mobile usage while traveling.

About Dopplr – www.dopplr.com
Dopplr is an online service for smarter travel. Dopplr helps you make more of your travels by sharing your future trips privately with friends and colleagues. The service then highlights coincidences, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Tokyo when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your personal computer or mobile phone. It links with many popular online calendars and social networks.

About Cubic Telecom
Cubic Telecom is one of the world’s first and largest suppliers of travel SIMs, which abolish high roaming fees that are usually charged by incumbent Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).

The company offers a 100% white label platform where MVNOs can customize everything as their own, including having their own branding of SIMs and web portal, plus customized audio prompts and short-codes.

MVNOs can set up multiple sub-distributors, each with their own discrete pricing, and customization, through Cubic’s innovative new offering.

Technorati Tags: MAXroam, Dopplr, roaming, travel, mobility

This is a follow up reminder post, with a reason. This morning we were on a Squawkbox call with our friends and colleagues in the communications industry. Our friend Lee Dryburgh, the guy who’s pulled together the eComm Conference was giving some insights into what’s coming.

Lee announced that they have extended the early bird registration through the end of January, so special pricing is still available.

If you follow the world of emerging communications, you simply have to know that eComm is the event that’s defining the post-telecom era. The world communicates differently today and the old legacy telcos are quickly being left as a distant memory. They’re relics of the past and don’t really have a viable place in the communications world of today.

Lee has assembled a staggering group of speakers (check out the speakers list) and participants, and this event promises to be one of the best events the industry has ever seen. It’s being held at the San Francisco Airport Marriott, an excellent conference site, from March 3rd through 5th. We were just there for an eComm dinner a few weeks ago on our trip to San Francisco.

What is eComm?

Cataclysmic change is facing the multi-trillion dollar telecom industry:

• Telecom is becoming software
• The cash cows of telephony and SMS will dry up long term
• “Phones” are turning into general purpose computers
• Applications innovation is being democratized
• The media industry is converging with personal communications
• Search engines and computer manufactures are encroaching into the space
• The telecom kingdom is fragmenting daily.

It means unprecedented opportunity for those ahead-of-the-curve.

Last year we posted a flurry of 13 live podcast in one day from the
conference because we just weren’t able to attend. This year, to our great unhappiness, we’ll be missing the conference again. We’re very disappointed, but it’s outside our control.

There’s also a special sidebar badge over on the right sidebar to ensure you can always get the discount registration price.

Technorati Tags: eComm, emerging communications, Lee Dryburgh, unified communications, conference

The ITExpo is coming up soon in Miami. It’s one of those pivotal events that Sheryl and I try to get to every possible chance. This time around it just isn’t possible. For us it’s a chance to meet with friends that we rarely see, to catch up, share news and brainstorm. We feel disconnected and out of the loop when we can’t be there, but we just can’t manage the conference circuit right now.

This year, there’s one person in particular I’d like to meet with for a number of reasons. Moshe Maeir from The Flat Planet and I met the first time in 2007 at the now defunct ETel Conference sponsored by O’Reilly media. Sheryl and Moshe have never met, and I’d really love to sit down to some quiet conversation among the three of us.

After that conference, I tagged Moshe as one of the “under-recognized heroes of the voice revolution.”

Here’s what I said almost two years ago:

Moshe Maeir – Chief Flattening Officer at Flat Planet Phone Company

First, let’s give some credit to the title. Moshe’s got the coolest title of anyone in the business. Flattening a heirarchy that’s been buttressed and fortified for over a hundred years in the telecommunications sector.

Moshe was part of Om Malik’s LaunchPad event at ETel, but I met with him earlier in the day. While he was very well received, I found his thoughts much more powerful in one-on-one conversation. Speaking in front of a crowd of talent like we had at ETel is a daunting task, but Moshe’s passion and commitment to enabling near-realtime provisioning of a telephone system is nothing short of revolutionary.

I worked in the telecom industry for years and remember how the deployment of tools like DACS (Digital Access Cross Connect) and the hot technologies of the mid-80’s would enable customers to order, provision, and instantly activate services. Frankly, that was one of a thousand illusions that the legacy telcos promised, but never delivered. At Flat Planet, Moshe’s making that a reality for many customers.

When you think about the ability to provision a new telephone system online, then make it a reality, the environment for responsiveness changes. Automated service, web service and web page integration become reality. Capital investment declines. Delivery intervals (what the big providers call time to market) drop to zero. This is a big change.

And I now count Moshe among my friends. That means I’ll pay much closer attention to what he’s doing over there. And while it still may not quite fit my Americanized pre-conceived notions, he took some time with me so that I can really better understand and appreciate what he’s doing.

Today, I feel the same way. Moshe recently posted this:

The Last Frontier?
Looking back, one of catalysts that pushed me into the telephony business was an article that Harry Newton wrote in 1995. Harry for those of who are not familiar with him was in his previous life the outspoken publisher and editor of the Computer Telephony magazine. As I recall, Harry wrote about the uniqueness of the telephone business, where you can sell the same product for 2 cents or $5 dollars. Newton’s law of telephony pricing (my naming) stated that the exact same “minute” can be packaged and marketed in endless ways with umpteen price points.
[Read full post]

One of the things that is and has remained a key part of the value proposition is the focus Moshe and the Flat Planet bring to the industry. Sure, his post talks about VoIP, but they’re one of those companies who really see VoIP for what it is, a transport mechanism in the infrastructure. They focus on voice service, cost effective delivery, ease in setup, and real value.

This focus on voice service as a value has served Flat Planet very well in the two years since I first met Moshe. And he remains, to me, one of the under-recognized heroes of the voice revolution. In part, that’s because of blowing their own horn and waving a flag with VoIP on it, they simply keep on delivering solutions that work – to business, through political campaigns, across the board.

Moshe will be at the ITExpo. Flat Planet is in Booth 924 at the ITExpo in Miami. If you’re going to be there, you really should stop by, shake hands and get to know one of the thought leaders who puts thoughts into real world action.

Technorati Tags: Moshe Maeir, Flat Planet, VoIP, unified communications, ITExpo

This is a subject I’ve thought about a lot. So far I haven’t been outspoken, but it’s been on my mind for a long time. A long time. If you know me well, you can trace back to the Howard Dean campaign and my conversations with Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager.

Those conversations drove a lot of dialogue over a number of years. You can see what I posted in April of 2006 in Questions for the Would-be Candidates. Those questions cycled, unanswered in my view, through two dismal failures of the Bush administration.

Today is a new day. The first day on the job for President Obama. He’s had a busy day from the news blurbs I’ve seen. He’s not resting on his laurels, and while I fear the public has set absurdly high expectations, I am filled with hope under this new President.

I am pleased to know that, while I’m sure I won’t be completely happy with the choices made and actions taken, the new adminstration has a plan. They recognize the importance of our technologies.

I don’t know any of my friends and colleagues in the tech sector who doesn’t agree that these three ideals will help not just our sector of business, or the US. These are focal points that will help make the world a more connected and communicative place.

While Sheryl and I write a lot about the innovators who are doing leading edge work in the emerging communications space, we also talk with the established major players regularly. One of the questions I’ll be asking all of those major players is what programs they’re putting in place to help ensure the success of these technology plans. And the lack of a strategy to help, is a big strike against any perceived leader in the space.

First up for me is Siemens Enterprise Communications. I’m already coordinating a call with them to talk about their plans. I know they call it their O2 initiatives internally, and I’m excited to hear what they see ahead. Siemens has long been a thought leader in seeing how the future will unfold.

Technorati Tags: President Obama, technology, Siemens, Internet technologies, Internet, communications infrastructure

I love broadband

I’ve been thinking about a lot of different things the past week or so – the pace of life, of change,of technology. It brought to mind a slide I’ve used in a number of past presentations. Sheryl and I have been talking a lot about how people adapt to change…or not; embrace new technologies…or don’t; how companies flourish…or fail.

We’ve drifted into evolution – survival of the species – the most adaptable. It brings to mind a quote by Alvin Toffler:

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”

With that thought in mind, here’s a visual:

It’s a simple theory really. Everything is increasing. There are more. And they’re coming faster. What ever they are layoffs, startups, new technologies, changes – there will always be more at an increasing faster pace. We are spinning up, not spinning down.

I can’t begin to relate that to chaos theory, nor do I choose to speculate that we’re spinning up to the point we’re going to fly apart. But as people, and as companies, the pace of our lifestream is getting more hectic. We need to be more responsive, more proactive, more engaged in what matters.

To do that effectively, we need to make the best use of every tool in our arsenal. For those of us who are mobile, that means extracting every bit of productive value from our Blackberry, iPhone, or mobile computing device of choice. Note, I consciously chose mobile computing device over cell phone. Anyone who’s using a cell phone instead of a mobile computing device of some sort today is on a collision course with 21st century illiteracy.

We have to wring every bit of power from our applications and web services too. In this era of “social networking” (I’m beginning to hate that term for human communications), these tools help us maintain our relationships, both personal and professional. Tools matter, and using them to their maximum value brings a return that can be measured. We can’t just dabble with a tool and be content today.

The tools we use are changing, and new ones are coming faster and faster. Gist and SocialScope are both examples of tools coming and changing quickly. If you think the old tools will help you fight off the danger of 21st century illiteracy, you need to really take a look at something new. You can start with Sheryl’s Conversation with Steve Newman from Gist. Don’t just read her post. Go look at Gist, watch the video she points to, and think about how you aren’t getting full value from your old tools used the old way.

You are not getting full value. Only constant change and embracing new tools and ideas lets us gain greater value. Everything changes. It changes fast. Hang on. There’s a wild ride ahead.

Technorati Tags: change, social networking, tools, illiteracy, literacy, Alvin Toffler, Gist, SocialScope

Yesterday Ken and I had a conference call with Steve P. Newman, CTO from Gist. If you don’t know about Gist, read Kens post here, and then wander over to the website and sign up for the beta.

We had a bunch of questions because we’ve been using Gist for a few days. It’s still in beta, or as Steve suggested, really more of an alpha but they wanted to get all the feedback they could so put it out as beta. We like a lot of what we see already, but the completed product promises a much fuller experience and one we don’t have to tweak so much.

About Gist

They say in business, it’s not what you know, but who you know. At Gist, we think it’s both.

Gist is an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people and companies.

T.A. McAnn, Gist CEO says:

“What people want is smarter collection, organization and dynamic presentation of information. This provides focus and intelligent views of what I need “right now” and, of course, it will be accessible on the web and any mobile device.”

Here’s what Ken and I know. We installed the desktop plugin. It basically accesses your outlook email and gathers all the information on your connections and email and also the companies associated with them. Up to that point it’s kind of like xobni, except it doesn’t live in your email application, it lives on the web.

Why it’s cool for it to live on the web is because all the connections you have also have web associations, well most of them do. Their companies may be web based, they typically have a web presence of some sort at the very least. Think cloud computing.

Gist searches the web for those affiliations and gathers information on all the people, companies, it even searches for images. Further to this, it’s not specific to outlook as xobni is. Gist can also search out gmail contacts and linkedin contacts. It updates and is always scanning to gather the newest information. It doesn’t seem to slow your system down though we did have questions about it’s constantly scanning. Steve said that is being addressed.

When you test in beta, many times the features aren’t complete, or they aren’t refined. Gist is working to refine some things and make it’s application a better fit for prosumers as well as enterprise business. One of the ways they are going to better fit us by release date, is to have incorporated twitter into the mix, which I think is really important.

Some of the things Gist is looking to bring in it’s Version 1 release, which is scheduled for hopefully mid year, google calendar and ical integration. We think this is important. They are also looking at social graph views in a separate tab. The dashboard, as they call it now will be changed to be a proper dashboard not just a reader of sorts.

In this iteration it’s hard to see the full potential, but you can see just enough to know that as Ken implied in his earlier post, it really sort of makes redundant some of the tools you already use by basically mashing them together into one application.

For further information here is a video interview with T.A. McCann and Robert Scoble. T.A. is a dynamic speaker and really captures his company vision well.

Technorati Tags: T.A. McCann, Steve P. Newman, xobni, Gist, Workfast tv, Robert Scoble, linkedin, google, ical,

This morning, like many Americans, we watched the inauguration ceremonies with great hope for change.

This was Sheryl’s first election since moving back to the States, and it was one of the most important of our lifetime. We’re filled with hope for the next administration. Like the rest of the world, we have great expectations.

There was something new today. While we watched NBC on the television (our pal @newmediajim was on the scene behind an NBC camera), we also sat side-by-side with our laptops. This inauguration ceremony was shared actively with friends and colleagues around the world thanks to the efforts of CNN and Facebook.

The online activity is likely to continue through the day. If you haven’t seen this, you should check it out. It’s really the next best thing to being there.

Sure, Jim’s job puts him in the thick of things in DC. And we marvel at his ability to poke Facebook friends even in the middle of everything. Our good friend Neil got tickets and is somewhere in that throng of people. We’re jealous and would love to have been present for this historic day.

               

Social media just leapfrogged into the mainstream in a new way. Those who didn’t experience the shared experience can’t fully appreciate the change. And those who simply don’t “get” social media just lost a few steps in the evolution toward relevance and engagement in the global information age.

What CNN and Facebook did this morning was raise the bar on how social media will be used in the future of politics, campaigns, elections, and events of importance. Imagine the campaign and townhall meetings of the next election. That’s right, it’s inauguration day, but looking four years ahead.

Today, social media changed. It became something new.

Technorati Tags: Social Media, Inauguration, CNN, Facebook, Jim Long, Neil Vineberg

We’re looking at a couple of new solutions we think are going to be very hot. Scorching hot. One, Gist, has been the subject of a lot of buzz on Twitter over the weekend.

Sheryl’s coordinating a call with Steve, their CTO for the next few days. We’re looking forward to working closely with the Gist team, and we’ll be sharing our experiences, and our thoughts about where this can unveil some new ways to maintain our business, social and personal relationships.

I use them all. I used Bloglines. I use Xobni. I like them a lot. While I’ve never used steroids of any kind, here’s the analogy I’ve been using today.

Gist. It’s like a web-enabled mashup between Bloglines, Xobni and more…on steroids.

The other is a new Blackberry tool called SocialScope. It’s in private alpha testing right now, but it has the look and feel of a great tool for using a combination of Twitter and Facebook from the Blackberry. While it’s tad weak on the Facebook side, it blows Twitterberry right off the handheld at this point – and that’s in closed alpha state. We’re anticipating some great stuff from SocialScope and will keep you posted as things progress.

And the coolest thing about SocialScope may be the user feedback. There’s a feedback button built in that populates a message with your Blackberry mode, OS version and all the technical details. It’s a no-brainer to give feedback easily. They rock with how they’ve enabled user feedback

Technorati Tags: Gist, Social Scope, Twitter, Facebook, social networkings

So two posts caught my eye in the past hour. On TechCrunch we see Jaiku Founder: “We’re Not Dying, We’re Morphing”. Stowe Boyd posted Jyri Engestrom on Jaiku’s Future.

Both point to Jaiku founder Jyri Engestrom’s post Signal (and noise) about Jaiku this week. Jyri had this to say:

Soon, anyone, for free and with little effort, will be able to install and modify the Jaiku code, launch it on App Engine, and run their own microblogging platform.  Combine that decentralization with standards such as OAuth and the forthcoming activity stream standards, and what we’re seeing here is the accelerating trend away from microblogging being a destination to microblogging being a pervasive and ubiquitous part of the fabric of the web itself.

Now that’s cool.

I’d love to be kind and charitable, but WTF are you smokin’ Jyri?

Jaiku had potential. Jaiku had the power to squash Twitter quite handily and easily. But the team got so focused on being acquired that the service went stale. Flat and stale. Zero effervesence. And then they got acquired and things got worse. But the paychecks were nice.

In Internet development time, nothing happened at all. Ever. Zero progress. Jaiku died of old age, apathy and general disinterest long before Google had the mercy to pull the plug. It’s pretty common knowledge that what Google wanted was the talent behind Jaiku, which is also some talent from the Nokia past in many ways. Google got what they paid for. They got the talent.

Users got left behind. Jaiku supporters and users got screwed and left in the dust. The message to them? “Thanks for the big paychecks you helped us get from Google. Your community is stuck in a time warp.” They dynamic and magical Jaiku community is gone. The lifestreaming dream that many users saw ahead dried up.

And now, Jaiku’s an open source project where you can roll your own microblogging service and deploy it for a dozen of your buddies and Jyri thinks this is a good thing. And yes, it could have been a great thing a year ago. Could have. Today, it’s yawner. There’s no flogging life back into that horse. It’s dead Jyri. You watched it die, and spitting out feathers like “Now that’s cool.” don’t make it cool. They don’t make it viable.

They just make it more deadpool fodder. Own it and don’t dance around reality. There’s no breathing life back into the corpse that was Jaiku.

Technorati Tags: Jaiku. Google, Jyri Engestrom

There’s a stellar piece of work that’s been popping up on Twitter and other socials sites today. It’s The Winnie the Pooh Guide to Blogging.

James Chartrand presents some of the best wisdom of Pooh in nugget sized tips that really make sense for bloggers, writings, speakers and anyone who’s really trying to make a point

1. “You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”
2. “If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”
3. “You can’t help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn’t spell it right; but spelling isn’t everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn’t count.”
4. “It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like “What about lunch?”
5. “I don’t see much sense in that,” said Rabbit. “No,” said Pooh humbly, “There isn’t. But there was going to be when I began it. It’s just that something happened to it along the way.”
6. “Always watch where you are going. Otherwise, you may step on a piece of the Forest that was left out by mistake.”

Technorati Tags: James Chartrand, Winnie the Pooh, Pooh