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Gary Edwards

The suddenly exciting future of enterprise communications | TechCrunch - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...e-of-enterprise-communications

communications enterprise-communicaions Bessemer-Venture-Partners

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Enterprise communications is not a sector that typically generates palpable excitement. In the enterprise, the plumbing is never as exciting as the fixtures, and people spend more time noticing what communications enables than how it’s delivered. It doesn’t help that enterprise communications is often dismissed as slow to innovate, given its high capital costs to deploy new infrastructure and natural monopolies. But this bias is now outdated, largely because software has taken the lead in an industry that was previously hardware-centric. And communications is one of very few markets where startups can claim their share of a trillion-dollar market. Companies like Slack, Fuze (formerly ThinkingPhones) and Twilio have carved out large and growing businesses in new categories to improve the way enterprises communicate. One of the main drivers for this shift is because communications is moving from one of the most closed tech ecosystems to one of the most open. In the era of telecom monopolies and copper wires, only a few trusted wizards actually knew how to build and maintain complicated systems that needed to deliver 99.999 percent uptime. As infrastructure has moved to data, faster networks and the cloud, it has become much easier not only to provide basic connectivity, but also to layer on additional services.
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Mar 16
     
    "Enterprise communications is not a sector that typically generates palpable excitement. In the enterprise, the plumbing is never as exciting as the fixtures, and people spend more time noticing what communications enables than how it's delivered. It doesn't help that enterprise communications is often dismissed as slow to innovate, given its high capital costs to deploy new infrastructure and natural monopolies. But this bias is now outdated, largely because software has taken the lead in an industry that was previously hardware-centric. And communications is one of very few markets where startups can claim their share of a trillion-dollar market. Companies like Slack, Fuze (formerly ThinkingPhones) and Twilio have carved out large and growing businesses in new categories to improve the way enterprises communicate. One of the main drivers for this shift is because communications is moving from one of the most closed tech ecosystems to one of the most open. In the era of telecom monopolies and copper wires, only a few trusted wizards actually knew how to build and maintain complicated systems that needed to deliver 99.999 percent uptime. As infrastructure has moved to data, faster networks and the cloud, it has become much easier not only to provide basic connectivity, but also to layer on additional services."
Gary Edwards

Everyone wants to reinvent email, workflow: Here's what we really need | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...flow-heres-what-we-really-need

email-productivity workflow Cloud-Productivity-Platform collaboration docflow-conversation

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Here's where all these efforts fall flat: These products are all pitched as magic bullets to simplify your work life, but in reality are just another item to sell or keep current customers in the fold. Another reality: These applications are trying to tackle human issues with collaboration and communications. Tech isn't going to fix those communication quirks or cure humans' need to try and keep up.
  • We don't need another tool. We need less of them. We don't need another app to aggregate tech functions. We need to simplify tech functions starting with a bunch of check boxes marked delete. We don't need technology to help us communicate. We need to be taught how to communicate. And we sure don't need more messaging. We need to turn our damn phones off so maybe we can really get some work done or look up and actually talk.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15
     
    "In recent weeks, email and other collaboration and workflow tools are being re-imagined with new interfaces, social components, integrated video conferencing and easy swipes to dismiss messages. To wit: IBM launched  its Verse effort with a snazzy interface that combines, social, email, analytics and mobile nicely. Google floated Inbox , an app designed to help you manage your email better. For the most part, it's effective. Cisco's Project Squared is an app that runs on its collaboration cloud and integrates video conferencing, messaging and other tools. Facebook is pondering Facebook at Work with a news feed and doc sharing. We could go on, but the list of tech vendors trying to deliver a workflow leapfrog is long. And we're not even counting efforts by Workday, Salesforce and others to include collaboration with core business functions. WHAT'S HOT ON ZDNET Windows 10: You've got questions, I've got answers Windows 10 ​How to use Google's new My Account, the one-stop control center for all of its services Security Apple Watch or Android Wear? Neither. Why smartwatches aren't ready for prime time Mobility The tech of Computex 2015 in pictures Hardware Here's where all these efforts fall flat: These products are all pitched as magic bullets to simplify your work life, but in reality are just another item to sell or keep current customers in the fold. Another reality: These applications are trying to tackle human issues with collaboration and communications. Tech isn't going to fix those communication quirks or cure humans' need to try and keep up. We don't need another tool. We need less of them. We don't need another app to aggregate tech functions. We need to simplify tech functions starting with a bunch of check boxes marked delete. We don't need technology to help us communicate. We need to be taught how to communicate. And we sure don't need more messaging. We need to turn our damn phones off so maybe we can really get some work done or look up a
Gary Edwards

Facebook Messenger: inside Mark Zuckerberg's app for everything (Wired UK) - 0 views

www.wired.co.uk/...inside-facebook-messenger

Messaging Conversation Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • It's the job of Marcus, a gently spoken 42-year-old French-born fintech guy, to turn a proprietary messaging app into this all-encompassing platform - essentially, an operating system on which third-party apps, and entire businesses, can be built in ways that lock them into the Facebook ecosystem. The Chinese have already shown what's possible: social media giant Tencent enables 600 million people each month to book taxis, check in for flights, play games, buy cinema tickets, manage banking, reserve doctors' appointments, donate to charity and video-conference all without leaving Weixin, the Chinese version of its WeChat app.
  • "The messaging era is definitely now," Marcus says. "It's the one thing people do more than anything else on their phone. Some people were surprised when I joined Facebook, but it's because I believe that messaging is the next big platform. In terms of time spent, attention, retention - this is where it's happening. And it's a once in a generation opportunity to build it." Or, as Zuckerberg acknowledged in a public Q&A last November, "Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking."
  • Some questioned why the company was competing with its own acquisition, WhatsApp, bought two months earlier for what was then $19 billion (£12.5bn). But over the next year, as WhatsApp remained lean, Messengerfunctionality kept growing - video and voice calls, peer-to-peer payments, location-sharing - even as its use was made independent of a Facebook account.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Messenger Platform." Messenger would be opened to outside developers - initially 40 pre-selected partners, including ESPN, Giphy, Boostr, Dubsmash and Talking Tom - to build new "tools for expression" that would let users create and share content inside the app.
  • But Messenger would also, he revealed, let users communicate with businesses just as if they were friends - through simple conversation threads that would let them "make a reservation, buy something, change shipping information…"
  • There are lots of different ways that people want to share and communicate. In a lot of countries, as much as 99 per cent of the people online will use SMS or send text messages - with people sending 15-20 messages or more every single day."
  • Zuckerberg continues, explains the continuous iterations designed to let Messenger"enable you to express yourself in new ways": photo and video messaging; stickers to help you easily display emotions; geolocation to let you find your friends; Messenger for business; and peer-to-peer payments. Now the Messenger Platform would let people "use creative new apps to have richer conversations". "We expect these improvements to continue making Messenger a more useful and engaging experience for people."
  • People send 30 billion daily messages on WhatsApp alone, according to the company - compared with 20 billion daily SMS messages. Even smaller apps such as Telegram are claiming ten billion daily deliveries.
  • And when people are inside messaging apps, they're not encountering web ads or discovering retailers or interacting with an existing social network.
  • "Facebook, Amazon and Google are all threatened by the way the operating-system owner has control on mobile," says Benedict Evans, a partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz who writes widely on the mobile ecosystem. "It's why the Kindle Fire exists. It's too late for Facebook or Amazon to create an operating system, so Facebook is thinking, how do we create our own layer on that power structure? So it's trying to create its own runtime withMessenger. It's about attention or engagement: do we become commoditised as just another messaging app, or do we do something more profound? T
  • service discovery: you put stuff inside a messaging app, so you have social as part of discovery
  • Can you turn this into a discovery acquisition channel, which is what Facebook on the desktop became?" 
  • WithMessenger, everything you can do is based on the thread, the relationship. We want to push that further."
  • Transforming interactions with businesses represents "the first baby steps in a series of millions of steps," Marcus says. "Even calling a restaurant is complicated - but when it comes to calling an airline to change a booking, it ranks with a visit to the dentist - it's painful and nobody wants to do it. And email is completely broken. Look at the traditional e-commerce journey: you go to a website. You have to create an account - that's one email. You add something to your shopping cart and check out - that's another email. The package ships - that's another email. When it arrives, that's another. That's four emails that are distinct threads that are not canonical. And the only thing you can do for interactions inside an email is click on a link and go to a website, where you have to re-authenticate. It's painful on desktop, it's impossible on mobile. That's why, for the majority of online retailers, north of 60 per cent of their website traffic is mobile - but only ten to 12 per cent of checkouts are mobile. And mobile traffic will continue increasing.
  • So the thought is, what would those interactions look like if the web and desktop had never existed?"
  • Messenger's answer is to enable businesses and customers to communicate through conversation threads that its 14-person product team calls "interactive bubbles"
  • Once you interact with a business, you open a thread that will stay forever. You never lose context, and the business never loses context about who you are and your past purchases. It removes all the friction."
  • "There are certain conversations that can be handled by an AI quickly and easily - forms don't work on the mobile web, free search is hard," Chudnovsky says. "AI can solve those pain points for you. You'll say, 'I want the cheapest flights from New York to San Francisco, what are the options?' And if you're not satisfied with the results, you can get a human to help. If we do this right, it becomes your primary interface for getting your tasks done. That sucks in a pretty big part of intent."
  • When you're a business that generates most of its revenues from advertising, it's just a better business," he says.
  • "eBay takes a cut of every transaction and listing; Alibaba does all that for free, and makes money from advertising. Alibaba is bigger than eBay and Amazon combined, and is growing much faster. We take the same approach.
  • We want the maximum number of transactions on the platform, while enabling the best possible mobile experience for commerce. The margins on payments aren't that high, and we want the broadest reach. Businesses will want to pay to be featured or promoted - which is a bigger opportunity for us."
  • Julien Codorniou
  • Codorniou, 37, now Facebook's director of global platform partnerships, runs teams in London, Singapore and the US who have brought in the initial Messenger partners such as Everlane, Boostr and YPlan.
  • Michael Preysman, Everlane's CEO and founder, sees value in "a more human one-on-one dialogue that you can track over time, unlike email, which goes into black holes.
  • Marcus reflects on the hours we spend interacting with businesses. "If you can reduce that time and increase delight, if we can increase the fidelity of the conversations with those you care about, then Messenger will be a very important part of your life."
  • "What's happening in Asia is an inspiration - and not only WeChat," says Chudnovsky, "but that's more about proof of what's possible. It's proof that everything starts from a conversation.
  • The trouble with platforms is that they, rather than the businesses built on top, set the rules.
  • Zynga was once the world's biggest social-gaming company; then Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm to limit how it could promote its games. Yet Facebook's reach is hard to ignore: last year, the company says it drove 3.5 billion app installs across desktop and mobile, and more than five billion pieces of content from third-party apps were shared on Facebook's platform.
  • And yet… the platform's interests will not always align with those of the third-party businesses that rely upon it. Marcus dismisses the risk. "Every business is building on top of other platforms, whether iOS or Android,"
  • It's owning the existing identification platform that gives Facebook a distinct edge.
  • "Plugging in GIF-makers into Messenger - OK, that's interesting. But turning it into a universal notification platform for the web - that's much more interesting
  • We live in a world shaped by the web on mobile, but web is a desktop, not a personal experience. We see the world as people-based. If we can recreate that, it reinvents mobile interactions from the ground up."
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15
     
    ""As Messenger has grown, we think this service has the potential to help people express themselves in new ways, to connect hundreds of millions of new people, and to become a communication tool for the world," Zuckerberg told 2,000 developers at his company's F8 conference in San Francisco in March, as he announced that Messenger was becoming so much more than just an app. "Helping people communicate more naturally with businesses will improve, I think, almost every person's life because it's something everyone does.""
Gary Edwards

What Salesforce's acquisition of Quip means for enterprise software startups | TechCrunch - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...r-enterprise-software-startups

Productivity Enterprise-Productivity SaaS Quip Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • So which startups are gunning to take Quip’s place? The answer is surprising: none. There are hundreds of task/project management apps and dozens of communication platforms, yet full productivity suites are few and far between.
  • Sure, there are solutions like OnlyOffice, Zoho Docs and Polaris Office, but these can hardly be considered startups. That last part is important because startups, with their fresh outlook and high risk tolerance, are the true drivers of innovation.
  • Meanwhile, enterprise giants will continue snapping up these enterprise software upstarts to bolster and innovate higher-performance offerings in an attempt to provide customers with a seamless, uninterrupted workflow.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Enterprise software spending is on an upward trend, and is expected to reach $326 billion this year; meanwhile, startups and investors have taken notice. There are currently 1,425 active startups in the space — as listed by CrunchBase — and there’s been an influx of venture funding. According to PitchBook, venture funding of enterprise productivity startups has more than doubled, from $4.75 billion in 2012 to $11.46 billion last year. This year, these software startups have already raised $6.26 billion to date, and the median deal size is up 25 percent compared to 2015, reflecting current market demand and investor appetite. With investors hot on enterprise startups, the market will become more fragmented and saturated than ever before. End users are already inundated with dozens, if not hundreds, of similar software solutions, each which focus on filling one specific business need as effectively and efficiently as possible.
  • In an environment where the biggest technology leaders are looking to startups for new innovation and transformation, there will likely be a coming spike in M&A activity. A historical analysis of CrunchBase data reveals an ongoing trend: enterprise software startups are seven times more likely to get acquired than they are to shut down, while only 4 percent make it to an IPO.
  • Email, communication and collaboration Email clients and collaborative communication platforms are at the epicenter of modern workflows. For a software giant like Salesforce, whose core product (CRM) relies so heavily on email communications, startups in this segment are particularly attractive targets for an acquisition.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 16
     
    "A new player has entered the enterprise productivity race. For decades, Microsoft reigned as the market leader in enterprise productivity - until Google pushed into the space with Google Apps. Now, with the acquisition of Quip, Salesforce is joining Microsoft and Google in the race. The implications, however, extend far beyond productivity and CRM. Recent developments in enterprise software - including Oracle's acquisition of NetSuite, Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn and Salesforce's acquisition of Demandware and Quip - point to a shift in the market. Enterprise software (not just productivity apps) can no longer be siloed applications bolted together with varying degrees of integration. Today's tools are expected to be cross-functional, with native integration, real-time collaboration and smart communication at their very core. Enterprise software giants across different verticals are moving in the direction of end-to-end solutions in an attempt to own more of the workflow - Salesforce's acquisition of Quip will only intensify the competition. For enterprise software startups, it's indicative of more mergers and acquisitions to come."
Gary Edwards

Gigaom | 'Work Processing' and the decline of the (Wordish) Document - 0 views

gigaom.com/...work-processing

Work-Processing Documents Visual-Productivity Cloud-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Chat-centric work management, as typified by Slack-style work chat, is getting a tremendous surge in attention recently, and is the now dominant form of message-centric work technology, edging out follow-centric work media solutions (like Yammer, Jive, and IBM Connections).
  • Workforce communications — relying on a more top-down messaging approach for the mobile workforce — is enjoying a great surge in adoption, but is principally oriented toward the ‘hardwork’ done by workers in retail, manufacturing, transport, security, and construction, and away from the ‘softwork’ done by office workers. This class of tool is all about mobile messaging. (Note: we are planning a market narrative about this hot area.)
  • Today’s Special Advertisement Today, I saw that David Byttow’s Bold — a new work processing app — has entered a private beta, with features that line it up in direct competition with Google Docs and the others mentioned above. Bold raised a round of $1 million from Index Ventures in January 2016. Advertisement The competition is hotting up.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Work Processing Will Be The New Normal Advertisement What I anticipate is the convergence on a work processing paradigm, with at least these features: Advertisement Work processing ‘docs’ will exist as online assemblages, and not as ‘files’. As a result they will be principally shared through links, access rights, or web publishing, and not as attachments, files, or PDFs, except when exported by necessity. Work processing apps will incorporate some metaphors from word processing like styling text, manipulating various sorts of lists, sections, headings, and so on. Work processing will continue the notions of sharing and co-editing from early pioneers (Google Docs in particular), like edit-oriented comments, sharing through access-control links, and so on. Work processing will lift ideas from work chat tools, such as bots, commands, and @mentions. Work processing will adopt some principles from task management, namely tasks and related metadata, which can be embedded within work processing content, added in comments or other annotations, or appended to ‘docs’ or doc elements by participants through work chat-style bot or chat communications.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Jun 16
     
    "I've been exploring a growing list of web-based tools for the creation and management of what most would call 'documents' - assemblages of text, images, lists, embedded video, audio and other media - but which, are in fact, something quite different than the precursors, like Microsoft Word and Apple Pages documents. The big shift underlying these new tools is that they are not oriented around printing onto paper, or digital analogues of paper, like PDF. Instead, they take as a given that the creation, management, and sharing of these assemblages of information will take place nearly all the time online, and will be social at the core: coediting, commenting, and sharing are not afterthoughts grafted onto a 'work processing' architecture. As a result, I am referring to these tools - like the pioneering Google Docs, and newer entrants Dropbox Paper, Quip, Draft, and Notion - as 'work processing' tools. This gets across the idea that we aren't just pushing words onto paper through agency of word processing apps, we're capturing and sharing information that's critical to our increasingly digital businesses, to be accessed and leveraged in digital-first use cases. In a recent piece on Medium, Documents are the new Email, I made the case that old style 'documents' are declining as a percentage of overall work communications, with larger percentages shifting to chat, texting, and work media (enterprise social networks). And, like email, documents are increasingly disliked as a means to communicate. And I suggested that, over time, these older word processing documents - and the use cases that have built up around them - will decline. At the same time, I believe there is a great deal of promise in 'work processing' tools, which are based around web publishing, web notions of sharing and co-creation, and the allure of content-centric work management."
Gary Edwards

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-build-the-perfect-team.html

Collaboration Messaging Team-work Google Communications NYTimes

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Today, on corporate campuses and within university laboratories, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians are devoting themselves to studying everything from team composition to email patterns in order to figure out how to make employees into faster, better and more productive versions of themselves.
  • ‘‘We’re living through a golden age of understanding personal productivity,’’ says Marshall Van Alstyne, a research scientist at M.I.T. who studies how people share information. ‘‘All of a sudden, we can pick apart the small choices that all of us make, decisions most of us don’t even notice, and figure out why some people are so much more effective than everyone else.’’
  • If a company wants to outstrip its competitors, it needs to influence not only how people work but also how they work together.
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last two decades and that, at many companies, more than three-quarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.
  • Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).
  • In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared. Dubey, a leader of the project, gathered some of the company’s best statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers. He also needed researchers. Rozovsky, by then, had decided that what she wanted to do with her life was study people’s habits and tendencies. After graduating from Yale, she was hired by Google and was soon assigned to Project Aristotle.
  • No matter how researchers arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference. ‘‘We looked at 180 teams from all over the company,’’ Dubey said. ‘‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’
  • As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’ Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather: One team may come to a consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate; another team might develop a culture that encourages vigorous arguments and spurns groupthink. Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound.
  • Team members may behave in certain ways as individuals — they may chafe against authority or prefer working independently — but when they gather, the group’s norms typically override individual proclivities and encourage deference to the team.
  • After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams. But Rozovsky, now a lead researcher, needed to figure out which norms mattered most. Google’s research had identified dozens of behaviors that seemed important, except that sometimes the norms of one effective team contrasted sharply with those of another equally successful group. Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be played down? The data didn’t offer clear verdicts. In fact, the data sometimes pointed in opposite directions. The only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them. Which norms, Rozovsky and her colleagues wondered, were the ones that successful teams shared?
  • the researchers wanted to know if there is a collective I. Q. that emerges within a team that is distinct from the smarts of any single member.
  • What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.
  • As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared.
  • First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’
  • On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’
  • Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.
  • One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out.
  • People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
  • But all the team members speak as much as they need to. They are sensitive to one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions. While Team B might not contain as many individual stars, the sum will be greater than its parts.
  • Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like ‘‘conversational turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects of what’s known as psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’
  • Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,
  • ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’
  • Most of all, employees had talked about how various teams felt. ‘‘And that made a lot of sense to me, maybe because of my experiences at Yale,’’ Rozovsky said. ‘‘I’d been on some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy from the group.’’
  • Rozovsky’s study group at Yale was draining because the norms — the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique — put her on guard.
  • Whereas the norms of her case-competition team — enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, joking around and having fun — allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized.
  • For Project Aristotle, research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. There were other behaviors that seemed important as well — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.
  • the kinds of people who work at Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid talking about feelings in the first place.
  • Rozovsky and her colleagues had figured out which norms were most critical. Now they had to find a way to make communication and empathy — the building blocks of forging real connections — into an algorithm they could easily scale.
  • They agreed to adopt some new norms: From now on, Sakaguchi would make an extra effort to let the team members know how their work fit into Google’s larger mission; they agreed to try harder to notice when someone on the team was feeling excluded or down.
  • But to Sakaguchi, it made sense that psychological safety and emotional conversations were related.
  • The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else. In fact, they sometimes matter more.
  • What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations.
  • We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.
  • helping his team succeed ‘‘is the most meaningful work I’ve ever done,
  • He encourages the group to think about the way work and life mesh. Part of that, he says, is recognizing how fulfilling work can be.
  • Project Aristotle ‘‘proves how much a great team matters,’’ he said. ‘‘Why would I walk away from that? Why wouldn’t I spend time with people who care about me?’’
  • technology industry is not just one of the fastest growing parts of our economy; it is also increasingly the world’s dominant commercial culture.
  • The paradox, of course, is that Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.
  • Google, in other words, in its race to build the perfect team, has perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection and done what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways.
  • ‘‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.’’
  • Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized.
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Feb 16
     
    "Five years ago, Google - one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity - became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees' lives. Google's People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers)."
Gary Edwards

Email took an almighty beating this week, but it's far from dead | VentureBeat | Apps |... - 0 views

venturebeat.com/...his-week-but-its-far-from-dead

eMail Messaging

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Yesterday, email-killing team-collaboration upstart Slack nabbed another $200 million in funding, valuing the company at $3.8 billion. But perhaps more importantly, Slack now claims 2.7 million daily active users, up from 2.3 million just last month, with big-brand customers including CenturyLink, CBS, Dow Jones, Harvard University, Samsung, the U.S. State Department, and the Federal Aviation Administration.
  • Fast-forward six years and you could now say that SMS is also on the way out, replaced by a plethora of Internet-based messaging services. But Sandberg had a point — looking at the methods of communication that permeate the lives of young people gives the biggest clue as to where we’re heading. But it will be a gradual process guided by the demographics of people who use a given service; Uber may be phasing out email completely, but that’s because the majority of its users — in the U.S. at least — are under the age of 35 according to recent reports. But an airline such as KLM will have customers spanning all age groups, so it would be less likely to switch off telephone or email support quite so quickly.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Apr 16
     
    "While 2016 is shaping up to be the year virtual reality and the Internet of Things went mainstream, it could also go down in history as the year email's much-touted demise cranked into overdrive. At least, if this week's events are anything to go by. With the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter, and a myriad of communication conduits springing up over the past decade, there's little question that people use email less than they once did for personal communications, and when you swing the demographic dial down to teenagers, the shift is even more pronounced. But email has remained in rude health despite the rise in mobile messaging, and this has been in no small part due to businesses - within companies, between companies, and between companies and customers. But things are changing."
Gary Edwards

Working Remotely? Try These 27 Tools for Better Communication, Collaboration & Organiza... - 1 views

blog.hubspot.com/...remote-work-tools

productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jul 15
     
    "One of the best parts about being in marketing is that most of us can work anywhere and everywhere -- as long as we have an internet connection, it's relatively easy for us to get most our day-to-day work done. To publish that blog post, send that email, or set up that email nurturing workflow, we simply need to connect to Wi-Fi and get to work.  But an internet connection doesn't solve everything we need to accomplish during the day. Often, we need to communicate with team members, project managers, and freelancers -- and when you're remote, that communication can get a little ... messy.  To help make it easier for their employees to have flexible work arrangements, many companies are discovering and implementing new tools and resources. To help you figure out which tools might be handy for your team's work arrangement, we compiled some of the best ones my friends on the Inbound.org discussion boards suggested for remote working. Check 'em out below. When You Need to Stay Organized"
Gary Edwards

Working Remotely? Try These 27 Tools for Better Communication, Collaboration & Organiza... - 0 views

blog.hubspot.com/...remote-work-tools

Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Apr 15
     
    "One of the best parts about being in marketing is that most of us can work anywhere and everywhere -- as long as we have an internet connection, it's relatively easy for us to get most our day-to-day work done. To publish that blog post, send that email, or set up that email nurturing workflow, we simply need to connect to Wi-Fi and get to work.  But an internet connection doesn't solve everything we need to accomplish during the day. Often, we need to communicate with team members, project managers, and freelancers -- and when you're remote, that communication can get a little ... messy.  To help make it easier for their employees to have flexible work arrangements, many companies are discovering and implementing new tools and resources. To help you figure out which tools might be handy for your team's work arrangement, we compiled some of the best ones my friends on the Inbound.org discussion boards suggested for remote working. Check 'em out below."
Gary Edwards

Learn from past mistakes to avoid Amazon lock-in: Office 365 - 0 views

searchaws.techtarget.com/...stakes-to-avoid-Amazon-lock-in

Office-365 Vendor-Lock-in

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Dec 16
     
    Hey David! The horses have left the barn. Unlike the last great platform transition, the move to the Cloud involves moving billion and billions of existing data bits and documents. Much of this content (data + documents) is valuable "in-process" information vital to the current operations of legacy business systems. The last time there was a platform shift it was from the Mainframe-workstation era to the PC client-server era. Digital information was in its infancy. Today the volumes of digital business information is enormous. Meaning, the horses have already left the barn. The lock-in is set. Volumes of document content is locked into Microsoft Office applications, and can only be "worked" by either Microsoft Office, or Office 365. No business is going to move their systems to the Cloud and leve these billions of "in-process" documents behind. Another aspect to consider is the productivity equation which says that collaboration = the integration of communications and content (data + documents). ALL THREE must be integrated!!! Meaning if Microsoft apps have billions of documents locked up, an enterprise cannot make a decision based on best communications or data integration. They must choose Microsoft's Cloud where all THREE aspects can be integrated. This is the hook that has made Office 365 the most successful Cloud mover ever (85 million subscribers with an annual run rate of $13.5 billion - and all this after only two years in the marketplace) Quote: "The majority of IT decision-makers believe that vendor lock-in prevents their companies from maximizing the business value of public cloud. IT leadership often chooses not to move applications to the public cloud because they believe investing in just one cloud provider will hinder flexibility. Several studies reinforce this conclusion, stating that the overwhelming market dominance of public cloud players, like AWS, is negative for the industry. Even when using core services, such as Amazon Elast
Gary Edwards

How to Build a Strategic Narrative - HBR - 0 views

hbr.org/...to-build-a-strategic-narrative

Narrative HBR

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • You want to know what inspires them, what they are like to work with, and whether they can be counted on. You want to get a sense for them as a person.
  • The context of the narrative must be a human, not an institutional, relationship. People want to get a sense for your company as if it were a person. Human relationships require reciprocity and authenticity. The narrative should say who you are, not just what you do.
  • Shared purpose The cornerstone of a strategic narrative is a shared purpose. This shared purpose is the outcome that you and your customer are working toward together. It’s more than a value proposition of what you deliver to them. Or a mission of what you do for the world. It’s the journey that you are on with them. By having a shared purpose, the relationship shifts from consumer to co-creator.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • One function of the strategic narrative is to explain how the purpose will be fulfilled.
  • The second function of the narrative is to explain the roles necessary to fulfill the shared purpose.
  • To find your brand DNA, go back to the original vision and ethos of your founder(s). Walmart’s value proposition is everyday low prices. It’s by no means unique among retailers. But Walmart’s shared purpose is not about lowering prices, but raising the quality of life. When he founded the company, Sam Walton said, “If we work together, we’ll lower the cost of living for everyone.” Other retailers can match Walmart’s strategy, but not its narrative.
  • Losing the narrative Most companies don’t have a powerful narrative. They are missing the human connection, lack a shared purpose, or are out of alignment with their brand DNA. But the opposite can also be true. Some companies have a powerful narrative and then lose it. Starbucks is one such cautionary tale.
  • In his book Onward, Schultz reveals that Starbucks lost its narrative while he was away. Schultz writes: “Starbucks’ coffee is exceptional, yes, but emotional connection is our true value proposition. Starbucks is not a coffee company that serves people. It is a people company that serves coffee.”
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Mar 16
     
    "It's a common refrain in executive suites these days: "We need a new narrative." It's not enough any more to say "we make widgets." With changes happening so quickly from so many directions - competition, regulation, technology, talent, customer behavior - it's easy for one's story to become generic or outdated. You want a story that inspires employees, excites partners, attracts customers, and engages influencers. A story that is concise but comprehensive. Specific but with room to grow. One that defines the company's vision, communicates the strategy, and embodies the culture. The natural step is to give the assignment to an agency. Most branding firms will come back with a tagline and positioning statement. Most advertising agencies with creative treatments and marketing campaigns. Most PR firms with messaging and communication plans. These are useful tactics but aren't the kind of strategic narrative you are looking for. A strategic narrative is a special kind of story. It says who you are as a company. Where you've been, where you are, and where you are going. How you believe value is created and what you value in relationships. It explains why you exist and what makes you unique. This doesn't come out of the usual competitive landscape, customer interviews, and whiteboard sessions. It takes a different approach and a shift in thinking led by the leadership team. "
Gary Edwards

Gigaom | WebRTC is a Natural Fit for the Enterprise - 0 views

gigaom.com/...natural-fit-for-the-enterprise

WebRTC

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Up until today, communications took place in a separate logical and often times even physical network. Be it cellular, wireline or VoIP service, these get built in its own private network or virtual LAN within the enterprise. And the interfaces built into these products in one of two ways: communication-based, which is hard to handle (think SIP or Megaco as an API layer for IT developers); or on some proprietary API that is hard to interface and integrate with. Advertisement WebRTC changes all that. It not only makes VoIP more accessible as a technology, but it almost forces developers to think with standard web protocols on how to use and deploy it. As an example, it gets your CRM vendor build his own contact center, many times with players such as Twilio who offer their own WebRTC SDK. Advertisement
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Jun 16
     
    "Here's something funny. While most complain that WebRTC isn't suitable for the enterprise, it is probably the next best thing happening to enterprises. And it is all because we're in the midst of a digital transformation. WebRTC is a five-year-old technology, so it is rather new to the scene. At its core, WebRTC enables adding real-time voice and video communications to any website without the need to download a thing. Need to get a customer on a quick support call? Just send him a URL. The naysayers dismiss WebRTC because it still isn't available on Safari or Internet Explorer. While that is true, it is changing. Support already exist in the new Microsoft Edge browser with reassuring rumors about Apple and Safari's plans towards WebRTC. Ubiquitous WebRTC support everywhere is on the horizon. Which brings me to enterprises. Enterprises today are going through a digital transformation. In each and every vertical, businesses are being redefined by having the information that runs through the enterprise turned into digital assets that are then used to drive business processes and analytics. This takes shape in many different ways: enabling customers to use self-service channels instead of using human operated contact centers, using big data and data lake projects to deduce insights and personalize services, streamlining sales processes through marketing automation, etc."
Gary Edwards

Office 2016: Reinventing productivity and business processes - The Official Microsoft Blog - 0 views

blogs.microsoft.com/...ctivity-and-business-processes

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Third, productivity requires a rich service spanning all your work and work artifacts (documents, communications, and business process events and tasks). It is no longer bound to any single application. It’s a service that leverages the cumulative intelligence and knowledge you and your organization need to drive productivity.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 25 Sep 15
       
      This statement misses an important point. Productivity demands "focus". Spreading the artifacts of productivity across the broad spectrum of communications, messaging, conferencing, scheduling and documents is anything but productive. Take eMail for example. It's a great messaging and communications platform, but it takes the focus away fromt he workflow and puts into a forced focus on a broader messaging flow. If conversations are focused on the documents in a workflow, and the workflow is tracked and managed by document, the focus remains exactly where it should be - ON THE DOCUMENTS! Things like eMail, collaborative editing and comments, real time messaging, phone calls and scheduling, are critical to capturing the conversation, but they need to be tied to the document in question and the overall activity of the workflow. Keep the focus on the documents; keep the conversation surrounding the documents with the documents; and the focus will be exactly where it needs to be! Use the notification systems to notify workers of what is happening with each document, and keep them aware of how the workflow is progressing.
  • Mobility. Conversations. Intelligence.
  • Its entrepreneurs see Office as a universal language for their company to fuel collaboration with their team across a range of devices and for data-driven decisions about their inventory as they ship more than 10,000 designer dresses every hour.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Our ambition to reinvent productivity includes reinventing business process. In the past, these processes were rigid, imposed and inflexible. Office and Microsoft Dynamics are changing the game with solutions that make business processes a catalyst to organizational productivity.
  • striving to build a new productivity and business process system that any organization can use to harness the power of human networks, respond to business events in real time, and find and share data insights as businesses create more information than they can consume.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft: A 'Significant Disruptor of Collaboration' - Post - No Jitter - 0 views

www.nojitter.com/...ant-disruptor-of-collaboration

Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • In a release on the findings, Synergy attributes Microsoft's overall gain in the collaboration market to the widening of its lead in the hosted/cloud segment, as well as to its continued strong premises positioning. Calling Microsoft a "significant disruptor in collaboration," Jeremy Duke, Synergy founder and chief analyst, said the company's "aggressive embrace of all things cloud is opening up ground for further disruption and market share advances." Is Microsoft's cloud gambit lifting all boats? Synergy's 1Q data shows that, for the first time ever, total quarterly revenues from hosted/cloud solutions are higher than those for premises deployments. Hosted/cloud revenues are up 10% year on year, compared to a 2% loss in premises revenue. Among hosted/cloud options, Synergy's research showed that contact center, voice and UC as a service, video, and enterprise presence/IM enjoyed "particularly strong growth" in the opening quarter of 2015. At 51%, hosted/cloud solutions now account for slightly more than half of the total collaboration market, the firm reported. Microsoft stands to gain as enterprises become more amenable to getting communications and collaboration from the cloud. "We believe that if Microsoft is successful in rolling out Skype for Business in Office 365, it could take its collaboration opportunity to a whole new level," continued Duke, in his press release statement.
  • His thinking is similar to that of frequent No Jitter contributor and Enterprise Connect speaker, Brian Riggs, an analyst with Ovum. In an April post, Riggs said he considers Microsoft's Skype for Business Online to be a game changer for everybody -- customers included -- in the Microsoft ecosystem. With a commitment to adding PSTN connectivity and Enterprise Voice in Skype for Business Online, Microsoft has finally taken the first step toward delivery of a full-featured hosted UC service, as he explained. (Certainly Microsoft's hosted/cloud story will be a topic of interest at the Enterprise Connect Tour on implementing Lync/Skype for Business we have planned for the fall. Get more information Enterprise Connect Tour here. Join us in a city near you.) But, of course, nobody expects Cisco to sit still as Microsoft nibbles away at its toes -- and it isn't. "... such threats are not going unnoticed and we see Cisco continue to refresh and reinvent its collaboration strategy," noted Duke, pointing to the recent Tropo acquisition and Spark rollout as examples. Dismissing Cisco certainly would be foolish -- it showed strong quarterly growth, at 6% year on year to a 14% overall stake of worldwide revenues, for its premises business, and as Duke suggested, its collaboration initiatives are really starting to heat up now. I know many industry watchers, myself included, are eager to see where Cisco heads now that it has a passel of communications-savvy developers under its purview, for example.
  • Of course, Cisco and Microsoft aren't the only companies in the market. Avaya and Google hold the third seats in the premises and hosted/cloud segments, respectively, while IBM, Polycom, Verizon, Citrix, AT&T and Mitel also hold leadership positions, Synergy said. Overall revenues for collaboration products, "were once again well over $8 billion in the quarter."
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Jun 15
     
    "Latest Synergy Research data shows Microsoft lapping at Cisco's heels in the overall collaboration market, and well ahead in the hosted/cloud segment. A couple of primary tussles characterize the collaboration decision today: Cisco vs. Microsoft, and cloud vs. premises. So it behooves us to ask, then: What impact might we expect Microsoft's big push into the cloud, a la Skype for Business and Office 365, to have on each of these critical enterprise decision points? Will Microsoft push ahead of Cisco as it makes cloud the center of its collaboration universe? And will its Skype for Business/Office 365/voice story make the cloud an easier choice for enterprise communications professionals trying to determine whether to ditch a premises installation? This is certainly one way to think about the latest collaboration market data from Synergy Research Group, released this week for first-quarter 2015. The Synergy research shows Microsoft trailing Cisco ever so slightly in the total collaboration market, but well ahead of its chief competitor in hosted/cloud collaboration, as displayed in the graphic below. "
Gary Edwards

Roudcube open source email & collaboration platform Roundcube beats Indiegogo funding g... - 0 views

venturebeat.com/...e-beats-indiegogo-funding-goal

Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 15
     
    "Web mail, calendaring, task management, conferencing, and file sharing have become essential parts of our lives and work. They live on the web, but increasingly on mobile devices. At stake is our data and who owns it, and at the enterprise level it's a game of lock-in and standardisation that can make users feel like peasants of Westeros in giant games played by titans of the tech industry. Roundcube.net is a platform created with the goal of enabling applications that would feel native to any platform and on any device. Ten years ago the Berne, Switzerland-based project used the most advanced technologies and was ultra-modern, dynamic, and beautiful. Reviewers and users were delighted and Roundcube quickly became the default choice for many governments, universities, companies and individuals. The results to date? cPanel reports that Roundcube is dominant with 62 percent of all users in its systems. The technology is installed on approximately half a million websites globally, and it's used daily by hundreds of millions of users. Roundcube is integrated into major commercial offerings such as the Kolab Enterprise Collaboration suite, and offers a full Exchange replacement for organizations and corporations all the way up to the Fortune 50. Simply put, Roundcube is the unsung work horse of web mail. But a decade is an eternity in technology. When Roundcube started, mobile devices were large, clunky affairs used by the few. Today they are the most commonly used communication device. Roundcube Next is today's answer to that radical change. Instead of once more embarking alone on that ten year journey, Roundcube Next is about building a strong, healthy and diverse Open Source community to achieve that task within 12 to 18 months."
Gary Edwards

Something Big is Happening With Snapchat: Why Businesses Shouldn't Wait to Get Started - 0 views

blog.hubspot.com/...snapchat-business-update

SnapChat Technology-evolution

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • On their own the features are interesting, but it's the message behind the features that really caught my attention. Together, these features amount to a very clear benefit: The removal of limits to how you communicate with others remotely. Think about it: Every other app or device we use for communication requires a certain category or format of that communication. Phones are great for long-form audio. SMS is great for text and sometimes images. Other messenger apps are great for short form messages and transactional conversations. But before this release, no single app or device optimized for all the ways humans communicate: long form, short form, audio, video, text, photo, and drawing. Which means that Snapchat, for now, is actually pretty special.
  • "It lets private conversations morph between mediums depending on what users want to show or tell," explains TechCrunch editor-at-large Josh Constine. "Snapchat is positioning itself as the most vivid, human way to chat.” And it's doing so in a single, simple interface.
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Apr 16
     
    "There's a funny pattern of awakening that tends to happen when a technological advancement sneaks up on us. It starts with a mess of confusion. We don't understand the technology or its purpose: "I don't get Twitter. Why would I want to know what you had for lunch?" It then evolves into miscategorization: "The iPhone is actually a pretty crummy phone." We get so caught up in definitions, we almost miss the larger leap that's occurring: "Why would people use messenger apps when you can just text?" Then, finally, we get it: "The iPhone is not a phone at all. It's an everything device. And Twitter is not about lunch. It's about removing the barriers to real-time publishing." While we're busy missing the big picture, a rapidly growing niche of early adopters is diving in. Early adopters don't get distracted by the need to categorize or define the technology. They just use it. And in repeated agenda-less use, the bigger picture becomes clear. This same pattern is happening today with Snapchat. Hang with me. Don't roll your eyes just yet. I'm going to pay it off. I've been a Snapchat doubter for a while now. Like many others, I relegated it to a fad or a niche service for a subset of a subset of the population. I'm beginning to realize I was wrong."
Gary Edwards

Addappt makes your address book smart | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...s-your-address-book-smart.html

Contact-Management

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • How it worksWhen you install the addappt app on your device and verify your email ID, the app stores your profile information on its server. You profile includes only that information that you added to your own profile, including phone numbers, email IDs, physical address, social network. And you can selectively make any property private at anytime. The second step is to get your friends on addappt. You can send invites to your friends and when they join addappt their profile is uploaded to the sever. The app automatically helps people connect using the verified email or verified mobile so all your friends need to do is download addappt and make sure they have one of your emails or mobile. Resources White Paper CloudFlare Advanced DDoS Protection White Paper Don't Let Your Security Strategy Become Irrelevant See All Go Now the magic begins. Addappt will sync your profile with your friends' address books and vice versa. Now when you change anything in your profile on your own phone, it will sync those changes in your friends' address books. No need to send bulk emails or messages. This puts you in control of your information. You determine which is the preferred phone number to or email address to reach you at. Ane addappt also remembers the number you called last and will automatically dial it. Since often we have different channels of communicating with different folks, the app also remembers how you communicated last with someone (i.e., it "adapts" to you).
  • Cool featuresOne feature that is extremely important from a privacy point of view is that addappt uploads only the profile that you added in your address book, stuff like your phone number, email ID, LinkedIn profile, physical address -- whatever you choose and nothing else. No contacts from your address book are uploaded to the sever. Also, and very importantly, your connections never see your other connections and you can’t see theirs. It is all private. I recently discovered another interesting feature of addappt when I was travelling to India and had a local number there. Previously I would have to bulk email hundreds of people in my address book to give them my new, temporary number, only to change it again 4 weeks later. With addappt, I updated my profile and added the temporary local number and, boom,  everyone who was connected with me via addappt had my new local number instantly. When I came back to the U.S., I removed the temporary number from my profile and it automatically removed it from my friends’ address books. And unlike some popular social networking sites, if you quit addappt, your contacts will remain on your device. What you will lose is the ability to keep syncing your contacts. That’s it.
  • New featuresAddappt recently introduced Widgets so your favorite contacts are now available on iOS and Android from anywhere on the phone and you don’t have to open the app. They require no setting and they are live since addappt remembers how you communicated last. They reorder, get removed or added just as within the app. You can also message your friends with one “tapp.” On iOS, you can email URLs from your browser to yourself using the action extension. You can group  contacts very easily and then send a group email, group chat or a group “tapp". Addappt’s  one "tapp" messaging is also available on the Apple Watch. Addappt makes it much easier to share your contact info with people you meet at conferences, for example with a feature called Share My Info.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 May 16
     
    " remember the days before smartphones when managing your contact list was a herculean task. I used to maintain a notebook where I would add phone numbers, email IDs and physical addresses. But people change their contact info all the time and it was close to impossible to keep up. Download the April 2016 Digital Magazine Inside: How companies are making wearables work, why CIOs aren't ready for container tech & much more! READ NOW When we moved to smartphones, the physical address book was gone and along with it the crossed out or hastily erased names and numbers, but the challenges of staying updated remained. I had been looking for a solution where some magical app will keep my address book updated and keep my friends and colleagues informed of my latest contact details without having to send spam mails to everyone I could remember. Then I found addappt, a new way to make your addressbook as smart as is your smartphone. I spoke with addappt founder Mrinal Desai to learn about his background, how the app came to be and how it works. Desai was a very early LinkedIn employee (employee number 15, to be precise). He was LinkedIn's first business development manager. "LinkedIn is basically who I am offline. I build relationships over years and years and I believe that is the way to live life, based on very full and enriching relationships." said Desai. The problem Desai is trying to solve with addappt twofold: On one hand the onus is on the person who is moving to inform "everyone" about the move and send them updated information. On the other hand, you have to keep your address book updated every time someone changes contact info. There were two constantly moving goal posts to chase. "It started getting harder and harder, so for me to get the latest information. One, I have to depend on you, hopefully that you will remember to email me or all your friends in a mass spam-ish way, if you will. Then, I go take it in and I have to remember to now update some
Gary Edwards

Enterprise startups to bet on in 2016 - Business Insider Deutschland - 0 views

www.businessinsider.de/tups-to-bet-on-in-2016-2015-11

Startups

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Docusign: replacing paper signaturesDocuSignDocuSign CEO Keith Krach. Company name: DocusignHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $508.1 million in 14 rounds Anytime your company’s name becomes a verb, it means you’ve made it. That’s the case with Docusign, whose name is almost used as a verb in the digital-document area ("just Docusign it"). Docusign offers a simple and secure way to sign documents online, allowing businesses to approve transactions on the go. It's used across many different industries, from real estate and auto insurance to technology and travel services. Investors have been lining up to throw money at this company, investing almost $400 million in just the last two years.
  • Zuora is a cloud service that specializes in subscription billing.
  • Tenable offers something called "continuous threat monitoring"
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Slack took Silicon Valley’s startup scene by storm, reaching a whopping $2.8 billion valuation in less than two years.
  • Its work-communication app isn’t just for messaging coworkers — it can do a lot of different things, from getting automatic Twitter notifications to calling a Lyft cab or looking up restaurants nearby.
  • Spark is a way to sift through massive amounts of data really fast. It can be used with a popular way to store all that data, Hadoop, but increasingly, Spark is being used on its own as an alternative to Hadoop.
  • Checkmarx helps software programmers check their apps for security holes.
  • Illumio is offers a security product that protects apps inside the data center even after a hacker breaks into the network.
  • MuleSoft offers technology that makes it easier for enterprise applications to talk to each other and share data.
  • Blue Jeans is becoming a household name in the enterprise videoconferencing scene. It created a cloud service that lets different people on different online video services, like Google Hangouts and Skype, talk to each other. It also has its own browser-based service, and recently expanded to broadcasting services too.
  • Qualtrics offers a service for doing sophisticated online employee or customer surveys. The company has been on fire lately, raising all of its $220 million in venture funding over the past three years
  • Insidesales is making life easy for a lot of salespeople. It can predict the best time and person to contact before making a sales call, using machine-learning and data intelligence.
  • Tanium impressed Sinofsky because it detects when hackers are attacking as the hack is occurring, instead of what usually happens, finding out after-the-fact.
  • Optimizely didn’t invent A/B testing, the standard technique in which two different versions of the same product are tested in the market — it just made it easier for everyone to do it.
  • Xamarin offers tools for writing enterprise mobile apps and has exploded in the past year.
  • CloudFlare is a web-performance and security company that serves as a “digital bouncer” for millions of websites around the world. Its technology filters the web traffic before it reaches its customers’ websites, and sends it on the most efficient route to help websites run faster. The company claims its service handles nearly 5% of all web traffic.
  • GainSight has won the respect of Silicon Valley investors by making a solution to help enterprises keep track of their customers — and help make sure they stay loyal. Customers like HP, Workday, and Adobe all use Gainsight to manage their customer contracts, helping divisions like product development, sales, and marketing all better understand just who's buying their stuff.
  • Adaptive Insights is quickly rising through the ranks in the corporate-performance management (CPM) market, where software is used to improve budgeting, forecasting, and other financial activities. In a nutshell, it’s trying to replace a lot of the work Excel spreadsheets used to do in the past for finance people.
  • Bracket offers software that lets enterprises securely run apps and data on multiple clouds, with a minimum of management hassles.
  • Enterprises are racing to ditch their data centers and use more clouds and there are a lot of clouds to choose from. Some want to mix and match and Bracket helps them do it.
  • While he was an engineer at Facebook, Avinash Lakshman created Apache Cassandra, a "big data" database originally built to handle Facebook’s Inbox Search feature.
  • Lakshman went on to found Hedvig, which offers software that makes all of a company's computer-storage systems act like one really big, really fast hard disk.
  • open-source project called Kafka, which quickly became a popular technology used by many big internet companies: Yahoo, Spotify, Airbnb, and many others.
  • left LinkedIn to launch Confluent, which provides a commercial version of Kafka.
  • created some of Facebook's most popular data-analysis tools, Bobby Johnson and Lior Abraham. They are famous in the big-data world for creating the open-source tools Scribe and Haystack.
  • With this startup, their mission is to do for every enterprise what Facebook did for friendships: Analyze billions of events in seconds to bring you the relevant info.
  • If you’ve ever used Uber before, chances are you’ve used Twilio’s service. Same goes for apps like Lyft, Airbnb, and Match.com. That's because these apps are plugging into Twilio’s service that helps provide communications features like text messages, phone calls, and video chat. So the Uber text message you get is powered by Twilio's service.
  • Twilio has become a top choice for developers looking to add communications features to their apps. More than 700,000 developers have used Twilio’s platform so far, the company says.
  • For small and midsize businesses that hire workers and contractors overseas, Payoneer solves a big problem. It lets them make and receive cross-border payments in other currencies. Payoneer has racked up a user base of millions of businesses and professionals in more than 200 countries, it says.
  • Stack Exchange, founded in 2008, has grown from its modest roots as a question-and-answer site for programmers into a network that provides expert help and advice to over 26 million programmers every month, at all skill levels.
  • SimilarWeb seemed to spring out of nowhere a couple of years ago to become a star in the web- and mobile-app-analysis world.
  • Mesosphere offers what it calls a Data Center Operating System (DCOS). It's a commercial version of an increasingly popular free and open-source project called Mesos that's used by developers.
  • AtScale is an engine that slips almost invisibly into Hadoop and then easily lets business managers use their favorite analysis tools like Excel,
  • Tableau Software, or Microstrategy with the data stored in Hadoop. 
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 16
     
    "The 2015 holiday season is upon us and the year is drawing to a close. Soon our thoughts will drift to our hopes and goals for 2016. For those who are dreaming of a new job at an up-and-coming young company, we've compiled this list to help. All of these companies specialize in making tech for work and business use, a $3.5 trillion worldwide market. All of them had spectacular years in 2015, by launching great new technology or getting a boatload of funding or landing big partnerships and generally setting themselves up for a successful 2016 and beyond."
Gary Edwards

Ditch Your Office - & Watch Employee Productivity Soar - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...tch-employee-productivity-soar

Cloud-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Email Email generates a “push” interruption in your daily work. When people want something from you, they sends you email, which interrupt your flow of thought. In our company, we turned to alternatives to reduce email — options such as Basecamp, Asana and Slack. Now, when someone is contributing to and working on a project, instead of giving a “push” with email — which distracts the people from their work —they make a “pull” and retrieve information directly from the place where everyone is working together on the same project. Additionally, it encourages more collaboration. The problem with email is that all the information remains enclosed between the sender and receiver. The communication remains behind closed doors. When a new team member wants to join in on a project, they have to bother another person to catch up on the state of the job and learn the way the project is advancing, triggering another flow of email to catch the person up to speed. Now, that new team member can simply log onto the platform, Basecamp, for instance, search for the corresponding project, and find everything they need to begin working.
  • Meetings As shown in this infograph, $37 billion dollars are lost each year in the United States alone because of unnecessary meetings. Employees spend more than 60 hours per month in unproductive meetings (with half of those being considered by them to be a total waste of time). Who creates meetings? Yes, people who live from one meeting to the next —managers! Their agenda is full of meetings. This is due to the fact that they are not the ones doing the true work — the work that serves a purpose, which has value and adds up, the productive work. The ones who do the productive work are the programmers, designers, etc. They need to have a work schedule with no meetings for them to reach their maximum level of productivity.
  • Another reference point is this article by The Economist, where a study showed that a factory was able to save the equivalent of eliminating 200 jobs just by limiting meetings to a maximum of 30 minutes and 7 people per meeting.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Embrace the Digital Workplace When you work without email, meetings (both by phone or physical) or bosses, you will go from having synchronous to asynchronous communication. What this means is that if someone needs something from you they will have to communicate strictly by text using the project management tool and when you finish your three to four hours of continuous work you will be able to answer the messages based on your time, without it being an interruption.
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Aug 16
     
    "Six years ago, we surveyed our employees with the goal of determining the optimal place for each of them to work in terms of maximum efficiency and productivity. What we quickly determined was that no one wanted to work in the office. Workers Can't Concentrate in the Office When asked to identify the best place to get work done - specifically work that requires maximum concentration and creativity, such as designing a web page, programming new functionality for software, developing a financial report or writing a sales proposal - not a single member of our 34-member team chose the office. Rather, they selected: An extra room at their home Their favorite coffee shop A train or airplane Our finding wasn't an anomaly. In a much larger study based on 2,600 interviews, FlexJobs concluded that 76 percent of workers prefer to avoid the office when they have important work to do."
Gary Edwards

The Office 365 Story: Is Microsoft leading the way for Cloud Office Applications? - 0 views

microsoft.cioreview.com/...ications-nid-23166-cid-50.html

Office-365 Microsoft

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Oct 16
     
    "Shortly after the start of the millennium, Microsoft stated a goal to be the go-to enterprise platform for the data center. Many in the industry scoffed at the idea that Microsoft could dominate in a market traditionally led by Unix. Today, there are few enterprises that don't have a significant investment in Microsoft servers and infrastructure. Five years ago Microsoft launched Office 365 and, right now, we're seeing a parallel in their move to lead the cloud office application sector. Office and the enterprise applications that support Office 365-Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business - have become ubiquitous in the market. In July this year, it was reported that Office 365 is used daily by over 70 million enterprise users. However, Microsoft hasn't achieved this success without challenges. In 2013, many industry pundits saw Google Apps for Enterprise as the heir apparent for cloud and productivity, but things have changed significantly in the last three years. Under Satya Nadella's leadership, Microsoft has rebranded to support its 'mobile-first, cloud- first' go-to-market. The move to support Office on the Apple and Google platforms has strengthened its position in the market. Following this success, their next ambition is to enable customers and partners to move to Office 365. Earlier this year, Microsoft launched a number of initiatives to help clients consume Office 365 licenses more effectively. One such program is geared towards securing the license base by motivating renewals and preventing-churn versus a completely new sale. Once a client activates and consumes the licenses on Office 365, they receive ongoing upgrades, renewals, and new features as part of an evergreen service. Employees experience the latest across all their devices. This compares favorably to the historical process of waiting every three to four years for the on-premises Enterprise Agreement to be signed and subsequent refresh of a laptop with a new office applica
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