Skip to main content

Home/ Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)/ Group items tagged organization

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

ROI for Social Technologies? In a Word, Squishy | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com [18Nov11] - 0 views

  • a survey administered by Jive Software that found both executives and knowledge workers believe social software will become a necessary part of doing business — even though the return on investment for this kind of software is still pretty squishy. 
  • Improving customer loyalty and service levels and driving increased revenue or sales were among the top reasons for using social software mentioned by survey respondents.
  • they shouldn't become so focused on attaining a hard ROI that they miss opportunities to use social to solve business problems.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • an article written by Chess Media Group principal Jacob Morgan
  • Morgan noted that while none of the participating organizations were able to offer a projected ROI, all agreed that enterprise collaboration technologies solved business problems, and that doing so was a good enough reason to make the investment.
  • report titled "Social Business Systems: Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications." According to the survey, which was sponsored by a group of 20 companies that sell social software, just 12 percent of organizations must make a financial business case for social business investments, down from 20 percent in 2010's survey.
  • 27 percent said social applications were considered part of the infrastructure, in much the same way as email or teleconferencing, up from 12 percent last year.
  • In my interview with AIIM President John Mancini about the survey, he told me social technologies were becoming "the digital dial tone for organizations." He said:You wouldn’t have to do an ROI analysis for your email system. These types of systems are going to be adopted in some way, shape or form by most organizations. They decide, “We need this capability. It should be a platform. It’s going to be a core infrastructure.” Then they figure out how much they want to spend. You don’t go through the kind of elaborate analysis you do for other systems, including content management systems, which AIIM does a lot of.
D'coda Dcoda

How "Fast Zebras" Navigate Informal Networks [30Apr10] - 0 views

  • Are you a “fast zebra”??? If so, it means you have special insight into navigating informal networks, I suspect there may be herds of them racing around in social media.
  • former US Ambassador to the United Nations, has a term for people who can quickly absorb information, adapt to new challenges, and get people aligned in the right direction: fast zebras. They are the people who can skirt around or blast through the kind of gridlock found not only in the political spectrum, but in organizations of every stripe.The metaphor is based on the fast zebra on the African savannah who survives a trip to the drinking hole by moving quickly while slower herd members fall prey to waiting predators. Well, organizations are sometimes like the savannah; to the new-comer, they constitute vast, unexplored areas fraught with hidden dangers. The fast zebras in both contexts travel the terrain swiftly to accomplish significant goals while the naïve ones run into the predators of red tape, unaligned incentives, and unmotivated teams.A fast zebra is someone who is singularly focused on achieving performance results, knows how the organization can both hinder and help, and charts their course accordingly. In particular, they are wise about when to use the formal and rational elements of organization (such as hierarchy, processes, and monetary rewards) and when to use the informal and emotional elements (including values, networks, and feelings about the work). Read more at blogs.hbr.org
  •  
    the kind of people doing very well in social media for business purposes
Dan R.D.

Compensation Cafe: Is Your Organization Ready To Go ROWE? [26Jul11] - 0 views

  • Here are the 'Nine Commandments' of ROWE:
  • We do not post office hours or core hours. Our employees know where to be when they need to be there. We don't dictate it. Everybody has complete control over how they spend their time. All the time.
  • We do not track time for our exempt/salaried workforce. We track work getting done.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • There are no hours-worked expectations for exempt/salaried employees. We do not talk about how many hours we work or demand 40, 50, or 60 hours out of people.
  • We do not have a tele-work policy, handbook or tele-work rules. Tele-work is so 1970's, Work is just work. It doesn't need a location label, And, we don't have flextime.
  • We do not track PTO (vacation, sick time, personal time, holiday time). It's not a benefit. Unlimited paid time off as long as the work gets done is the contemporary benefit that matters.
  • Nobody asks permission to go to an appointment, event or any other personal activity. Ever. And they don't have to inform the team or management in an effort to be polite.
  • We have adopted the Sludge* Eradication Strategy - NO SLUDGE in our workplace.
  • We NEVER put 'mandatory' on a meeting invite. Every meeting is optional.
  • We don't have any limits put on how or when we can work: "No E-Mail Fridays" and "No Meeting Wednesdays" don't exist in our organization. 
Dan R.D.

Why Badges? Why Not? | HASTAC [16Sep11] - 0 views

  • Any other organization can join them in asking for partners to design a new way of offering accreditation to their own organization.
  • Individuals can earn badges from multiple organizations, some certifying human skills such as collaboration or even helpfulness, that mean as much to future employers as skills and experience and credentials from traditional institutions.   And an individual can choose to reveal or not reveal an e-portfolio.  YOU own your portfolio.
  • Some might be games---but most will have nothing to do with games
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • peer run or top down
  • you don't need much technology or money to implement a badging system--or, at least, that is another of the goals of this Competition.
  • operating on inexpensive mobile phones or Web-based platforms
  • inspire learning and collaboration, and so ownership is key.
  • The point is to thing big, think new, think change. 
  • If you contribute, you can have a record of that contribution.   That’s the beauty of digital badge systems or eportfolios such as Top Coders where you can actually click on the badge and see all the specific contributions or skills of a person that were recognized by peers in the form of a badge.
  • Badging helps one developer to know how much they can trust some unknown contributor and then, if the project goes well, one participant in the virtual team can recognize the skills, collaborative attributes, and other technical as well as social collaborative skills of another.
  • Another inspiring aspect of open badges for lifelong learning:  they recognize achievement and contribution, not reputation or credentials. 
Dan R.D.

Social Media versus Knowledge Management [26Oct11] - 0 views

  • On the surface, social media and knowledge management (KM) seem very similar. Both involve people using technology to access information. Both require individuals to create information intended for sharing. Both profess to support collaboration. But there's a big difference. Knowledge management is what company management tells me I need to know, based on what they think is important. Social media is how my peers show me what they think is important, based on their experience and in a way that I can judge for myself. These definitions may sound harsh, and biased in favor of social media, and to some extent they are. Knowledge should be like water — free-flowing and permeating down and across your organization filling the cracks, floating good ideas to the top and lifting all boats.
  • Social media looks downright chaotic by comparison. There is no predefined index, no prequalified knowledge creators, no knowledge managers and ostensibly little to no structure. Where an organization has a roof, gutters and cistern to capture knowledge, a social media organization has no roof, allowing the "rain" to fall directly into the house, collecting in puddles wherever they happen to form. That can be quite messy. And organizations abhor a mess.
Dan R.D.

Mobile Apps Must Die [24Sep11] - 0 views

  • Too much trouble The problem with apps, and by this I mean native apps that must be downloaded to your phone, is that they are just becoming too much trouble to organize and maintain. It's just not realistic to have an app for every store you go to, every product you own and every website you visit. This creates an ever increasing set that must be curated, organized and culled. It's a common task we all perform, removing old and unused apps every few months, effectively garbage collecting our phones. Very organized folks relish the opportunity to tidy their burgeoning app menagerie but most can't bother and their home pages scroll into a receding haze of choices.
  • Movie posters with radio tags such as RFID or NFC will allow me to get an interactive version of the poster on my phone to show me more information 
  • Any consumer item, such as ketchup or milk bottles, also with radio tags, will allow me to not only get more information on these items just like the poster, but also track usage and even offer to purchase replacement items
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Shopping malls will offer maps and hours whenever I’m there
  • My local bus stop will be geo-located so all I need is my current GPS fix and I can get just the information for that specific bus stop, knowing when the next bus will arrive. While this is possible today with some fancy urban systems, deploying a geo location system allows any city to do this, across all bus lines much more cheaply.
  • Any store will have an app that I can interact with as I walk through their door
  • A local food cart vendor will offer not only their menu but where they are going next and when they’ll return
  • An on demand rental car company, such as Zipcar, will allow me to register and drive away with one of their cars, just using a bluetooth connection on my phone.
  • Just In Time Interaction All of these concepts are of course just speculation but they represent a trend that is thundering down upon us. Each of these devices will likely need some form of interaction but only as I approach them, a “Just in time” interaction model that gives me interactivity but only when I need it.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Demystifying Enterprise Gamification for Business | Constellation Research Inc. [06Dec11] - 0 views

  • Gamification describes a series of design principles, processes and systems used to influence, engage and motivate individuals, groups and communities to drive behaviors and effect desired outcomes. Originating from the video game industry, many of these pioneering concepts now play a key role in driving incentive and behavior management for both brands in the consumer world and internal scenarios in the workplace. Enterprise gamification is a user experience (UX) and consumerization of IT (CoIT) trend that will take the market by storm in 2012. Constellation believes that by 2013, more than 50 percent of all social business initiatives will include an enterprise gamification component.
  • In interviews with 55 early adopters of enterprise gamification, Constellation identifies the three core pillars that include measurable action, reputation and incentives. By creating triggers through both monetary and non-monetary incentives among customers, employees, partners, suppliers and other interested parties, organizations can secure sustainable engagement and drive business outcomes such as improved marketing response from external communities, sustained long-term customer loyalty, increased collaboration among internal teams, or enriched onboarding, delivering success with new hires, partners, and customers.
  • Enterprise gamification requires an application of psychology and behavioral economics to incentivize outcomes. Because enterprise gamification maps closely to human behavior, organizations will want to follow Constellation’s best practices in appealing to the “Seven Deadly Sins” for gamification design.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Purpose and Intent Much hype surrounds the topic of gamification. Often seen as a technique to add engagement to existing tasks, projects, marketing campaigns, and initiatives, the term gamification unfortunately lacks the seriousness it deserves. This report seeks to change the point of view and demonstrate where gamification plays a role in the enterprise. More importantly, executives will discover how gamification can drive behavior and outcomes through both monetary and non-monetary incentives in enterprise class settings.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Research Summary: Demystifying Enterprise Gamification For Business « A Softw... - 0 views

  • Gamification describes a series of design principles, processes and systems used to influence, engage and motivate individuals, groups and communities to drive behaviors and effect desired outcomes. Originating from the video game industry, many of these pioneering concepts now play a key role in driving incentive and behavior management for both brands in the consumer world and internal scenarios in the workplace. Enterprise gamification is a user experience (UX) and consumerization of IT (CoIT) trend that will take the market by storm in 2012. Constellation believes that by 2013, more than 50 percent of all social business initiatives will include an enterprise gamification component.
  • In interviews with 55 early adopters of enterprise gamification, Constellation identifies the three core pillars that include measurable action, reputation and incentives. By creating triggers through both monetary and non-monetary incentives among customers, employees, partners, suppliers and other interested parties, organizations can secure sustainable engagement and drive business outcomes such as improved marketing response from external communities, sustained long-term customer loyalty, increased collaboration among internal teams, or enriched onboarding, delivering success with new hires, partners, and customers.
  • Enterprise gamification requires an application of psychology and behavioral economics to incentivize outcomes. Because enterprise gamification maps closely to human behavior, organizations will want to follow Constellation’s best practices in appealing to the “Seven Deadly Sins” for gamification design.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Some highlights of the report include: Details on who’s using gamification across the enterprise The three pillars of enterprise gamification The six elements of sustainable engagement Sustainable behaviors to drive desired business outcomes The Seven Deadly Sins to Optimize Gamification Design The top gamified business processes for the enterprise (see Figure 1)
  • Designing your gamification models?  What enterprise business processes will you gamify first? next?   Ready to turbo charge your next generation customer experience?  Have you tested out iActionable, CrowdTwist or the 3B’s (i.e. Badgeville, Bigdoor, and Bunchball?  Ready to here how you can apply the white arts of the 7 Virtues to work?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.
D'coda Dcoda

This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Busines... - 0 views

  • The business climate, it turns out, is a lot like the weather. And we've entered a next-two-hours era. The pace of change in our economy and our culture is accelerating--fueled by global adoption of social, mobile, and other new technologies--and our visibility about the future is declining.
  • Uncertainty has taken hold in boardrooms and cubicles, as executives and workers (employed and unemployed) struggle with core questions: Which competitive advantages have staying power? What skills matter most? How can you weigh risk and opportunity when the fundamentals of your business may change overnight?
  • Look at the global cell-phone business. Just five years ago, three companies controlled 64% of the smartphone market: Nokia, Research in Motion, and Motorola. Today, two different companies are at the top of the industry: Samsung and Apple. This sudden complete swap in the pecking order of a global multibillion-dollar industry is unprecedented. Consider the meteoric rise of Groupon and Zynga, the disruption in advertising and publishing, the advent of mobile ultrasound and other "mHealth" breakthroughs (see "Open Your Mouth And Say 'Aah!'). Online-education efforts are eroding our assumptions about what schooling looks like. Cars are becoming rolling, talking, cloud-connected media hubs. In an age where Twitter and other social-media tools play key roles in recasting the political map in the Mideast; where impoverished residents of refugee camps would rather go without food than without their cell phones; where all types of media, from music to TV to movies, are being remade, redefined, defended, and attacked every day in novel ways--there is no question that we are in a new world.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Any business that ignores these transformations does so at its own peril. Despite recession, currency crises, and tremors of financial instability, the pace of disruption is roaring ahead. The frictionless spread of information and the expansion of personal, corporate, and global networks have plenty of room to run. And here's the conundrum: When businesspeople search for the right forecast--the road map and model that will define the next era--no credible long-term picture emerges. There is one certainty, however. The next decade or two will be defined more by fluidity than by any new, settled paradigm; if there is a pattern to all this, it is that there is no pattern. The most valuable insight is that we are, in a critical sense, in a time of chaos.
  • To thrive in this climate requires a whole new approach, which we'll outline in the pages that follow. Because some people will thrive. They are the members of Generation Flux. This is less a demographic designation than a psychographic one: What defines GenFlux is a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates--and even enjoys--recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions. Not everyone will join Generation Flux, but to be successful, businesses and individuals will have to work at it.
  • Digital competition destroyed bookseller Borders, and yet the big, stodgy music labels--seemingly the ground zero for digital disruption--defy predictions of their demise. Walmart has given up trying to turn itself into a bank, but before retail bankers breathe a sigh of relief, they ought to look over their shoulders at Square and other mobile-wallet initiatives. Amid a reeling real-estate market, new players like Trulia and Zillow are gobbling up customers. Even the law business is under siege from companies like LegalZoom, an online DIY document service. "All these industries are being revolutionized," observes Pete Cashmore, the 26-year-old founder of social-news site Mashable, which has exploded overnight to reach more than 20 million users a month. "It's come to technology first, but it will reach every industry. You're going to have businesses rise and fall faster than ever."
  • You Don't Know What You Don't Know "In a big company, you never feel you're fast enough." Beth Comstock, the chief marketing officer of GE
  • Within GE, she says, "our traditional teams are too slow. We're not innovating fast enough. We need to systematize change." Comstock connected me with Susan Peters, who oversees GE's executive-development effort. "The pace of change is pretty amazing," Peters says. "There's a need to be less hierarchical and to rely more on teams. This has all increased dramatically in the last couple of years."
  • Executives at GE are bracing for a new future. The challenge they face is the same one staring down wide swaths of corporate America, not to mention government, schools, and other institutions that have defined how we've lived: These organizations have structures and processes built for an industrial age, where efficiency is paramount but adaptability is terribly difficult. We are finely tuned at taking a successful idea or product and replicating it on a large scale. But inside these legacy institutions, changing direction is rough.
  • " The true challenge lies elsewhere, he explains: "In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, ambiguity is rising to unprecedented levels. That's something our current systems can't handle.
  • "There's a difference between the kind of problems that companies, institutions, and governments are able to solve and the ones that they need to solve," Patnaik continues. "Most big organizations are good at solving clear but complicated problems. They're absolutely horrible at solving ambiguous problems--when you don't know what you don't know. Faced with ambiguity, their gears grind to a halt.
  • The security of the 40-year career of the man in the gray-flannel suit may have been overstated, but at least he had a path, a ladder. The new reality is multiple gigs, some of them supershort (see "The Four-Year Career"), with constant pressure to learn new things and adapt to new work situations, and no guarantee that you'll stay in a single industry.
  • "So many people tell me, 'I don't know what you do,'" Kumra says. It's an admission echoed by many in Generation Flux, but it doesn't bother her at all. "I'm a collection of many things. I'm not one thing."
  • The point here is not that Kumra's tool kit of skills allows her to cut through the ambiguity of this era. Rather, it is that the variety of her experiences--and her passion for new ones--leaves her well prepared for whatever the future brings. "I had to try something entrepreneurial. I had to try social enterprise. I needed to understand government," she says of her various career moves. "I just needed to know all this."
  • You do not have to be a jack-of-all-trades to flourish in the age of flux, but you do need to be open-minded.
  • Nuke Nostalgia If ambiguity is high and adaptability is required, then you simply can't afford to be sentimental about the past. Future-focus is a signature trait of Generation Flux. It is also an imperative for businesses: Trying to replicate what worked yesterday only leaves you vulnerable.
  • "We now recognize that external focus is more multifaceted than simply serving 'the customer,'" says Peters, "that other stakeholders have to be considered. We talk about how to get and apply external knowledge, how to lead in ambiguous situations, how to listen actively, and the whole idea of collaboration."
D'coda Dcoda

Obama Tries to Bypass Congress with Deadly Global Internet Treaty ACTA [28Jan12] - 0 views

  • Before the American people were protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the president managed to sign an international treaty which would permit foreign companies to demand that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remove web content in the United States without any legal oversight. Entitled the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty was signed by Obama on October 1, 2011, but it is currently a subject of discussion because the White House is circulating a petition demanding that senators ratify the treaty.
  • the White House has done some maneuvering — characterizing the treaty as an "executive agreement" — thereby bypassing approval by members of Congress. Concerned by this action of the administration, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., above left) sent a letter to President Obama in which he declared: It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law. But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law ... the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress' authority, absent congressional approval.
  • Similarly, TechDirt observes: ... [E]ven if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement? The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the President legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Twenty-two EU member states signed the treaty at a ceremony in Tokyo on January 26. Other nations interested in signing the agreement have until May 2013 to do so. According to Wikipedia, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement “creates a governing body outside national institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the United Nations.” The scope of the agreement includes counterfeit goods, generic medicines, and pirated copyright-protected works.
  • The provisions of ACTA grant copyright holders direct powers to demand that ISPs remove material from the Internet, without the requirement of a court order, and permit foreign influence over ISPs in the United States. Advocates of the treaty seek to give copyright holders the ability to demand that users who do violate intellectual property rights have their Internet connections terminated as a punishment. To enforce such a system would require the creation of an individual Internet ID.
  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports: The same industry rightsholder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by Internet Service Providers and for Internet Service Providers to terminate citizens’ Internet connection on repeat allegation of copyright infringement (the “Three Strikes”/Graduated Response) so there is reason to believe that ACTA will seek to increase intermediary liability and require these things of Internet Service Providers.
  • The EFF has been vehement in its opposition to ACTA, particularly regarding the secrecy surrounding the treaty negotiations. Likewise, Michael Geist, in writing for Copyright News, asserted that ACTA was “shrouded in secrecy.” He pointed out that ACTA negotiations did not include civil society groups or developing countries, noting also that “reports suggest that trade negotiators have been required to sign non-disclosure agreements for fear of word of the treaty’s provisions leaking to the public.” The European Commission denied this allegations in 2008, arguing, “It is only natural that intergovernmental negotiations dealing with issues that have an economic impact, do not take place in public and that negotiators are bound by a certain level of discretion.”
  • As noted on Wikipedia, opponents of ACTA also assert that it will impinge upon freedom of expression and communication privacy. A large number of the World Trade Organization’s 157 members have voiced concerns that the treaty would have a negative impact on trade. Others have pointed out that ACTA does not include provisions for legal safeguards protecting ISPs from liability for the actions of their subscribers. Without such provisions, ISPs will be forced to invade the privacy of their subscribers in order to protect themselves. Aaron Shaw, research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, stressed that “ACTA would create unduly harsh legal standards that do not reflect contemporary principles of democratic government, free market exchange, or civil liberties.”
  • The technology news and information website ArsTechnica.com argues that ACTA encourages ISPs to collect and provide information about suspects by providing for those ISPs “safe harbor from certain legal threats.” In protest against the treaty, the hacktivist group Anonymous hacked into the Federal Trade Commission’s cybersecurity advice website on January 24, replacing the homepage with the Anonymous logo, a rap song, and a message threatening more attacks if anti-piracy legislation in Congress were to pass. According to The Next Web: The message left temporarily on OnGuardOnline referred to the Stop Online Piracy Act, The Protect Intellectual Property Act and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. If they pass, the message said, "we will wage a relentless war against the corporate Internet, destroying dozens upon dozens of government and company websites."
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

NFCNews | Continental unveils NFC auto solution in Vegas - 0 views

  • German automotive supplier Continental has announced that it will showcase its new NFC-enabled vehicle access control solution this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
  • According to Continental, the “Simplify your Drive” system uses a virtual key that is stored on the SIM card of NFC-enabled phone. To unlock a vehicle, the user simply taps their handset against the car door equipped with an embedded reader.
  • In addition to access control, the solution makes it possible to load personalized settings – e.g., seat position, climate control, radio station, GPS directions to common destinations – on the NFC key, so that when you unlock the door your car automatically adjusts to your driving preferences, according to Continental. Drivers can also use NFC to wirelessly charge their cell phone during travel.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • According to Continental, the solution will be particularly useful for car sharing or car rental services, as it enables the provisioning of virtual car keys over the Internet, rather than having to keep track of physical keys.
  • For example, once the customer has selected a vehicle on the rental website, a temporary digital key from Continental and the driver’s profile is loaded onto the cell phone’s SIM card via a secure data link. At the same time, the cell phone receives the license plate number and the location of the car.
  • Continental says it is currently working with telecom companies to integrate services like Deutsche Telekom’s “mobile wallet” for storing and organizing the electronic car key in the cell phone. With the addition of mobile wallet technology, drivers may be able to organize their bank account or credit card data and pay for car sharing or car rental services
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Square Now Being Used For Mobile Payments At Political Fundraisers | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • Jack Dorsey’s Square was unveiled last December as an innovative way to let people quickly and easily accept physical credit card payments from their mobile phone.
  • Square is ideal for taking money at political fundraisers for several reasons.
  • A local flower cart in San Francisco is using Square to take payments from customers. Denim, a jeans store in New York is using Square to take payments from shoppers. We even used Square at this year’s Crunchies to raise money for the UCSF Foundation.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Here’s how Square works: A small device attaches to the phone via the headset/microphone jack. The device gets the power it needs to send data to the phone from the swipe of the card, and sends the information over the microphone connection. The device is compatible with both the iPhone and Android. It’s similar in some ways to PayPal, but anyone can now accept physical credit card payments, too. With no contracts or monthly fees. People are sent receipts by text and email. If you haven’t seen Square in action, check out this video.
  • And now, a new use case has popped up for Square: political fundraising.
  • Square is currently being used in two campaigns. Silicon Valley VC Josh Becker, who is running for state assembly in California’s 21st district, has been using Square at fundraising events. And lawyer Reshma Saujani, who is running for Congress in New York’s 14th district, is using Square at campaign fundraising events, including at an event in San Francisco on Friday.
  • Valued at $40 million even before launch, Square is off to an impressive start. And technology’s most notable investors and leaders seem to think so as well.
  • Currently, if you want to donate money at a fundraising event, you often have to fill out a form and hand over a check or cash at the event. If you don’t have your checkbook or cash handy (which, many of us don’t), credit cards are the only option. You can write down your credit card number and info for fundraisers to charge at a later date, but you have to trust that the fundraiser keeps track of that information and paper.
  • With Square, there is both a convenience added for both the payee and fundraiser. The donation is instantly processed, and Square will send the receipt via SMS or email to the payee. Of course, political contributions and donations are a little more complicated because of the reporting requirements associated with donations.
  • For many types of donations, you need to take the donator’s name, occupation, address, and other information. Currently Square doesn’t allow users to input all of this information but Dorsey says that they are releasing Square’s API to allow fundraisers to build additional applications on top of Square, where they could input all of the necessary data. Once this is enabled, Square will allows fundraisers to eliminate paper collection and payments all together.
  • Dorsey says he’s already getting significant interest from politicians and political candidates across the country, but because Square is in limited beta, is being selective about how the service is distributed. Dorsey expects Square to be open to the public sometime in the next few months.
  • Since then, Square, which has been in limited beta, has been used in a variety of use cases. E.g. philanthopic organization charity:water recently used Square at the SXSW festival to collect donations.
  • Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, investor Ron Conway, Google’s Marissa Mayer, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, Digg creator Kevin Rose, investor Esther Dyson and a host of others have invested in Square. The company also raised funding from Khosla Ventures.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

With Funding In Tow, MineralTree Launches A Disruptive Banking And Payment Solution Aim... - 0 views

  • For SMBs, managing banking and payment processes is not as easy — or as secure — as it should be. So, coming out of stealth today is a Boston-based startup called MineralTree that is looking to fix both of these problems. Tomorrow, at the Small Business Banking Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, MineralTree will officially launch its first product: A cloud-based banking and payment solution designed specifically for SMBs.
  • Backing the startup in its mission to create an easy payment solution for small businesses is a cool $1.5 million in seed funding, raised from .406 Ventures, which has enabled MineralTree to develop its payments solution and make its initial hires, partnerships, and customer acquisitions. The most notable of which is the startup’s partnership with Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara, California — the first financial institution to implement MineralTree’s solution and offer it to its SMB customers.
  • MineralTree’s Accounting Manager app is a web-based add-on to the SMB’s existing accounting system that businesses can use to manage payables, including entering payment information, associate payments with backup documents, along with the ability to prioritize, recommend and submit payments to the CFO or business owner for approval.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The startup then provides a separate “CFO App” that lets the financial officer, or the executive in charge, to approve and release payments. Both accounting manager and CFO apps are available on the iPad or via a secure web app. In turn, the bank used by the SMB gets a third web-based app that enables the financial institution to manage its MineralTree users.
  • Each of the three apps are linked to the startup’s payment server, which coordinates and manages all payment functions in the system, between customers, the bank, and payment service providers, etc. While it may sound like there are a lot of moving parts, in reality, the MineralTree solution provides an all-in-one, universal platform for all the payment channels an SMB or bank uses, whether it be check, ACH, wire, payment cards, PayPal, or mobile banking.
  • MineralTree’s payments platform is definitely niche, but for the 2.5 million SMBs currently operating in the U.S., this has the potential to solve a lot of problems inherent to the paper-based and snail-slow payment, approval, and accounting processes many are currently working with. It will be interesting to see if the team can convince the big banks that this is a workable solution for their SMB clients.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

New 5 Billion Page Web Index with Page Rank Now Available for Free from Common Crawl Fo... - 0 views

  • A freely accessible index of 5 billion web pages, their page rank, their link graphs and other metadata, hosted on Amazon EC2, was announced today by the Common Crawl Foundation. "It is crucial [in] our information-based society that Web crawl data be open and accessible to anyone who desires to utilize it," writes Foundation director Lisa Green on the organization's blog.
  • The Foundation is an organization dedicated to leveraging the falling costs of crawling and storage for the benefit of "individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits." It's lead by Gilad Elbaz, the forefather of Google AdSense and the CEO of data platform startup Factual. Joining Elbaz on the Foundation board is internet public domain champion Carl Malamud and semantic web serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack. Director Lisa Green came to the Foundation by way of Creative Commons.
  • The Foundation explains the scope of the project thusly. "Common Crawl is a Web Scale crawl, and as such, each version of our crawl contains billions of documents from the various sites that we are successfully able to crawl. This dataset can be tens of terabytes in size, making transfer of the crawl to interested third parties costly and impractical. In addition to this, performing data processing operations on a dataset this large requires parallel processing techniques, and a potentially large computer cluster. "Luckily for us, Amazon's EC2/S3 cloud computing infrastructure provides us with both a theoretically unlimited storage capacity coupled with localized access to an elastic compute cloud."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The organization was formed three years ago, just now started talking about itself publicly and believes that free access to all this information could lead to "a new wave of innovation, education and research."
  • Open Web Advocate James Walker agrees: "An openly accessible archive of the web - that's not owned and controlled by Google - levels the playing field pretty significantly for research and innovation."
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Wikets, The Social Commerce App With $1.5M In Funding, Rewards Users For Recommendation... - 0 views

  • In September, Wikets, Inc., announced it had raised $1.5 million from venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Battery Ventures, as well as from six angel investors, to build a new iPhone application that allows users to rate products and share those recommendations with friends. Today, the app has gone live in iTunes.
  • The resulting product is deceptively simple. You make a recommendation, optionally share it with friends via Facebook or Twitter, and then get rewarded in the form of points that can be later turned in for gift cards at online merchants.
  • At launch, Wikets lets you recommend products from its featured partners and from 60 major retailers, including iTunes (music and apps), Etsy, eBay, Amazon, Best Buy, The Home Depot, Wine.com, and others, as well as any place you can pull up on Yelp or Foursquare. You can also scan a product’s barcode, if you choose.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In order to encourage usage, Wikets doles out points for your recommendations, other in-app activity, and, most importantly, your purchases. (100 points = $1.00 USD). These points can later be redeemed for gift cards from select merchants.
  • In the app’s main stream, which includes all the recommendations on the service, there’s a search button to find recommendations from others or to find users by name, plus filters for popular recommendations, nearby recommendations and recommended people. As you browse through this stream, discovering new content, you can tap a button to add items to your wishlist or strike up a conversation around the item in question through a comments feature.
D'coda Dcoda

09/1/07 Deep Web: Databases of Databases - 0 views

    • D'coda Dcoda
       
      entered in diigo
  • Opportunities emerge from the deep semantic web
  • Economics is the science of incentives. While the promise of searching a huge store of databases may not sound like Saturday social night at the local drive in burger joint, it does by extension, introduce new incentives.  The new technology will drive people to build databases.  A new generation of entrepreneurs will collect, organize, analyze and create – not information – but data.Database of databases of databasesThe first things entrepreneurs will organize are human knowledge data – starting with their own, then relating it to others. Not unlike the human genome project, the vast human knowledge reservoir will be mapped. Entrepreneurs will enter their communities (on line, neighborhood, work, school, church, social networks) and create a database for what other people know and parse the data in any number of important and useful databases.The reason for this is simple; data are collections of human observations.This is the only thing people are willing to pay forRead more at www.conversationalcurrency.com
  •  
    Opportunities emerge from the deep semantic web
Dan R.D.

Three Years of Transforming Businesses with Cloud [17Sep11] - 0 views

  • In working with thousands of clients, IBM has established that businesses and the world at large have become more interconnected and certainly more intelligent. Just to toss out a few factoids – data is growing at 6 trillion bytes per second, IP traffic will accelerate in 3 years to over a trillion gigabytes, and as of 2010, there were an estimated 30B RFID tags across the global ecosystem. Almost 162 million smart phones were sold in 2008, surpassing laptop sales for the first time. Soon there will be one trillion connected devices in the world, constituting an “Internet of things.” This environment provides both the individual and the organization the opportunity to adapt their thinking and actions to address the challenges of the new world.
  • Clouds are now seen as an element of a transformative process. Organizations spend time looking at their business processes and deciding which ones to change for competitive advantage as they move into the cloud. More efficient workflows that incorporate “outsiders,” such as customers, contractors, and suppliers can be created.
  • The ability to allow outside partners to connect to a legacy application via the cloud is an important consideration.
Dan R.D.

How This Guy Is Making Your iPhone Virtually Human [17Sep11] - 0 views

  • Today, your iPhone is a gadget, a mere consumer appliance. But your future iPhone will become increasingly human. You’ll have conversations with it. The phone will make decisions, prioritize the information it presents to you, and take action on your behalf — rescheduling meetings, buying movie tickets, making reservations and much more.
  • In short, your iPhone is evolving into a personal assistant that thinks, learns and acts. And it’s all happening sooner than you think,
  • Ultimately, however, human beings are hard-wired to communicate with other people, not computers. And that’s why the direction of interface design is always heading for the creation of artificial humans.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • For speech, Apple has maintained a long-standing partnership with the leading company. A version of iOS 5 with Nuance Dictation has reportedly been sent out to carriers for testing.
  • There are four elements to a machine that can function like a person: 1) speech; 2) decision-making algorithms; 3) data; and 4) “agency,” the ability to act in the world on your behalf.
  • For decision-making algorithms, Apple can rely on the amazing technology it purchased in April, 2010, when it bought Siri, a company that created a personal-assistant application that you talk to, and it figures out what you want.
  • The most expensive, ambitious and far-reaching attempt to create a virtual human assistant was initiated in 2003 by the Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA (the organization that brought us the Internet, GPS and other deadly weapons).
  • The project was called CALO, for “Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes,” and involved some 300 of the world’s top researchers.
  • The man in charge of the whole project was a brilliant polymath who worked as senior scientist and co-director of the Computer Human Interaction Center at SRI, Adam Cheyer (pictured above).
Dan R.D.

Crowdpark Raises $6 Million To Bring Legal, 'Social Betting' Games To Facebook (And Soo... - 0 views

  • Crowdpark, a Berlin-headquartered game developer, announced today that it has raised $6 million in series B financing from top German venture capital firms, Target Partners and existing investor, Earlybird Venture Capital. Waldemar Jantz, partner at Target Partners, will be joining the startup’s board as a result of the investment. The new round of funding brings Crowdpark’s total to $8 million. Why should you care? Well, Crowdpark is aiming to give gamers their fix of legal gambling, er, betting. Using its patented “dynamic betting” technology, Crowdpark enables forecasting in realtime for social gaming in much the same way the brave among us play the stock market. Unlike its social gaming competitors, the German startup allows gamers to compete against each other in betting events using virtual currency. This includes the opportunity to bet on real world events taking place in everything from sports and entertainment to news and technology.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

The Paypers. Insights in payments. [02Dec11] - 0 views

  • The Dutch consortium of major banks and MNOs which in 2010 signed a letter of intent to jointly introduce mobile payments at the checkout in the Netherlands have taken their initiative one step further.
  • The partnership, which includes financial services providers ABN AMRO, Rabobank and ING as well as KPN and Vodafone, will notify the initiative for approval to the European Commission in Brussels.
  • It is expected that the EC will communicate its vision in the first quarter of 2012. After that, the consortium can start the actual execution of the plans. It is expected that Dutch consumers can experience payments with their mobile early 2013.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The consortium was established to develop a user-friendly and secure mobile payment service in the Netherlands. For technical support a central services organization (Trusted Services Manager/TSM) is set to be established by the partners. The creation of a legal entity which will host this TSM is currently in preparation.
  • In 2010 the six original consortium partners signed a letter of intent, followed in mid-2011 by a cooperation agreement. T-Mobile, which was part of the initial group of six, has recently decided not to become a shareholder in the legal entity to be established and therefore not to continue the cooperation. T-Mobile and its parent company Deutsche Telekom strongly believe in the potential of mobile payments, but will decide in a later stage how to bring this service to the market.
  • The other five partners however have fully reconfirmed their commitment to the Sixpack initiative. In view of the competitive aspects of collaboration between the biggest banks and mobile operators, the consortium informed the Dutch Competition Authority (NMa) of the initiative in an early stage. In the coming weeks the Sixpack initiative will be notified to the European Commission (EC) in view of the requirement to test the founding of the TSM for competition law aspects.
1 - 20 of 65 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page