Nothing to buzz about

Clearly Google is struggling with innovation, and they are starting to look like the Yahoos of the world when it comes to social networking.
It seems that everything they try is failing, and buzz looks like another one of these. Time will tell, but for now I am not impressed.

So what's going on? Lots of cool stuff is coming out, and employee are said to have 20% of their time that they can allocate to special project, but then whatever is produced is only a half success at best. Lots of buzz that falls flat after a while. I am talking here about Google video, Google talk, Google check out, Google Lattitude, Google wave, and I suspect Google buzz.

My take on this is that Google is too fat. They make good money from ads revenue, and they are not hungry enough that they need to go to the bottom of the solution that they are offering to make them really appealing on the business side.

One exception: Google mail, which evolved into Google Apps. Clearly they have something there, a very compelling solution for businesses to handle the typical basic services like email, and doc sharing. It took a while to get here, but it is happening.

The good news for Google is that they have money, so they can buy their way into better solution. And they did get their hands on cool technologies: the most famous was YouTube as a replacement for Google video, but also Writely for Google docs, Grandcentral for Google Voice, Etherpad, Gizmo - to name a few.

So is there a lesson here that good innovation cannot by design come from the corporation after it has reach a certain size?
All teams inside are geared to optimize the delivery of their solutions, and protect their market, and even with 20% time for other things they are not in the right state of mind to create, really think outside the box to the point where it could be counter to their bespoke solutions. The people inside cannot think of the Google mothership as the enemy against which they can produce a better app.

After many years of trying to create software exclusively from the inside, Oracle went into a buying spree. And probably acquisitions are where the next hot things will come from in Google's case too. Not to say that you should not experiment, if anything to understand the issues before you go an buy something, but I do not expect too much from Google buzz to turn Google into a social networking success...


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Entrepreneur Commons Academy: engaging your community and its influencers

Do you need to understand better what is being said about your company and your product?
Would you like to get a better with online communities within your ecosystem?

Then this Entreco web event is for you.
At the end of this webinar, you will understand:

* How to identify key social influencers in my target market?
* What are hot topics people are talking about?
* How current topics and discussions relate to my brand and
competitors?
* How to establish a relationship with key social influencers?
* How to mix buzz, outreach and content marketing to improve your
visibility and attention in key communities?

PRESENTER: Dominique Lahaix - co-founder and CEO of eCairn
Dominique has over 15 years of experience in e-marketing, knowledge engineering and software development. Prior to founding eCairn he was the CEO and founder of Cairnalys, an e-mail marketing technology company, which customers included companies such as eBay. Prior Cairnalys, he was manager of WW Consulting Practice at HP Emerging services. Dominique previously held engineering and engineering management positions at HP, McDonnell Douglas Information Systems and Tymnet. Dominique holds a Management degree from the prestigious INSEAD European business school and an engineering degree from Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon, France.


WHERE: this is an online event at Entrepreneur Commons Academy
http://entreco.supercoolschool.com/

To register: http://entreco100211.eventbrite.com/

HOW IT WORKS: Once you register for the event, you will receive an email invite to join the Entrepreneur Commons academy, where you will be able to join the class.

Note that this event is a live online event using the Adobe Connect platform - you will need a computer and a headset, and ideally a webcam to participate.

Once you signup you will receive an invite to join the Entreco supercoolschool space, where you can then access the online event.

If you cannot attend the live event, you should consider becoming a member of the Entrepreneur Commons Academy so that you can access the video archive of the event, and other events that will happen throughout the year.

Entrepreneur Commons is growing! 3 new chapters

I have been pushing Entrepreneur Commons for some time now, and I am happy to announce that we are growing. Here is the official announcement:

>>
Entrepreneurs around the world get valuable help from their peers through Entrepreneur Commons.

San Francisco chapter member Brandon P. says: "Through EC, I've met a solid, knowledgeable group of entrepreneurs who challenge my thinking and gladly offer assistance."

To serve entrepreneurs better, we are happy to announce the creation of 3 new chapters.

A new chapter in New York


Melcion Chassagne et Cie and Alexander Lexington & Co are happy to announce the first Entrepreneur Commons meeting in New York City on February 9, 2010. This meeting will be hosted by Foley & Lardner, and will start promptly at 8:30am.

LOCATION: Foley & Lardner - 90 Park Avenue, 37th floor - New York, NY
WHEN: 2/9/10 from 8:30am until 10:30am

click here to register for the NY meeting

A new chapter in Oakland (CA)

Katovich Law Group is happy to announce the first Entrepreneur Commons meeting at their office in Oakland on February 17, 2010. This meeting will start promptly at 8am.

LOCATION: Katovich Law Office - 436 14th Street - Suite 208, 2nd floor - Oakland CA
WHEN: 2/17/10 from 8am until 10am

click here to register for the event

A 2nd chapter in Paris

In addition to the existing chapter already meeting at Club Melcion, Melcion Chassagne et Cie is happy to announce the creation of a second Entrepreneur Commons chapter in Paris on February 1, 2010. The meeting will be hosted by Regus Paris St Lazare, and will start promptly at 5:30pm.

LOCATION: Regus Paris St Lazare - 26-28 rue de Londres - 75009 Paris - France
WHEN: 2/1/10 from 5:30Pm until 7:30Pm

To register, contact christine at melcion dot com

We look forward to seeing you all there

And if you are interested in starting an Entrepreneur Commons chapter in your area, please contact us

Best,
Marc Dangeard

***

Entrepreneur Commons is a network of entrepreneurs that provides peer mentoring. Entrepreneurs meet on a regular basis (typically once a month) to share issues and successes on their current projects with other entrepreneurs. These meetings are an opportunity for all to exchange information, knowledge and contacts in a trusted environment.

Members of Entrepreneur Commons also have access to the global network of entrepreneurs who have already joined local chapters in other places, or who have joined the online community through the Entrepreneur Commons Academy.

Good to see another piece of the puzzle

"we've acquired Gizmo5"

Good to see another piece of the puzzle added to the overall Google toolbox.

Comment posted on Google Voice Blog: Google welcomes Gizmo5 at googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com using Reframe It

Test from iPhone

Test from iPhone

Comment posted on Reframe It - Javascript Injectable Margin (JIM) Integration Demo at delphi.reframeit.com using Reframe It

The tower of Babel - another take

Since the beginning of my life on the web I have had this gut feeling that we are building a Babel tower, and that we have to be very careful how we do this if we do not want the whole thing to blow up in our face.
There is the issue of architecture, and how we are today surfing private silos (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc...) rather than surfing a global web of distributed servers. And there is risk in this.

And then there is the social web.

This is what I see:
- people have limited time to spend reading stuff and interact with others on the web, so they have to choose
- meanwhile there is an increasingly large number of sources of news, and of places to interact, so choice is becoming even more difficult
- in the end, what will make me choose one place or another is where the people I know are. And if I make new friends, I will invite them to join these places where my network is, as a way to share this network with them and bring them into that one place where I can maintain network. Pick one and stick to it.
- what it means, is that these places can only be public places, easily accessible by others and places that will remain open to me whatever happens to me (job situation, personal life situation). This is the promise of a LinkedIn or a Facebook, and many other "public" services.
- from a business prospective, this is also the promise of these vertical networks of experts, which make a lot of sense to share best pratices and create some critical mass around a given subject matter.
The issue however, is that the more we get together talking about a subject, the more we are turning this vertical network into a competitive economy where the winner takes all. From the network, will emerge a few recognized experts, and they will get most of the traffic, and most of the deals. Everybody else in the group becomes another person stuck in the middle and struggling to get their voice heard. An individual among many others in the long tail. Which is not a very healthy economy for most (who makes money from his/her blog today?).
For the expert in the middle, the way out (until he gets some attention and can be the lucky beneficiary of the network effect) is the personal network, people who appreciate the value he brings and will agree to compensate him fairly for that value.
And this is where the tower of Babel story comes back into mind: the story ends with a lot of small groups that do not talk to each others, because this is a more sustainable way.
Let's see what happens this time around...

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If you like Google Sidewiki try www.reframeit.com

Google Sidewiki is a very nice concept, but ReframetIt is a way better implementation of the concept. try http://www.reframeit.com, see it in action here

I have tried Google Sidewiki, and I have uninstalled it within the half hour, because it is missing the point on the user experience side, and it does not really deliver on its promise. Maybe the next version will be better. In the meantime, ReframeIt rules :-)

It is always nice to see Google push great new ideas, but in this case I think that they are victim of becoming too big for their own good. And they seem to be spreading themselves over too many things without really going into the depth of them enough to make them really worth our while.

I have seen it happen several time: friendconnect was a great idea, but I do not see too much happening with it, Google talk was a good idea, but I do not seem much happening with it, etc...

The worst of it all in this area is Google contacts, this link you have in Gmail to access your contacts. This is the worst contact management system I have seen, and it has not been improved a bit in the few years I have been using Gmail. And even if you use Google Apps and pay for the service you are very limited on that side, and for example there is no UI to upload contacts that you want to share with colleagues within the same domain. Just an API, and outside vendor who have built the HTML and will charge you for that piece. How hard can it be for Google to resolve this?

I love Google and I love what they bring us (I can't wait to see Google Wave open up to more people so that I can start use it fully to communicate), and I appreciate that they bring it to us for free, but I wish sometimes that they would do a little less and go a little deeper to make it really work...


Comment posted on Google Sidewiki at www.google.com using Reframe It

Google Voice on the iPhone

I just ran into this post mentioning that there is now an app to use Google Voice on the iPhone. I have tried and this is a major cool app.
Basically I can use the app the call, the keyboard is the same as for the regular phone app, and I have access to all my contacts on the iPhone. What it does for me is resolve the issue of the Google contacts not being synchronized with the right account.
Google Voice native uses my Gmail contact, while I am using Google Apps (dangeard.com domain) for my address book. Not a problem anymore, since these contacts are synchronized on my iPhone through the Exchange sync, and since they are the contacts I can use when dialing from my iPhone. Very very cool. If you have any question why you would want your iPhone jailbroken, here is the answer. Thank you Sean Kovacs for this...

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Post originally published here

My friends at eCairn recently came up with a new service to get to know your ecosystem better: network and keyword maps.

I am already using eCairn to collect and read blogs on several topics: entrepreneurs, entreprise 2.0, social capital, etc...

I use the service to find new blogs related to each of these topics: the "suggested blog" feature that they have has allowed me to build from an initial set of about 20 blogs that were relevant to me to a list of about 500 to date.

I also use eCairn influence ranking to sort out these blogs, so that I have a choice to filter the posts I read using keywords, but also influence. If I am short on time, I'll stick to checking posts from the top influencers, and then if I have more time, I will dig down into the bigger set of blogs. This same influence ranking is what allowed me to post the top 150 "Social Capital" blogs for example.

And now they are offering some interesting visualization tools. I did experiment with them on the Social Capital list of blogs:

1. Network map: this is a big blob, and not much can be seen, but it is interesting to notice that within this big cloud of 548 blogs there are a few networks within the network that appear on the edges (blue tags and green tags).

2. Network map for the top blogs: in this map, you can see 2 distinct networks for blogs. From what I could see, one group seem to focus more on funding and marketing, while the other seem to have a focus closer to social entrepreneurship. But in the end bloggers are people and who they reference and why is not a strict rule. In this case I would be interested in feedback from bloggers on why we have such 2 groups at the top.

3. Keyword map for the blogs mentioning "Social Capital": in this last example, I used a filter on "Social Capital" to look at the posts from the Social Capital ecosystem that I am tracking. And what is interesting here is that we are looking not just at keywords, but at groups of words as well, up to 3 word. The big difference here is that while it is interesting to keep keywords, there is value in identifying groups of words such as "office of social" for example. In this case, it is probably fair to assume that this group of word refers to the Office of Social Innovation established by the Obama administration. And if we start looking at this group of words and how often they are used in posts, we can see here that "Office of Social" is used more often than "government".

The most striking group of words for me is "Social Media" which comes back more often than almost anything else. For a group of blogs focusing on Social Capital, it comes back more often than "social entrepreneurs" or "social innovation".

On the more "to be expected side", "Social Venture" is comes back more often than "philanthropy", "Impact" comes back more than "investment".

And then note the importance of "San Francisco" in the overall cloud. If I am to believe bloggers, San Francisco is clearly the place where things are happening.

And if there is one event that stands out, it is the Social Capital Markets Conference (look at the size of the "Capital Markets Conference" group). Kudos to the Socap team for the awareness that they were able to raise in the blogs. It would be interesting to see how this cloud evolves over time...

Post originally published here

The last day of Socap started with very moving and sobering accounts of the state of the world from 3 women. According to the program we were looking at 3 stages of Social Entreprise, but really it was 3 vivid snapshots from the ocean of issues we need to address:
- Elizabeth Lindsey talked about vanishing indigenous cultures and the absence of respect for elders in Western countries. "We earn these wrinkles, we should be proud of them"
- Ann Wizer talked about trash, and how we need to think about what happens after a product has been used. This is not just about recycling, it is about including the "end of life" into the design of the product
- Eve Blossom talked about fighting the sex trade by providing a competing market options

Inspiring stories that ultimately show us that regardless how bad things are, something can be done to try to make it right.

And after the tone had been set, the open space format of the last day always make it the best of all. This is where we go past the formal presentations to dig into the heart of things.

For me today it was virtual currencies and how they can help unlock currently untapped or under-utilized resources. 2 examples, from each end of the spectrum:
- Recipco offers UTUs, a universal trading unit backed by large corporations. A very impressive solution worth checking - more details here
- Everywun offers credits to compensate for positive actions: displaying support, learning about causes or reaching out to friends. These credits can be used then to support charities. Simple and powerful.

Technology exist that works, we can use virtual currencies as a tool to change the dynamics within a given ecosystem.

My idea for Socap next year would be that every attendee gets 10,000 units on the first day, with a mission to spend it all during the conference on social entrepreneurs or other resources that help make a difference. You must spend your initial 10,000 units, and then you can spend units that you earn during the conference.
And at the end of the 3 days, some of the foundations present at the conference could match these units with real dollars for the top earners.
Spending units could be fun, it could be a good opportunity to meet people, and it could be an opportunity to get a few projects funded on site.

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Socap09 - day 2

Post originally published here

Lots of conversations today at Socap09, and a lot of the same questions from last year still unresolved: how to get projects funded, how to scale, how to measure impact, how to better account for intangible assets, etc... We are still experimenting, and sharing results from here and there, trying to extract the lessons learned so that hopefully next year we can show a little more progress.

Meanwhile the highlight for me today came from the discussion on "hubs": building communities anchored around a space. Nothing fundamentally new, incubators have been around for quite some time, except that we are not talking about real estate, but rather we are talking about establishing geographical landmarks as anchors for local communities to gather around the idea of changing the world. A small difference in the narrative and in the pricing model, but a huge difference in the type of community you establish and the results you can expect.

And it seems to me that it is a very good opportunity to start fresh with people and their dreams (their BeDo, as I discovered yesterday) gathering to help each other and share experience.

There are several examples of such concept implemented in various places, but the best I have seen so far is The Hub. A good place for entrepreneurs to hang out.

I have been working on my side on the Entrepreneur Commons, and I see a lot of synergies between hubs and Entrepreneur Commons. If the Entrepreneur Commons is a community anchored around a fund for seed capital, and hubs are communities anchored around geograhical landmarks, then what we have really are 2 pilars upon which we can build strong ventures. Something that I intend to explore further...

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Socap09 - first day

This post was originally published here

One year later, it feels good to be back at Socap, and it is great to catch up on the Social Capital Markets conversation.

My first impression is that just like everywhere else I go these days, and whoever else I talk to, the subject of Innovation, and more specifically Social Innovation takes over the conversation.

Socap and its attendees were no different today: the first keynote was from Sonal Shah, the director of the office of social innovation in the Obama administration.
- 4 people working across the various bodies of the administration to help them think differently and work with each other to scale efforts taken from the public or private sector that work
- a social innovation fund to help finance the process

It used to be that people dreaming of a better world would try to stay away from government ("big brother" could kill the dream). The same people see now the government as a potential (or even unavoidable) ally. This is a huge change in perception, and a huge opportunity to make things happen differently. Just that is a major accomplishment of the Obama administration, and even if it is just starting and much still needs to be done, it clearly makes this office of social innovation a success already.

So if you did not know yet, it's official now: 2009 is the year of Social Innovation. And what it is really is a re-definition of organizations models and infrastructure: whether it is government or enterprise, or any kind of organization, people have realized that military style hierarchies with top down communication are not sustainable over the long term. Michel Bowens has been talking about the rise of the peer-to-peer civilization, and it is now happening.

What this means for entrepreneurs is that they too should think about Social Innovation and Participation for their own organizations. If you are going to build a company that will last, it should have participation built in.

And this is the other highlight of this first day of Socap09 for me: BeDo Spring as the "Intel Inside" for enterprise.
What BeDo Spring does is help corporations develop unique mission brands and action platforms, which engage employees around social responsibility, sustainability and purpose. It helps brand evolve from a top down model of a small strategic marketing team defining plans and actions to a model where employees are empowered to do something good that will benefit them as well as the brand and the rest of the world.
Brand management is becoming community management, starting with employees. If we are evolving towards a world where "communities dominate brands" this is good strategy to implement. You too need to find your BeDo...



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Why I am going to Socap09: can we re-invent currencies?

This post was originally posted on the Socap09 blog

I read recently on Edge.org an essay from Douglas Rushkoff entitled "Economics is not a natural science".
In the article, Douglas reminds us that the current economic system we take for granted is a result of history. It goes back to the middle ages, when people went from bartering what they were producing, and the main measure of value was the amount of food that could be produced from an ecosystem, to currencies based on how much gold where held in central banks. Scarcity was no longer in the ends of mother nature, but rather it became disconnected from it, and in the hands of the rulers of the land.
Since then, currencies has evolved to no longer being connected to gold either, they are just an artificial instrument to regulate exchange within and across nations.

Comes the internet, and another phenomenon appears, that Xavier Comtesse describes in his essay on "Direct Territories": we are now living in a world at the intersection of several and often conflicting layers. There is the geographical layer, several government layers (from local to national), a business layer (the corporation that spans across nation), and many other community layers. With the internet, stakeholders from these layers that typically did not have access to the discussion now can have their voice heard and can contribute to the balance of powers. Yochai Benkler in his book "The wealth of networks" gives very good examples of how this power is being re-distributed, and of the opportunities but also the risks it represents.

Today the economic crisis shows us a world where many people are without a job while there is enough work for everybody if we want to fix the issues at hand. Douglas Rushkoff concludes his essay by saying that "the economic model has broken, for good. It's time to stop pretending it describes our world". So what can we do from here?

- From the internet came the Open Source community, that has shown us how a large group of developers who were not bound by any constraint other than their own desire to contribute could self-organize to build and maintain very complex systems.

- And from history, we learn that it is possible to go around the lack of liquidity in situations of crisis by using our own currency: in 1934, and because there was a shortage of cash due to the stock market crash of 1929, a business man in Switzerland created the Swiss Economic Circle, now called WIR Bank. They started with 16 members, and there are now 62,000 businesses strong. They eventually returned to managing real currencies in 1952, but the system worked well to help businesses out of the crisis in the meantime.

One opportunity at Socap09 is to derive from these lessons and to consider what the ideal currency should be used for social capital markets, that would allow us to restore the right balance for a more sustainable world. I am looking forward to having such a discussion...

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Look for Haute Couleur ad this Sunday 8.23.09 in the NYT Magazine

"Media-Vent™ 8.23.09: NY Times Magazine on Empowering Women"

Look for Haute Couleur ad this Sunday 8.23.09 in the special issue of the NY Times Magazine on Empowering Women

Comment posted on Haute Couleur® at www.hautecouleur.org using Reframe It

Echo is nice, but ...

Echo is nice, but until I know better Reframeit is better because it resolves a big issue for commenters, which is that comments should not be something controlled by the original content owner. If we want freedom of speech, shouldn't we be able to comment anything anywhere?


Comment posted on JS-Kit ECHO at js-kit.com using Reframe It

I also just discovered auto-post from posterous, so now this should go to my Facebook, Twitter, and to my Open Business blog. A blast!

via google-wave-robot

Posted via web from mdangear's posterous

Google Wave complexity does not come from UI

From What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way at blog.enterprise2open.com:

"But then another task needs to be dealt with - protecting users from the complexities of the platform and helping them find ways of use, here usability of apps and sites built upon Wave must be better than what we’ve seen so far … this messy UX above reminds me of some platforms best forgotten."

Google Wave complexity does not come so much from a messy UI but rather from lack of etiquette. Once you understand the way it works and you start cleaning up your interactions, you are back to a nice and manageable environment. The stability on the Google Wave sandbox is still an issue, but otherwise using it (as an end user) is easy, and the promise that it will be better than email feels very real.


Posted using Reframe It

Top 150 social capital blogs updated

I originally published the list in May 2009.

The list has been very stable. You can find the updated list here


2 new comers in the top 10:
A. Fine Blog - http://afine2.wordpress.com moving up from #16
Social Entrepreneurship - Change.org - http://socialentrepreneurship.change.org moving up from #11

Two blogs moved out of the top 10:
NextBillion.net | Development through Enterprise - http://www.nextbillion.net moved to #12
Stanford Social Innovation Review : Opinion Blog Entries - http://www.ssireview.org/opinion moved to #11

If you are planning to go to Socap09, these are good blogs to track...




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Reputation

From Masum at firstmonday.org:

"Reputation is a surrogate — a partial reflection representing our "best educated guess" of the underlying true state of affairs. Active evaluation by looking behind surface signals can corroborate or disprove reputations, while indiscriminate use degrades their reliability."

The Halo effect is a factor that will impact reputation and typically will create a disconnection between perception and the underlying true state of the affair. When a company does not perform well on the stock market, it is easy to rationalize that the CEO did not do a good job. The same CEO doing the exact same things in a market where the company does well would be presented as a reference for good management. The good read on the matter is "The Halo Effect" from Phil Rozenwieg.

But if/when we can resolve this problem, then there is a big potential. From the report:

"just as selfish local actions with market incentives can lead to collectively efficient behavior, locally maximizing actions with reputation incentives have the potential for similar guided emergent behavior that exceeds what might have been designed by a conscious planner."

I believe that this is a key element to making capitalism more sustainable. Definitely something worth working on!





Posted using Reframe It

Internal Evangelist of the Year - by the Adoption 2.0 Council

If you are an "internal evagelist" or know somebody that
contributes to bringing change within your organization, the Adoption
2.0 is launching a "Internal Evangelist" award, here is a great
opportunity to capitalize on the effort...

Comment posted on ITSinsider | Who Will be the “Internal Evangelist” of the Year? at itsinsider.com using Reframe It