Traveling Geeks

Huddle Integrates Humanity into Next-Gen Collaboration Tool #TG2009

Andy McLoughlin (@bandrew @huddle) and Alastair Mitchell asked this simple question:

What happens when the MySpace gen goes to work?

If Andy and Alastair have the answer, it’s “use Huddle,” their collaboration service that succinctly integrates file management, file sharing, permissions, whiteboards, task management, and online meeting tools into a clean interface that comes to you, in your social environment.

Huddle Workspace

One of the first companies invited to integrated into LinkedIn, Huddle is next launching within Ning – to bring group collaboration tools to groups, where than hang out.

I’ve used Basecamp and Lighthouse among other collaboration tools and Huddle looks like a definite improvement for a few reasons. First, the buddy list brings humanity into an experience that’s previously been “document” or “project-focused” rather than people-focused. Secondly, there’s web conferencing built right in. Third, you can live edit documents together, which I find I do often. And you can manage tasks for multiple projects in your account.

At Personal Life Media, though our experts are mostly in NY and SF, our production group is in Florida, we have developers in Chicago, New York and Chennai. All businesses are moving to global collaboration and Huddle is the next generation of collaboration tools. And there’s a Freemium business model, so you can try out a free account.

Replace Basecamp, GoToMeeting, Google Docs and your Chat ap with Huddle.

Andy McLoughlin, co-founder, Huddle

These co-founders have a great personal interaction – a good sign for success.

Andy and Alasdair Speed Dating with Howard Rheingold

From the Seedcamp Profile:

Andy McLoughlin     Alastair Mitchell

Twitter: huddle

Email: hello@huddle.net

Website: http://www.huddle.net

Contact Phone: +44 (0)7811 103 540

Company Description
Established by Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin in November 2006, Huddle.net is a multi award-winning network of secure online workspaces where users can share files, collaborate on ideas, manage projects and organise virtual meetings.
Its customers include P&G, Pearson, Nokia and UNICEF, hundreds of thousands of small businesses and a number of UK and US government departments. Huddle’s API enables developers to integrate their applications and build new services on top of the Huddle platform.
In October 2008, Huddle.net launched on the LinkedIn application platform as the only non-US company, alongside Amazon and Google. In February 2009, the company partnered with InterCall, the world’s largest conferencing provider, to provide services to theit 1M+ customers. In June 2009 BusinessWeek called Huddle.net one of their ‘50 most promising startups’ globally.
Huddle.net’s 30 staff are headquartered in London with sales offices in Chicago. A San Francisco office will open in September 2009.

Will BT let JP create the first open network operator? One scenario for the mobile Web

The Web exists because Tim Berners-Lee didn’t require any network operator to rewire its central switch. Google exists because nobody has to ask permission to create a new way to use the Web. These affordances for innovation are no accident: Sir Tim could give away the Web and Larry and Sergey could make billions of dollars for themselves because the architects of the internet’s original protocols were wise enough to reserve innovation for the edges, not the center of the network. The authors of what has become known as the internet’s realized that control of the network – technical, economic, political – could be radically decentralized, and that by enabling anyone who played by the TCP/IP rules to connect anything they wanted to the network, future media that they didn’t even dream about in the olden days would one day become possible. So the Web, cyberculture, the dot com economy, digital media, the refashioning of global economic production by digital networks, grew extremely rapidly.

The merger of the mobile phone and the internet has not grown anywhere nearly as rapidly as the web precisely because there is someone you have to ask for permission in the mobile world – the network operators. And network operators evolved from regulated monopoly telephony providers, who have done their best to prevent, rather than to facilitate, an internet-like ecology of small and large businesses, heterogeneous media, decentralized control, and a rising economic tide that lifts small boats and threatens huge ships that take a long time to turn. We have yet to see an owner of significant telecommunications network open their network by providing an open application programming interface (api)

Which brings us to JP Rangaswami:

JP Rangaswami talks to the travelling geeks

(Source: JD Lasica)

JD Lasica’s photo was taken atop BT Tower in London, when British Telecom’s CIO of Global Services invited the Travelling Geeks to dinner in a private, revolving dining room in BT’s high-security antenna tower, a landmark on the London skyline I’ve often wondered about. How that dinner came to be is a story of how life happens online these days. A link from another blog brought me to JP’s blog, Confused of Calcutta, years ago; I read it via RSS regularly, and when I saw that the blogger was on Twitter, I started following him. When JP used Last.fm, it tweeted what he was listening to. I couldn’t help noticing that he listened to a fair amount of Grateful Dead music. So I started to correspond with him. When he visited the San Francisco Bay Area, he invited me (via Facebook) to join him for dinner. He had more than a few interesting things to say about the way media infrastructure might evolve in the future. So when I knew we were going to London, I introduced the Travelling Geeks to JP. He, in turn, invited us to dinner. It dawned on me that my blogger thinker Deadhead social media acquaintance wielded some clout at BT when we were greeted for dinner by the CEO of British Telecom.

It was probably JP’s idea to seat me next to Ted Griggs, the founder of Ribbit, a company JP had acquired. The seating was probably no accident. Here’s Ribbit’s elevator pitch. (Another way of describing Ribbit’s product, Griggs told me, as London revolved below us, would be “open API’s for [now BT’s] networks.”)

I’ve been writing about the future of digital media for a while now, and I think I’ve developed a pretty good spidey-sense for something that could change everything. When I met the people JP had collected and saw what they were doing (during a morning of demos after our dinner), I was reminded of nothing so much as the time I got to know Bob Taylor at Xerox PARC and started to realize that what they were doing on Palo Alto’s Coyote Hill Road with personal computers, networks, graphical user interfaces way back in the 1970s was going to be the foundation of the 21st centuries fundamental structuring technologies.

But Xerox management, of course, thought they were in the copier business and failed to take advantage of the fact that their research arm invented the GUI, the Ethernet, and the laser printer.

Will BT management realize that they aren’t in the telephone network operator business, and that someone in their midst has invited not only their future, but everyone else’s? Stay tuned.

uberVU Social Media Commenting Tracking & Reply System #TG2009

Two of the things I’m tracking right now are social media meta tools and social media data mining for marketers.

uberVU, a European start up from Romania has created a clever social media meta tool that solves a real problem for content creators in the social sphere.  With uberVU, you can track conversations that happen anywhere on the web and see the responses in a single interface.

For example, this blog post is posted to my DishyMix blog, but will also automatically be Twittered and will get syndicated to my Facebook page. Anyone can reply to the blog post, reply to me @SusanBratton or comment on Facebook. uberVU lets me see all the comments in a single location and then allows me to comment from that UI.

Vladimir Oane and Dragos Ilinca of uberVU are in private beta now and public beta soon on their comment tracking and reply system.

Vladimir Oane, co-founder, uberVu

Here are some screen shots I got while meeting them at the Seedcamp US/UK Speed Dating event last week in London at part of my Traveling Geeks trip.

UberVu Single Conversation

You can track your own work or track stories from other sources. Select a blog post or Tweet for example and uberVU compiles the reactions to the story from where ever that story appears – blogs, Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, Disqus, YouTube and many more.

You can see all the responses to a story as a threaded conversation. And you can respond from the uberVU interface to any or all of the comments across myriad sites.

In my interview with @DaveTaylor at SXSW, he says the often overlooked but most important activity he recommends is posting blog comments around your key areas of expertise to stay active in the blogosphere. With uberVU, you can see what’s being said AND COMMENT ON IT from a single interface.

Susan Bratton & Dave Taylor on Social Media Commenting Strategies

uberVu is a web app that uses the ContextVoice API to track what’s being said across social graphs, using sentiment analysis, search and filtering, giving you near real time results.

UberVu Conversation Tracker

Tips for Using YouTube for Affiliate Marketing from Econsultantcy’s “The Innovation Report” #TG2009

As a Traveling Geek in London, I participated in a Round Table Discussion event with some of Econsultancy’s clients.

See the TG2009 Econsultancy Flickr Set Here

As a follow up to the event, I was given a copy of their very well done Innovation Report.

Econsultancy Innovation Report for Digital Marketing

If you want a high level overview of some of the hottest technology companies in the digital media and marketing space, this report does a great job with highlighting best practices in the following disciplines:

• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing
• Online advertising
• Multichannel marketing
• Online customer service
• Online PR
• Social media and communities
• Search marketing
• Usability and user experience
• Web analytics and optimization

One of the most interesting sections to me was on using video to drive affiliate traffic, written by Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit. (Most of the companies featured are European, but this example of a “best practice” was from Shawn, a US affiliate champion.)

For more free and in-depth coverage on video, I interview Bruce Clay about Video SEO on DishyMix airing today:

Bruce Clay on Video SEO, Page Rank Sculpting and Search Siloing Strategies

From Econsultancy’s Innovation Report

Video as a channel to drive direct traffic to affiliate links
Category: Affiliate Marketing
Company: http://blog.affiliatetip.com/
Many affiliates use video as a channel to drive traffic, but one innovative tactic to drive through higher volumes is to include the URL of the affiliate site and embed it within the video itself.  According to Shawn Collins, few affiliates are making use of video to either drive traffic to their
own sites or to affiliate links directly. Shawn Collins tested various online video engagement strategies, trialling videos through a number of popular sites, including YouTube, MySpace, Revver and Yahoo Video.
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkX7xHvTIe0

http://blog.affiliatetip.com/

Per Shawn Collins, co-founder, Affiliate Summit

?I have tested various methods over the past year… and found that the following format works best:
http://www.affiliatesite.com/product-name – I then create a redirect via an .htaccess file, so that /product-name
points to the affiliate link. The URL is featured for the duration of the video uploaded to the video sites.

?Conventional wisdom may be that people do not type in URLs in videos – I‘d like to share a secret that the
conventional wisdom is incorrect!

Address Books Supported by the New Contact Uploader in Skype 4.1

I recently met Neil Dodd of Skype in London and go the low down on Skype’s new 4.1 release. Neil says Skype now supports the following contact mangement and email systems and address books so you can easily grow your Skype address book.

Here’s the list of supported services:

Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, 163.com, Daum, FastMail, Indiatimes, Interia, Libero, mail.com, mail.ru, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, mynet, Rambler, rediff, SINA, Wirtualna Polska and Yandex.

Video: Interview with multiple award winner Spotify at #Europas

This is a re-post from Techcrunch Europe.

As you may well have heard, the big winner at The Europas Awards on Thursday night was Spotify, which won four awards (Best We app, Best New Startup, Best Founder Team and the Grand Prix). Here’s Shakil Khan (the video title is mis-spelt), Spotify’s Consigliere, sharing with writer and author Paul Carr and myself how he felt about winning four awards, including The Europas Grand Prix award:

Skype Talks Social Media

Peter Parkes Editor-in-Chief and Neil Dodd, Windows Experience Manager at Skype talk to me about their social media roles in London and beyond.

DishyMix: Susan Bratton Podcasts & Blogs Executives

Banquet at Soho House Sponsored by Agency.com

Here’s a photo of our dinner with Agency.com, TBWA/London and some of their clients including Nike and Comic Relief. Bloggers beyond the Traveling Geeks included Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch and mbites.com as well as other agency heads, including Chris Walker, the newly appointed Managing Director of Agency.com.

Andy Hobsbawm, Chairman of Agency.com and Traveling Geek Susan Bratton, CEO of Personal Life Media

Andy Hobsbawm and I are friends from the TED conferences. He’s been a DishyMix guest and I’ll have him on again soon for you. In addition to Chairman of Agency.com Europe, his newest endeavor is Do The Green Thing. Following his passion, Andy offers ways we can all be proactive in leading a greener life.

An Evening with the A-List Bloggers

Niiiice!

Skype’s Blogger-in-Chief & Robert Scoble Chat about Social Media

Below, I’m interviewing Robert Scoble and Skype’s blogger-in-chief Peter Parkes about how blogging has changed over the years and how Skype is using blogging and social media in Europe and the rest of the world.

Are You There? Skype is My Traveling Geeks Lifeline #TG2009

Every night I can’t wait to get back to my room and Skype my husband. Seeing his beautiful face is the perfect end to my days as a Traveling Geek here in London.

This morning we were treated to a lovely lunch at Malmaison and I was lucky enough to score a seat next to Neil Dodd, Windows Experience Manager at Skype London. Neil just completed Skype 4.1 Gold for Windows and it has some valuable new features that you will want to know about.

Download Skype 4.1 for Windows

Though Skype 4.1 is only  for Windows today,  the Mac 2.8 Beta out now will go “Gold” in a few weeks.

I’ve been using GoTo Meeting nearly every day lately, and I’m going to try out one of the newest features of Skype which is screen sharing.

Screen sharing includes swapping between people, so no matter who originates the call, you can trade screen sharing back and forth. Screen sharing is compatible with anyone’s past version of Skype – anyone can see your screen. For them to share back, however, they will need to  upgrade, so check that first before you start your call.

This week I saw a demo of Huddle (which I will write more about soon), which is a new collaboration tool and it has conference calling built in, which is now an important requirement of collaboration tools. The face that Skype has screen sharing will make it all that more invaluable as a part of our everyday applications.
According to Neil Dodd, this release is just the start of collaboration tools from Skype. Probably if I were as good a reporter as Sarah Lacy, here on the trip with me as a fellow Geek, I’d have gotten more of a scoop for you.

Another incredibly helpful feature is called Skype Access. It’s a tool built into the Skype client that allows you to connect to compatible WiFi hotspots and pay for that access with your Skype credit by the minute. Instead of purchasing a whole day pass, you can make micropayments for quick stop overs in airports and Starbucks. Skype Access is Mac-only for now. That’s  a nice change!

Next time you travel, try managing the WiFi access point from your Skype client instead of from your browser. Boingo compatible WiFi hotspots are currently supported which is actually the bulk of WiFi according to Neil. Many hotspots might be branded something else, but are actually Boingo. So give it a try.

And, for a connector like me, my favorite new feature of Skype is a new extended contact import feature so you can find your friends and contacts on Skype. Before you pick up the phone or email, you can have a more novel experience by Skyping your friend. Now with the new Contact Uploader, you supply your credentials to a raft of contact systems and they will be matched against the Skype user directory and sent an authorization request. You can control to whom you send requests and edit the email that gets sent.

Using Skype video is such a more fun connection occaison than an email that I’m going to give the uploader a shot at matching some folks from my database as soon as I get home.

Hope you enjoyed the update from Skype.

Signing off until tomorrow. Tim is online and I’m going Skype him right now!