Archive for 'Traveling Geeks'
SaaS Goes Open Source: Kaltura’s Yekutiel Tells Us Why
Kaltura’s Ron Yekutiel talks to us about open source and video. They organized and participated in a SaaS Goes Open Source panel at AlwaysOn this week, together with SpikeSource, Zimbra, Acquia, Fenwick & West and Alfresco.
It’s disruptive he says, but tears down those gardened walls giving corporations better control, flexibility and better integration. More from Ron on the SaaS model, video and open source below.
My6Sense Updates Us
Barak Hachamov and the My6Sense team gathers in Palo Alto to talk about their updates and upcoming iPhone app.
A Kiwi’s Mission to get Millions of Women Pregnant
Below is Shamus Husheer, the genius behind DuoFertility, which is being launched in the UK this month. Shamus’ Mission? To get millions of women pregnant.
Below Shamus holds the monitor that consists of a discreet, hand-held reader and a small sensor, roughly the size of a £1 coin, which is worn underneath your arm. The sensor measures your temperature continuously and uses this information to pinpoint your ovulation and identify when you are most fertile, helping you to get pregnant more easily.
Below Shamus talks to me in a video interview during a dinner held at the oldest college at Cambridge University: 1284, hence the quality of the audio.
William Tunstall Pedoe of True Knowledge Talks Semantic Search
True Knowledge improves the experience of finding known facts on the Web. Think: semantic search. Their first service – the True Knowledge Answer Engine – is a major step toward fulfilling a longstanding Internet industry goal: providing consumers with instant answers to complex questions, with a single click.
Picking up where search engines leave off, True Knowledge’s Answer Engine automates the laborious, time-consuming work that users generally must do to get final answers to their questions.
True Knowledge does this by structuring data in a way that enables computers to work and think like humans do, drawing inferences and conclusions when needed to find the information that’s requested.
Another key differentiator: True Knowledge is tapping subject matter experts around the globe to build its information repository – bringing together the benefits of machine-driven automation and people-driven intelligence.
In the below video, I’m chatting with the founder William Tunstall Pedoe in Cambridge England.
Wise Advice From a Wise Geek
Advice from Jeff Saperstein on Changing Careers
While I was in Cambridge on the Traveling Geeks trip, I decided to interview one of the wisest geeks I know- Jeff Saperstein for some tips on how to make the switch. If you’re at all looking to change careers this is the video for you.
[vimeo 5700747]
10 videos from eConsultancy roundtables
From eConsultancy:
A few weeks ago Econsultancy hosted the Traveling Geeks roundtables in London, where the US digerati turned out in force to discuss and debate trends and issues.
The Geeks – featuring the likes of Craig Newmark, Robert Scoble and Susan Bratton – found that there is far more in common between the UK and US than is sometimes suggested, albeit with some notable differences (“fear of failure”).
The UK-based attendees included Poke’s Iain Tate, lastminute.com’s Marko Balabanovic and Steph Gray from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
After the roundtable discussions had taken place we shot a little bit of video, where we interviewed a bunch of the attendees to figure out what they’d learned from the day. Do check them out…
Do the Green Thing
I met Andy Hobsbawm, who I feel as if I must have run into at TED over the years.
Andy established the first international Internet agency in 1994 and was a founding director of leading British new media company Online Magic which merged with Agency.com in 1997. He is currently European Chairman of Agency.com, which sponsored a Traveling Geeks dinner at Soho House in London earlier this month.
His big passion is Green Thing, where he is co-founder. Green Thing is an award-winning non-profit service that inspires people to lead a greener life. With the help of brilliant videos and inspiring stories from creative people and community members around the world, Green Thing focuses on individual behavior change. (more…)
A Chat with East of England International
Karyn Barnes and John Dow chat with me about their roles and goals at East of England International. (EEI)
EEI enables business in the UK’s most innovative region, working across a range of industries and technologies including ICT, Clean Tech and MedTech/Lifesciences.
The organization supports regional companies to develop business in international markets. They deliver UK Trade & Investment services and products in the region and offer a wide range of services, including developing international strategies, providing in-depth information on target markets, cultural briefings and identifying business opportunities.
EEI’s Investor Development programme supports overseas-owned companies in the region stay abreast of key issues and receive ongoing support for growth.
Ribbit for Salesforce.com
I met up with the guys from Ribbit in London at BT’s offices earlier this month.
We saw the latest developments for the consumer market as well as Ribbit for Salesforce, which is a recently launched application from BT Business that features voice-to-text conversion.
Ribbit for Salesforce saves time and improves productivity for sales professionals and other mobile workers by making it easier for them to record customer information on the move.
Says BT’s Sandeep Raithatha, “think of it as an online personal sales assistant.”
Available in both the US and UK markets, any Salesforce.com user can now dictate notes and memos verbally on their mobile phones.
If you hover over any of your messages, they’re converted into text. If a call comes into your mobile and you miss the call, they flow into Salesforce.com.
Ribbit’s technology takes the message and converts voice to text. It also assigns it to a sender and their account.
“The notes are transcribed and flow directly into Salesforce.com and into the user’s inbox, eliminating the need to type updates, increasing user productivity,” says Sandeep.
The solution simplifies sales management by storing and organizing voicemail as email in Salesforce.com, categorizing leads, contacts and in-progress deals.
All voice messages are delivered as SMS or email, so users can respond or forward immediately without dialing into voicemail.
British Telecom is the first supplier to integrate voice with the CRM solution Salesforce.com through a cloud computing platform.
Ribbit has dragged the phone world over to the web world, whether it be for Salesforce or applications that can be used by consumers. It’s independent of VoIP.
Says Ribbit’s Crick Waters who was over from Silicon Valley during our visit, “we’re not just VoIP, so you can opt to take Ribbit on Skype, MSN, your mobile phone or over the web. We let the system figure out how to get in touch with you.”
He adds, “our objective is to make it easy to adopt for anyone.”
Econsultancy’s CEO on Innovation & Social Media
We spent some time with the Econsultancy folks in London during our recent visit, which included a series of roundtable discussions.
Here’s a piece on their blog which touches on innovation through the recession. They’ll also be hosting an awards ceremony specifically around innovation next year.
They have had a Members Forum on their own site for over ten years and are active on LinkedIn and Twitter as they have found these platforms to work best for their target market of digital marketing and e-commerce professionals.
A few words from Econsultancy’s CEO and founder Ashley Friedlein on technology and social media.
Says Ashley, “we have over 10,000 followers on our Econsultancy Twitter account now, which is mostly automatically created tweets from our blog.”
Staff members also have professional twitter accounts, such as Editor Chris Lakey, and they’re starting to create more targeted feeds for their jobs.
Ashley says of their use of Twitter in a Q&A I did with him, “we use Twitter for a number of things. Partly just to drive traffic to our site, which is then monetized via advertising and membership; partly to drive more inbound links to improve our search rankings as a lot of Twitter activity migrate to blogs; partly for customer service where we respond to customers directly on Twitter; and partly for product and service development where we use Twitter to listen to what people want.”
On LinkedIn, they are members of over 80 digital marketing focused groups. For example, the Digital Marketing group, with over 16,000 members, is run by eConsultancy staff, as is the Marketers on Twitter group.
They use these groups less to drive traffic and to market to directly but more for ‘rifle marketing:’ targeting people they’d like to speak at their events.
I asked him, “what do you think are the most important changes in terms of technology implementation for you in the past year?”
Ashley says that the major change has been the complete rebuilding and relaunching of their website and web platform, which included a move from a Microsoft environment to Ruby on Rails. Another more in-depth interview about their relaunch and the unfortunate SEO implications they experienced as a result of the site migration.
“The area that we’re most excited about in terms of what our new technology platform allows us to do,” he adds, “is around data and APIs and the services that this allows us to create.
Services which add value to our site and external sites via syndication of content, functionality or data both into our site, and out onto other sites.
For example, we are already using the Twitter API to automatically post our blog content to our various Twitter accounts as well as import, and show on our site, what is being said about eConsultancy on Twitter in real time.
We’re using this for live event feedback too and plan to roll it out as a feedback and review mechanism for our reports and training too.
We’re also using the Google Analytics API to be much smarter with our analytics and starting to tie the quantitative data that GA provides us with to the qualitative data we get, say, from user surveys. This allows us to start to understand not just “what is happening” but “why.”
We’re also working on exciting new services, using the GA API, to automatically deliver great insight and reporting to our advertisers in our Digital Marketing Supplier Directory.
Things like the Google Charts API, is also giving us ideas for vastly improved user interfaces and ways of showing data in a more compelling and useful way.
And increasingly we’re using our own APIs to provide our clients and members with completely customised versions of our proposition. So, our site and content becomes a true blend of our knowledge and their knowledge.”
I asked him what kind of innovation he needed that doesn’t exist today. I laughed at his first response: a special gadget that turns one hour of normal time into five hours’ worth of time.
He says, “our biggest challenge isn’t coming up with ideas or innovation, but it’s having the time and resources to implement those ideas. And, knowing how to prioritize our ideas.
Perhaps the hardest challenge now is less around technology and more around user experience and user interfaces. It is really hard to come up with brilliant user interfaces to make the mass of content and information we have, let alone all the other stuff we could aggregate, easy and useful to interact with.
So good interaction design, and good copy, are as hard as they’ve ever been, and even more important. Further innovation in user interface design would be good to see.”
Below a few shots during our Econsultancy roundtable event.
