Traveling Geeks

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.

Nina’s Love for the Ex-Yugoslavia

Nina reads to us on the BlogHer09 stage about her love for the ex-Yugoslavia.

Make Poverty History

Intel’s Tristan Wilkinson introduced me to Chris Ward from Comic Relief while I was in the UK.

He’s working on a campaign called 1GOAL that goes live on August 20th. 1GOAL’s mission is essentially to make poverty history.

As an official partner of the FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa, 1GOAL is an initiative from the Global Campaign for Education based out of Johannesburg.

Their aim is to secure 30 million people to engage in this campaign globally (by signing a digital petition) so that by the end of the World Cup, the noise around the issue of getting every child into education by 2015 (as Governments promised in 2000) is so loud that countries who have to act now to keep their promise feel compelled to do so.

The campaign is being backed by many Governments, faith groups, the private sector, celebrities and footballers and it is very much felt from within the sector that this is the one MDG that could be really achieved.

They have already received support from major names such as Gordon Brown, Nelson Mandela, Bono, Richard Curtis, and Kevin Rudd (Australia PM).

Over 200 countries will be involved in this initiative; Africa is obviously a key target for generating interest and signatures for the campaign – along with USA, Brazil, Japan, Australia and countless others.

Keep your eyes open for more information as the campaign goes live in August and if you have an opportunity to support them, please do. Doesn’t every child deserve an education?

Karwowski: Displaced Between Poland and America

Pauline Karwowski talks about being displaced between Poland and the U.S.

Behind The Scenes – Traveling Geeks 2009

My recent trip with the Traveling Geeks to the UK was an intense week consisting of many events and meetings with European startups, government agencies, conferences, panels, and some remarkable experiences.

My son Matt joined me part of the way through. In this video you’ll see my fellow Traveling Geeks and friends: Robert Scoble, Rocky Barbanica, Renee Blodgett, Ayelet Noff, Sarah Lacy, JD Lasica, Meghan Asha, Craig Newmark, Susan Bratton, Jeff Saperstein, Howard Rheingold, Sky Schuyler, Mitzi Szereto, Heddi Cundle, Mark Adams, Paul Carr, Hermione Way, Mike Butcher, Mathys van Abbe . . . and many more.

[BTW, the Facebook video embed is so much better quality than YouTube and many other video sites.]

Updates From the Folks at Think London

A few updates from the folks at Think London.

A topic which is currently hot in is clean tech. London’s Mayor Boris Johnson (one of THE TIME 100 Most Influential People) has declared he wants to make London the ‘electric vehicle capital of Europe.’

Many of Think London’s clean tech clients, such as Tesla Motors, are setting up in London because of the Mayor’s clean tech and renewable energy policies.

They are planning quite a few events this year in the US, all based around business opportunities for US companies and the London 2012 Games. See the event schedule.

Another interesting development they are seeing, is the amount of Chinese companies setting up or expanding in London. They seem less affected by the economic crisis ‘angst’ and see it as a great opportunity to invest elsewhere.

Big Chinese financial services companies are particularly keen to set up or expand their operations in London, such as China Construction Bank and China Merchants Bank.

And, Think London is adopting all the social media tools to keep tabs on and in touch with people. More from them in the coming weeks and months.

BaseKit – Dynamic web dev, no programming required

This is a repost from TechCrunch Europe

BaseKit is an automatic site builder for websites – No XHTML/CSS, PHP, Perl, or other programming languages required. BaseKit lets web designers build websites quickly and easily. It differs from other similar services by allowing users to implement functional, interactive and dynamic elements without coding. It doesn’t simply build a static site like the web site builders of a decade past. With BaseKit, it allows more people to build complex and dynamic sites without resorting to expensive web developers or complex coding.

However, like many start-ups, the revenue model needs tweaking. Founder Simon Best’s pause when I asked what his revenue model was priceless. According to Simon, if a web designer uses BaseKit to do the web site for a small business than the small business owner pays. But, wouldn’t this simply be the web designer’s fee? It wasn’t clear, at least to me, what the revenue model was. There’s potential, of course, but perhaps current open source solutions are sufficient. I also wonder how this substantially differs from Weebly or tons of other similar applications, besides a few more bells and whistles. Even in the good ol’ days of GeoCities (remember them?), there was an automatic site-builder feature, so this isn’t very different. On the other hand, development must continue because certainly who wants amateur sites in 2009 to look like they were built in 1999?

Reaching Advocates and Influencers

Rather than blasting out advertising indiscriminately to everyone, firms are finding they can target individuals who like their brand and can influence others to see the brand more positively. There are more and more ways to find out who your brand’s advocates and influencers are. That’s because software is now tying the data together so we can actively decide how to reach and, more importantly interact with, our passionate customers. Social media allow us to openly and transparently interact with and have conversations with our customers.

Susan Bratton, JD Lasica, Renee Blodgett and Robert Scoble discuss these aspects of marketing and customer relations in this roundtable in Cambridge as a part of Traveling Geeks 2009.

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Social Listening, Appvertising and “Give to Get” – Social Influence Strategies for Marketers

I spoke on a panel at the University of Cambrigdge as part of my Traveling Geeks blogger junket earlier this month.

The panel was entitled: “Energizing your Business through Social Networks” plus Show & Tell How businesses should be using social media/ social influencing marketing
An interactive event led by Omobono and created by East of England
TG Panel:Robert Scoble, Susan Bratton, Renee Blodgett & JD Lasica

Here’s a clip taken by Jim “Sky” Schuyler of me talking about how companies can get involved in social media. Thanks go to @ShivSingh of Razorfish for coining the term Social Influence Marketing and to Lorrie Thomas of Web Marketing Therapy for bringing to my attention the importance of Give to Get in the social sphere. Both are recent DishyMix show guests and the links to their excellent interviews are below.

Here is the clip Sky took and and his blog post about it.

Image of Shiv Singh

Shiv Singh, Razorfish on the Social Influence Marketing, the Portable Social Graph and Friendsters

Image of Lorrie Thomas

Lorrie Thomas, Web Marketing Therapy on Chill Pills, Give to Gain and the Four Agreements

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• Highly Recommended: “Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report” Dispells Myths (blogs.personallifemedia.com)
• The Agency Side of Business: Shiv Singh, Razorfish (socialmediatoday.com)
• Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report (socialmediatoday.com)