Here’s a link to a panel discussion from the Software 2007 conference held in May in Santa Clara. Good discussion by Neil Cameron of Unilever, Rob Carter of FedEx, Patricia Morrison of Motorola and Tony Scott of Disney. I had the chance to chat with Tony Scott a year or so ago about messaging at Disney. He is a very knowledgeable and very down to earth guy – something that really comes through in this clip.
Month: July 2007
New blog feature from madKast
I added something new to Reply to All from a company called madKast. Check out the "Share" icon next to each entry title. Click on it and you can share it or tag it in a variety of ways – a nice all in one way to keep up with all the various places it could go.. They are working hard in Boulder at TechStars and I received a nice note from Josh Larson (one of the founders) about trying it out.
Twice as long, half as much
This is a quote from my good friend Jim Clifton. I now have learned that this maxim applies not only to those things you encounter and predict when starting and growing a business including:
1. Sales/customer traction
2. Product roadmap/feature release
3. Revenue projections
But also to fence painting projects. I have now, after spending most of the weekend and a day off today (minus a rain delay yesterday), completed my fence painting project. I experienced a bit of scope creep (pruning back some trees from the fence), human capital constraints (a staff of one – me), and budget overruns (more than a few trips to Lowe’s). It took twice as long and I only completed half of what I thought I would by Saturday. But it is now done and it looks great…
Everybody jump on the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon
The latest to join? Accounting firm KPMG. This is a pretty decent podcast about both the benefits and challenges that new types of collaboration could bring to the enterprise (via Scott Gavin). Keep an eye out for the coming rationalization process where these tools will meet enterprise-centric drivers like security, access controls, litigation, and compliance. Here’s a link to the site focused on the "corporate use of social networking and collaborative software tools."
AOL “Email Addiction” survey is revealing
AOL just released their 3rd annual "email addiction" survey and it is a pretty disturbing commentary. Here’s the press release on it and a post by Jason Caplain that brought it to my attention. Couple of interesting things in the data including the emphasis on access to email via portable devices (picking up on the mobile theme here?)and that Washington, DC is the most addicted city (Seattle came in 7th). As a counterpoint to this is an article in the UK’s Independent on "the end of email" that features alternatives including enterprise wiki company Socialtext.
Updated:
I did not give proper coverage (thanks Michael) to the fact that my former home town of Atlanta came in an impressive #2 on this survey. Thanks to those of your that check you email incessantly in the A-T-L.
The five things you do with email
This is a bit long but worth watching about how to regain control of your life from email. Inbox Zero is a preso by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders at a Google company lunch and learn. A lot of pretty elementary stuff in here about "how" to work and not being a slave to your email…but also some good nuggets and perspectives. Here’s the five things according to Merlin:
- Delete (Archive)
- Delegate
- Respond
- Defer
- Do
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=973149761529535925&hl=en
Updated:
So now I listened to all the Q&A and find it a bit comical. Here’s a company that is the anti everything being held hostage by email. Come on…"500 emails per day" or "physical pain" from having to open emails? Companies that grow too fast get really inefficient and the recent discussion about hiring too much in their last earnings call comes through loud and clear here. Too many people with not enough to do end up sending a lot of emails…
Security challenges from new technologies
MessageGate CEO Shaun Wolfe was featured in today’s Wall Street Journal Business Technology blog on the topic of how new technologies can create security challenges in the enterprise. Ben Worthen wrote an earlier piece on the generational aspects of electronic communications which is something I previously posted on here. It will be interesting to watch how "old school" technologies like email collide with "new school" ones like text messaging and social media in the workplace. My view is that both sides have a lot of learning to do.
More on the proposed NYSE/NASD guidelines for supervision of electronic communications
As I stated in an earlier post, I felt there were some additional things that needed to be addressed in this joint guidance. In the spirit of open communications and the NYSE’s receptiveness to feedback on the proposed guidance, MessageGate submitted comments. They are posted on our website and will be posted on the NYSE’s site at some point. Here are the highlights:
There are challenges related to supervising electronic communications including:
- False positives resulting from binary keyword rules
- Duplicate messages in the review queue
- The burdensome review of internal messages which account for 70-80% of total volume
- A significant cost of knowledgeable staff and infrastructure to perform the reviews
The second part details what technology can do to enable supervision beyond lexicon (keyword) or sampling based approaches including:
- Segmenting electronic communication flows
- Identifying "of interest" or suspect communications
- Suppressing duplicate messages during review
- Enforcing departmental/business unit controls and exceptions
- Providing selective pre-send review
Here is a recent Q&A article with IT Business Edge where I lay this out from a business process perspective and one of our Instep Podcasts that covers the points above in more detail.
What your search history says about you
This certainly seems to be the topic du jour so I’ll join the fray. Lots of discussion going on about privacy and search engines. Appears that Ask.com led the pivot strategy away from Google and took the high ground on maintaining user privacy around what you search for with Microsoft and Yahoo following suit. Good discussion on this from Jeff Nolan as well as coverage on TechCrunch. Here’s Google’s most recent discussion around privacy.
Over the weekend, I took a look at my search history via Google’s "Web History" that populates when I am logged into Google. It was pretty fascinating as it strung together where I had been (maps & directions), what I had been looking for, what I had been talking about, who I had talked to, and more than a few random queries tied to various thoughts and discussions I had been having. Nothing over the top, but a lot of details that struck me when I saw them neatly laid out in chronological order. So rather than having my Outlook calendar and e-mail tell me this story (where I control this information), Google told me (where I don’t control it).
Google searches used to find me
A bit slammed today so posting late on Friday. Thought I would share some of the Google searches used to find this blog over the last couple months. I am set up on Google’s analytics and it gives some pretty good information so thought I would share some of the things people used to find me. A few interesting ones here:
- all emails are not created equally
- alternatives to email collaboration
- average emails received a day
- bluetooth eavesdropping
- coffee is for closers
- detect duplicate emails based on phrase in body
- does e-discovery limit gmail usage in business
- electronic communication nasd
- email retention policy 90 days inbox
- emails you cant reply to
- exchange journal eliminate duplicate messages
- fried blackberries
- generational communication
- google acquisition of postini
- how people use their technology
- how to control reply all
- hype anybody here
- living without email
- memail
- sharepoint send alerts to external email address "without email"
- sig hansen northwestern seattle residence
- terrifying emails
- visiting seattle
- vosnap
- why do people reply to all?
Venture Vice 