Voices Carry

Image by mohammadali via Flickr

Forbes.com contributor, Jennifer Hicks decided to take on a mini grapevine experiment on Twitter last week on the somewhat dry, yet volatile vertical of  “ConnectedTV” and she got back a micro-discussion that led to predictions on ConnectedTV by four strangers around the world – @razzmuzzen @inshot @mediadventurer @CreamHQ @jperrachon @msmobileconverg. We thought it was neat.

Read the full post on Forbes here.

Tags: Connected TV, Dantes Soma, Forbes, Gossip, inshot, Jennifer Hicks, Josh Mortensen, Online Communities, Social Networking

A Productive Conversation

Davorin Gabrovec is the Co-Founder of Flowr, a communication service meant to encourage true collaborative work flow.

This week, I exchanged emails with Davorin regarding collaborative productivity and the orgin of Flowr.

Tattletech: I assume that now, if your office, you use Flowr as your primary tool for organization. Before you founded Flowr, what was your project organization like? A mess of emails and shared documents like the rest of us, or were you always ahead of the game?

Davorin Gabrovec:  Before we built up Flowr, we used email, skype and scheduled meetings as our major communication tools. However, from the moment we wrote first few lines of code, we started with using Flowr for the development of Flowr and then evolved it based on our needs and our first beta users.

Tattletech: Wow. Using Flowr to develop Flowr, very Inception of you. When was the first time you had an idea that you wanted to create something like Flowr? Was it in a dream?

DG: Haha, it was not in a dream. It was came from thinking about improving our communication/collaboration issues within the small (20 employee) company which I funded before Flowr. We had been using several tools such as wikis, intranets and blogs to manage our internal information along with tons of emails and meetings, all of which were time consuming. At the same time, I was looking at social networks, which provided good examples of how you can easily get an information flow about your network, even amongst people you have never met in person.

Then I started to think about making a very easy “twitter-like” 140 character message box, where anyone inside our team could share a new idea, ask other some questions or just pass on an interesting link, without spamming the rest of the team–this would be great! We could reduce meetings, colleagues could interact when they will had time and all the information and knowledge would stay in one place. When I started talking with few of my colleagues from other companies, they loved the idea. That was the moment when two of my colleagues and I decided to build such a tool.

Tattletech: What was your biggest challenge in development?

DG: Our biggest challenge was making the product beautifully designed and as simple as possible. Our next biggest challenge was scalability from the tech perspective where our CTO Vlada played his role very well.

Tattletech: Have you had to change anything major from your original design to Flowr’s current iteration?

DG: We changed the user interface two times to make the product perfect (from our perspective). After the first redesign we put several analytics in place to start measuring how users actually use Flowr. Now we are much closer to what we want Flowr to be.

Tattletech: What is the next step for Flowr? What can we look forward to in the fall?

DG: The focus for the next few months is integration with third party apps such as customer relationship management, helpdesk and project management tools, as well as further development of mobile apps and an iPad app. We hope that Flowr will become a major communication tool for every small and medium business, with basic social features and notifications from the different applications companies usually use. That way, Flowr will become a major internal collaboration and information hub.

– Jason Oberholtzer

Follow Davorin on Twitter and take a look at Flowr.

Tags: Business, Collaboration, Davorin Gabrovec, flowr, Google, Issuu, Niccolo Pantucci, Online Communities, Peter Gibbons, productivity, Social network, Social Networking, Socialcast, Twitter

TattleTweet Hot Seat with TrueCaller

Image by trainman74 via Flickr

Keeping it real, we decided to do a little Hot Seat live on Twitter today  – we are calling it TattletTweet (it’s a working title) and our first volunteer was TrueCaller. These guys are based in Stockholm and decided that enough was enough and created TrueCaller which essentially does three main things: detects and blocks caller spam, offers caller ID on your mobile and dishes up a universal address book that The White Pages wishes they had. You can follow them on Twitter @TrueCaller.

@tattletech @AlanMamedi @TrueCaller We’re all friends here, lets get jiggy with’it

Ready? Q. Spam sucks, so what does #TrueCaller do to help me eliminate that on my mobile?

@tattletech – @TrueCaller offers an extensive filter which protects you from fraud, spam, expensive collect calls and annoying salespersons

@tattletech – (cont) Also with @TrueCaller numbers that repeatedly are deemed unwanted by others are marked in your display

Q. Ok so why hasn’t anyone come up with this before? What happens if they try and call me again? #mobilespam

@tattletech What separates @TrueCaller is that we have a maintained list in addition to the crowd-sourced one, worldwide!

@tattletech @TrueCaller (cont) Depending on your platform #android #symbian or #blackberry users are also able to auto-block those calls!

Q. Can we Autoblock calls on all those platforms with the free version of #TrueCaller?

@tattletech You definitely can! #TrueCaller Call filter functionality is completely free!

Tags: Caller ID, Mobile calling spam, Social Networking, spam, TattleTweet, TrueCaller, Twitter

Hob-Knob – is that a new door handle?

Image via Wikipedia

This was supposed to happen with Blue-tooth — see /interact with other Bluetoothers around you, connect if you wanted to and boom! Instant local social. But Blue-tooth was unreliable and gosh-darnit, was just a little too weird and slightly too complicated for the common man to work out. So we waited.

Then all these smartphones came on the scene, we got LBS – now just Location Services (LS) and now this. A new Twitter follower came on the scene today and  introduced me to Hob-Knob.  They claim to be the only “Locally Based Social Networking Application. Chat, share pictures or files and get deals all with people and businesses located within the same wifi as you”.

Careful, read that correctly…. located in the SAME wifi as you are. That means that if I am say, at terminal 2D at CdG where I usually find myself waiting for a flight to somewhere, everyone using that wifi there and I can connect, share, chat and of course the self-proclaimed savior to LS – get deals from nearby retailers, which in that case, would be Relay and the airport snack shack.

I kinda dig the concept behind Hob-Knob cause it throws narrow and not wide, it takes the basic premise that you are there now, in the moment around those people in that location and why not benefit from it. Although if you are close enough to share photos with someone you know in the same wifi area as you are in, why not just get up and go over and show them one-on-one, unless of course you are in high-school at the back of the class and your BFF is in front of the clase and you must send her a photo of Eric, the new kid that just transferred in from Helsinki. In that case, it would be useful. You can follow Hob-Knob (Knob? really? did they miss the boat on branding or what?) on Twitter  @hobknobbers

– JH

Tags: Bluetooth, Helsinki, Hob Knob, local based services, Social network service, Social Networking, Wi-Fi

Things we’ve learned: Week ending October 22, 2010

We love this time of the week, we feel like we are brimming with stuff we learned. Why didn’t we do this before?

Well anyway, it’s here now, so without further ado, here are the things we have learned this week.

1. The real meaning behind social networking is when a friendship you have made on Twitter spills over into your real life. That is the coolest experience and let’s me know that there is validity in those online connections. This week I felt like I came away from summer camp with a new friend and all over powder-blue MC Hammer pants. That old Faberge commercial [WATCH THAT VIDEO], she told two friends and so on, was spot on. So thank you @helenbrown (the founder of a great company Cat Walk Genius) for pointing out on Twitter that powder-blue MCHammer pants were making a come-back and introducing me to @carolineno.

2. London is really expensive, still.

3. Mobile is NOT the poster child for convergence, in reality it is more like divergence out there. Single biggest hold up despite all the shiny happy apps and multitude of things you can do. Good fracking networks. Please, give us some good networks. According to a panel at Tech Media Invest in London with Andrew Scott from Rummble and Jeff Coe of Linden Ventures, so many issues still exist that either we fix em now or just skip to 5G.

4. What goes around comes around.

5. According to Enrica Pezzi, who runs the Italian super PR agency, Puntoeacapo. you can’t manage a blog or social media completely scientifically. You still need messages and content to tell a story and sometimes that means more than just numbers.

6. Nothing beats a new hair cut and color at a tony salon in Mayfair. That’s like teflon. Change your hair, change your life.

7. When you introduce a beautiful, tall leggy blond as a Greek aristocrat and real estate tycoon to a room of VCs in the start up tech world, they actually look like a deer caught in headlights and stop and listen to what you are saying. It’s pretty epic.

Tags: Andrew Scott, Cat Walk Genius, Faberge, ink Communications, Jeff Coe, Linden Ventures, LinkedIn, London, MC Hammer, Public relations, Puntoaecapo, Rummble, social media, Social Networking, Tech Media Invest, Twitter

IBC 2010 and the overflow of crappy HTML emails

It’s that time of year again right before IBC – the telco industry’s big annual party, conference, September 10-15 in Amsterdam, the city where people think there are no rules. Anyway, I digress. The point is that more and more companies in this telco industry are trying to be more like their cooler cousins in high tech by adopting social media and marketing tactics into their communications programs.

But in fact it has just turned into a junk fest full of HTML emails that are packed with so much information that you can’t possibly even know where to look first or what they want you to focus on.. All I focus on is look how adorable they think they are by doing a fancy HTML email with everything they have done all year. Oh and yea follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Listen up people …. one fancy HTML email + Facebook + Twitter does not give you the right to vomit up every shred of mundane crap that happened to you in the last 6 months. Social media is a strategy, not about taking what you did before and just laying it into a new communications vessel. Please stop. That is all.  - JH

Tags: Amsterdam, Facebook, Intercontinental Broadcasting Corporation, Marketing, Online Communities, social media, Social Networking, Twitter

Tattletech Hot Seat with Dragos Ilinca, uberVU

Tattletech always finds itself in good company – always around start ups that seem to have their finger on technology that will pull the current market forward and with entrepreneurs that do more than focus on the technology but how to apply it to our lives. When we met Dragos, we knew immediately this compay was onto something. We caught up with uberVU’s Co-Founder, Dragos Ilinca and here is what he had to say. (uberVU was also a 2008 Seedcamp winner!)

Tattletech: So… let’s start with the question you are probably asked over and over again, what DOES uberVU mean?

Dragos Ilinca: uber is a German word that means “more, better, super”, just like in ubergeek or uberblogger. “VU” is just a misspelled “view”. we weren’t trying to be cute, but uberview.com <http://uberview.com>  was taken.  So in its essence uberVU refers to having a “superview” of the conversation on the Web.

TT:  Will aggregating all of the conversation threads into one place make the online world a smaller one, in the positive sense of the word?

DI: Quite possibly. All the people that comment on a story are part of the same community, they’re interacting around the same social object. So the online world around a story will be bigger, as you’ll be aware of people you did not know commented on a story. It might be smaller in the sense of more intimate, as in time, there will be many more familiar faces around each story or blog or content source. The point is that people should care about who is commenting and what they are saying and not have to worry about the underlying platform.

TT:  At the end of almost each article or blog post we see an unending list of icons and link backs – will Ubervu end all of that clutter?

DI: Some of those icons have their purpose, such as sharing the article on different services. The purpose is not necessarily to end that clutter, but be able to interact with people on the services that the icons represent without paying much attention to the service itself. This means getting comments from people everywhere in one place and also allowing you to reply to those people from one place. It’s about freeing the conversations from closed silos and exposing people to each other.

TT: What is the main differentiator between what you do and others? Do you trace the conversation and not the user profile?

DI: Yes, that’s the main difference. We get comments around a story, not around a person, user profile or keyword. Whether those will be included I don’t know at this point. One more difference is the ability to reply from within uberVU, in the sense that they reply gets sent back to the site/service where it should belong. From this point of view, we seem to be a great complement to a lot of existing services that people are already avid users of.

TT: Do you think users will quickly adopt using uberVU?

DI: Hopefully, although that’s not the goal in the short term.  Our main goal is to understand how people are using uberVU, what they need and don’t need from it and how to transform those demands into usable features so that they do start to use uberVU regularly. I think we still have some way to go until uberVU hits the bullseye and becomes just right for people. That’s why we’re experimenting with different things right now, such as being integrated by Disqus through our API. Maybe we’ll be a great destination site, or maybe we’ll serve as an infrastructure service that will only be used by way of API.

– SM and JLH

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mashable, Disqus and UberVU Launch Social Media Comments (mashable.com)
• Mashable innovates with new Twitter ad format (inquisitr.com)

Tags: Dragos Ilinica, Social Networking, Ubervu

It’s the small things that always add up

Today in Mashable, they ran a short story on the drop in ad spending on social networking sites – true the drop is not huge- $1.6 billion down to $1.4 billion – and that actually does ad up when you are uh, say MySpace -when that small number actually translates into 11.2% of ad revenue or $755 million. Reality bubbles really bite don’t they?  I mean, who do we think we are constantly creating new companies and hyping them all over the place without even batting an eye about where the money will come from (other than a VC or an M&A) Silly old us. 

Tags: Advertising, Social Networking

Thoughts on Social Networking from Red Herring Europe

Well – now that Red Herring Europe is over and the dust is settled, I have yet to post my comments and thoughts on one of the best panels there – Social Networking: Trends and Opportunities. The reason is that I think that what Andrej Nabergoj from Noovo and Yann Motte, CEO, Webjam were saying was SO important  - and it was not cloaked in any support of their own companies, rather they were in earnest talking about where the industry really is and more importantly, what will the next billion users want from social networking – certainly not the balkanized maze of choices today – even Andrej said that he is tech savvy but it took him days to try and connect all the pieces of the puzzle. And this new wave of users from China, Pakistan and India – what will they want or what will the expect from what is out there? In other words, what will they inherit and what will they demand. 1 billion users is a staggering number. With Bebo’s acquisition by Time Warner – we still don’t really see any companies that are working towards unification or rather a “one ring to bind them all” application. 

Yann put it so simply when he said  that right now – social networking is in the middle ages  – from here will spring forth a new tool or way to not only use social networking in a way that is easy and intuitive for users but also will be able to generate money. No one really knows the answers at all – a recent article in the Economist basically implied that social networking is everywhere and no where. This certainly echoed the comments from Andrej and Yann at Red Herring Europe and I can only hope that we will be able to hear more about their thoughts and other companies that are working to figure out how to move it all forward.

Tags: noovo, Red Herring, Social Networking, webjam

What is missing from Red Herring- Smeet

I know what is missing but I couldn’t put my finger on it- then the panic set in, I frantically looked for them and then the terror set in – I found Smeet, but he was missing- the brain, the linguist, the artist the Doctor, the one entrepreneur who you actually could talk to all day- Phillippe Boutellier.
How could this happen? I found Burkhardt which calmed me a bit, because all the Smeet guys (social networking in the virtual world space) are top shelf smart, engaging, intersting to talk to and pretty much THE ideal entrepreneurs.

But back to Philippe. Its been a year since this blogger has had the chance to hear the man talk- to give an update on Smeet and hear more about this, industry altering experience. Be on the look out for some exciting news from them and get ready to embrace Smeet.

And may I please request that in the future that Smeet send Phillippe back on the road? His brain is missed.

Tags: Germany, Innovation, Red Herring, smeet, Social Networking, virtual social networking, virtual world