Will Enterprise 2.0 Increase Web 2.0 Adoption?

March 27, 2008 by 1 Comment

On ReadWriteWeb, Josh Catone asks Is Facebook for Business Really Coming? The post is a good breakdown on how Facebook is growing in terms being useful for business. It touches on areas such as employees networking on Facebook, concerns about security around private content and groups, and inroad against LinkedIn.

The post is a good reference point for thinking about the effects of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. I’ve been out at the Gartner portals conference the past few days. Plenty of good analyst presentations and vendor updates. Expect to see more tagging, implicit activity integration, blogs, wikis, mashups, social networks, etc. Coming to a company near you!

As I listened to the presentations and talked with companies at our vendor booth, I came away with a strong impression that companies are looking at implementing Web 2.0 inside the enterprise. Yes, there are business cases to be built, but more companies are bringing Web 2.0 inside the firewall.

Assuming increased Web 2.0 usage inside companies, what are the outcomes? Of course, there are business improvements that will occur.

But, I think there’s another outcome from this increase. Web 2.0 tools will become more mainstream as employees are introduced to them in the enterprise.

Now, I want to make two points with regard to that statement. One is that “mainstream” is a relative term. In the U.S., there are 211 million Internet users. So one definition of mainstream could be say…50 million users. In the one quarter range. The other point is that plenty of great web sites can/will go mainstream without enterprise adoption. Nice thing about this Web, eh?

OK…with that out of the way…

This idea that companies lead the way for consumer adoption of technologies is not without precedent. Apple had the better PCs in the 1980s and 90s, but Microsoft’s operating system became the standard for the consumer market (Compaq, Dell, IBM). Why? Microsoft became the corporate standard, and employees bought the same technology when they got computers for the home.

As companies adopt Web 2.0 technologies, employee adoption is key to maximizing their benefit. As employees adopt the Web 2.0 technologies at the office, they become more familiar with them at home.

Let’s look at tagging. Del.icio.us has 3 million users. An impressive number, but only fraction of the 211 million Internet users. Many enterprise software companies are offering companies social tagging and bookmarking solutions. What happens once tagging becomes a regular part of the application stack inside the enterprise? People become comfortable with it. They ‘get’ why tagging has value (easy personal classification system, basis for discovering new content). They tag content inside their own companies. They click on tag clouds. They then come home, and want the same tagging experience.

How about RSS? RSS is a terrific way to easily stay up to date on new website content. But how many of those 211 million Internet users actually have an RSS reader of some type? Google Reader, FeedBurner, Firefox subscriptions, etc. Not that many yet. But RSS is going to be more pervasive in companies. Heck, you can even add it to Microsoft Outlook. What happens when people get used to staying updated via RSS feeds at work? They ‘get’ it. And when they get home, they’re stuck with email and their bookmarked websites. Until they realize they can enjoy the benefits of RSS on their computers.

You’re also going to see social networking introduced in the enterprise. Big as Facebook and MySpace are, the majority of Internet users do not have accounts on these services. Once employees are automatically enrolled into their companies’ social networks, they’ll start playing with them and begin to ‘get’ the value if being connected in this way. Maybe they had held off on social networks before (that’s for the kids). But after their work experience, what happens when they get home and want to keep up in a similar fashion with family and friends?

Companies need to be on top of the technology trends to stay competitive. This happens regardless of whether employees are itching for the change (how many employees were demanding groupware?). As companies roll out Enterprise 2.0, how long will it be before employee adoption makes Web 2.0 applications mainstream?

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Whither mashups…beyond Google Maps?

February 15, 2008 by Leave a comment

Mashups are a tantalizing concept. Put together two different apps, link some data and voila! A new hybrid app that doesn’t something incrementally valuable to either app individually. A good one that I recently enjoyed was the Super Tuesday Twitter map. It was one of two Twitter-related mashups covering Super Tuesday.

I will note that the Super Tuesday Twitter mashup used a Google map. And that’s not surprising. It seems that when people think of mashups, they automatically think of something grafted onto a map. Craigs List apartment listings. Megans Law sex offenders. Flickr photos of wineries.

It’s like that’s all anyone can think of. Now that’s actually overstating it. I took a look at the top 50 most popular mashups listed at Yahoo Pipes. Here’s my admittedly rough count of the categories (3 omitted from results):

  1. RSS management (14 mashups)
  2. Flickr service stuff (8)
  3. Online retail shopping tools (6)
  4. News search apps (6)
  5. YouTube stuff (4)
  6. Map (3)
  7. Persistent search (2)
  8. Combined search (2)
  9. iTunes (1)
  10. Upcoming.org (1)

So, obviously, there are some things beyond maps. RSS-related apps are showing good uptake.

However, it still feels like mashups are in their nascent stage. I think there are a couple reasons for that.

First, folks are still trying to get their minds around ways that they can be used. Web users are not all programmers. They aren’t thinking that way. They like to try out the things someone else has made.

The other reason is that tools themselves aren’t yet built out to allow more interesting apps. Or, it’s hard as hell to figure out how to use the tools if they are indeed there! For example, here’s a mashup I’ve tried to build both on Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly. Terraminds provides a nice search function for Twitter posts. You can convert the basic search function into a more persistent RSS feed for a given term. For instance, all tweets related to “enterprise 2.0”. I want to get the Twitter search results for “enterprise 2.0” posted to a page. The tweets include the Twitter author. I want to see the associated blog site of that author, listed right beside his tweet. That way, if the person says something I find interesting, I can click through easily to his personal website to see what else he talks about.

I have had no luck in figuring out how to use Pipes or Popfly to make this mashup a reality. It’s just too hard, or not even possible. Mashups still have a ways to go before they’re ready for wider usage.

So instead, maybe I’ll put all the Starbucks locations in San Francisco on a Google map…

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My First-Ever VC Pitch

February 11, 2008 by 3 Comments

I recently had the opportunity to pitch a VC firm. Hummer Winblad, to be exact. As someone who never thought he’d ever do that, I have to say it was all rather cool. Here are the details:

THE IDEA: Over the past couple months. I dreamed up an idea for online retailers to connect to social networks. I won’t say too much about the idea, because you just never know if it might see the light of day sometime. But I did take the time to lay it out via Google Presentation. That was pretty fun, I have to say. I had all these hack graphics courtesy of Microsoft Paint. Primitive, but it worked.

ASKING AROUND: Once the idea was written down, I needed to find out if it has legs. I didn’t worry about someone stealing the idea or anything. You can’t learn anything keeping the idea bottled up. So I asked a few friends to take a look at it. To my surprise, I got a lot of “great idea” responses. Followed by, “isn’t Facebook going to do this?” The feedback pumped me up, even if Facebook was going to do it.

CO-FOUNDER: I don’t code, can’t code, shouldn’t code. I needed to have a development partner. Well, I met a dev buddy and shared the idea with him. He liked it, and agreed to be a co-founder. So, good feedback from friends, and a co-founder who could actually make the idea a reality. Things were going well.

MARKET FEEDBACK: I talked with two different e-tailers about the idea. Both really liked it. Each had his own take on what he liked, and I was pleased with the responses. Good feedback from trusted friends, a dev co-founder, good response from potential customers. Check, check, check!

THE PRODUCT: Uh…we actually hadn’t built anything yet. Hmm…was this going to be a problem?

THE VC INTRO: I sent a link for my Google Presentation to a contact at Hummer Winblad. I had met with him a couple years ago to interview for a VC associate position (didn’t get it). To my surprise, he emailed back and said he’d be delighted to hear more details. I was thrilled, despite having no actual product to demo.

VC PITCH DECK: I needed to convert my original, handcrafted presentation into an investor deck. This was really pretty easy. First, a couple of VCs have written blog posts about what ought to be in a pitch (here’s a good one). Having spent several weeks researching the idea, the slide contents were pretty easy to pull together. The hardest thing was the financial projections. But even those weren’t too bad. See Glenn Kelman’s post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog for some very useful advice.

THE PITCH: My dev buddy and I arrive early for our pitch. We set up in a spacious conference room with a flat-panel screen. We’re a little nervous, but our attitude is “we have nothing to lose”. The VC runs late. Finally, my VC contact and an Associate arrive. We start the pitch. Good attention, questions are asked, dialogue is occurring. I’m feeling OK about it. Then they ask about what stage we’re at. “Seed. No product built as yet.” At that point, the pitch came off the rails. We were gracefully pointed toward the angel investor route. Alas, no follow-up meeting would be needed.

POST-MORTEM:

  • In this web 2.0 age of free software and services, it’s safe to say you’d better have some actual product to demo. Only well-known successful entrepreneurs could get away with not having an actual product while raising money, and it’s unlikely they would ever do so.
  • The entrepreneurs are the best prepared and most acknowledgeable people in the room when it comes to their idea. VCs can seem intimidating given all the pitches, investments and experience they have, but they’re generally learning in real-time from the entrepreneur.
  • Don’t sweat getting a ‘no’. Is it the idea, the company or the VC? Focus on your own view here. If it’s the idea, what needs to be fixed? If it’s the company, what can improve things (e.g. actual product)? If it’s the VC, there are many others.

So that’s my first-ever VC pitch. I’m noodling on what to do next. The product remains, as of yet, unbuilt.

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