Social Glass

Veodia was just announced as the winner of the Enterprise 2.0 launchpad at the E2.0 unconference in Boston today. This makes me happy. I walked away from my trip to china with a renewed sense of how valuable social connections are between teams and started trialling Veodia last week. Video is a great way to enhance the bond between remote teams and helps build a more cohesive, single team unit.

Veodia allows me, as a Manager, to record standup meetings and whiteboard sessions and embed them on our internal wiki much as you would a Youtube video. It also allows me to create a “live meeting”, where I provide a URL to my team in China and they can see me as I talk (I suppose Skype does a good job at this too). And the beauty is Veodia is free for up to 500 MB of video storage. That’s perfect for me as I convince others within my organization of the value add.

What I don’t yet understand, and what’s keeping me from being more aggressive about rolling this out to the rest of my division, is the security model. It seems that there is “security through obscurity”, where cryptic hyperlinks are the only thing preventing a would-be snooper from viewing my content. This is unsatisfactory within an enterprise setting where confidential data is being stored and shared among internal teams. If Veodia can get their security model right they’ll kick some butt.

I safely arrived in Colorado last night.  It’s been 1 year since I’ve been in the US.  I immediately noticed how festive the US is around the holidays. Carols were playing in the LA airport and people said “merry christmas” to me.  This doesn’t really happen in Australia, where if they said it they’d prefer “happy christmas” instead.  It’s also pretty cold in Denver (at least compared with how hot it’s been in Melbourne this past few weeks).  And I had my first Chipotle burrito since last December for dinner tonight. 

What I’ve noticed immediately is that most blog and twitter updates now happen throughout the day.  In Australia it was like reading the newspaper, where when I got to work most of the blog posts and twitter updates from my US counterparts had been completed already, so I’d spend 20 minutes or so catching up on the “news”.  Now my reader constantly has updates.  I’m not sure which way is better actually.

Anyway, I’m hoping to visit more conferences now that I’m in North America and meet some of my blogging friends in person.  I might look into heading to the FASTForward conference this year to get me going. 

It’s good to be back.

I’ve just come back from an interesting Enterprise 2.0 conference hosted by Dow Jones in Melbourne, Australia. Dow Jones has a product called Factiva, which they’ve recently relaunched as “Factiva 2.0″. The goal of the conference was to give an overview of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0, then dive into Factiva. I wanted to share some great quotes from Greg Merkle (he’s also a guitarist), Vice President and Creative Director of Dow Jones, on the topic of Enterprise 2.0:

The corporate intranet is where content goes to die.

Workers have adapted their habits to work the way systems work, instead of systems adapting to work the way workers work.

Collective Intelligence - No one knows everything. Everyone knows something.

I wouldn’t have picked Dow Jones as being innovative in this space, but they seem to have a lot of great ideas.