Friday, September 21, 2007

Socially conscious social network

MTV's ThinkMTV, A Socially Conscious Social Network

MTV will reward members that use the site "to do good" with opportunities to meet celebrities, get access to exclusive MTV events, and get exposure on MTV.

By Elena Malykhina
InformationWeek
September 20, 2007 05:00 PM

Viacom (VIAB)'s MTV entered the social networking scene on Thursday with the introduction of Think.MTV.com, an online community that promotes youth activism.

ThinkMTV, which launched in beta, is financially backed by several large partners, such as the Case Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Goldhirsh Foundation, and MCJ Amelior Foundation.

Various pop culture icons, nonprofit organizations, and civic organizations are using or plan to use the social networking site to encourage young people to speak out about issues that affect them. They include organizations like the United Nations, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and Strong American Schools, as well as celebrities like Bono, Shakira, and John Legend.

MTV said it will reward members that use the site "to do good" with opportunities to meet celebrities, get access to exclusive MTV events, and get exposure on MTV and other national media outlets. Additional benefits include grants and scholarships.

Members are encouraged to use different multimedia tools to engage and educate others about important issues, including cell phones, online forums, broadband video, and digital cameras. In fact, multimedia is a key component of the social networking site. It's comprised of videos, blogs, socially-conscious video games, podcasts, and news reports.

ThinkMTV also offers a "Think Tank" feature, where members can sort issues by interests, skills, or geography to advance the issues locally or globally.

MTV claims its social networking site is unique from other online communities, since content posted on the site will get exposure on MTV's other sites, mobile platform, and the MTV network.

ThinkMTV is part of Viacom's recently-launched social networking initiative called Flux Network. Flux is an open platform that lets bloggers add community-related tools to their sites.

It's still too early to tell if ThinkMTV will achieve the same popularity as other social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace. While ThinkMTV's purpose is to empower youth and help them speak out about issues related to politics, health, and education, social networking sites have been criticized for exposing youth to danger.

Earlier this year, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said that MySpace contained more than 29,000 sex offender profiles. MySpace defended itself, saying it's committed to deleting sex offenders from the site. MTV must be prepared to deal with a similar challenge.

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Tech Women Unite!

I'm Geeky. Are You?

Submitted by Holly on Thu, 09/20/2007 - 9:39am.

events | NPTech | NTEN

I've been working in this field for a long time now and if there's one thing I've come to learn, it's that you can't keep a good girl geek down! That's why I'm so happy to see that the one and only Kaliya Hamlin is involved in organizing a great event this fall out in California: She's Geeky.

She's Geeky will bring together women in tech from across all disciplines for two days. I hope that we'll be able to celebrate both our strength in the sector, and our love of shoes, but that's just me. I do love shoes. (One of my favorite blog posts: Beth Kanter on the Blogher Shoes.)

Here are the official deets:

She's Geeky
A Women's Tech (un)conference
October 22-23 in Mountain View, CA.

This event is designed to bring together women from a range of technology-focused disciplines who self-identify as geeky. Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology.

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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

IBM's Collaboration Summit, from CNNmoney.com

IBM Collaboration Summit to Highlight Advances in Technology and Business

September 18, 2007: 12:30 PM EST

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a class of new technologies to move collaboration forward in a Web 2.0 world at the IBM Collaboration Summit at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.

IBM's ongoing investments in collaboration technology have resulted in the richest and broadest collection of communications, collaboration and content services, connecting people to people and people to business processes and information in a standards-based environment that runs on a multitude of devices.

"Business leaders are capitalizing on the convergence of collaboration, information and business processes," said Mike Rhodin, general manager, IBM Lotus Software. "Coupled with industry adoption of open standards, this represents an historic opportunity to redefine how people work together in a Web 2.0 world. The primacy of email has passed. The new definition of collaboration is access to the right people and the right information at the right time -- the linked value of all the existing expertise for any topic or project."

IBM's collaboration software portfolio has been transformed in 2007 with Web 2.0, social networking and unified communications capabilities. IBM is expanding the portfolio further with several new products and services:

--  Hosted Lotus Notes: Lotus Notes is now available via enterprise-level
 application hosting. This new service offering provides Lotus Notes and
 Domino customers with a hosted and managed environment for their mail and
 collaborative applications, helping them improve the performance of their
 messaging environments while enhancing efficiency and productivity. By
 delegating the complex management of mail and collaboration tools,
 Applications on Demand for Lotus Notes can help clients tackle the
 integration of their entire email solutions. This includes not just email,
 but ever-expanding collaboration capabilities all within a security-rich,
 advanced hosting environment.  Since clients pay as they go for what they
 need, they are able to reduce up-front project and infrastructure costs,
 speeding returns on investment.  Applications on Demand for Lotus Notes
 currently supports Lotus Sametime, Lotus Quickplace, and Lotus Quickr. IBM
 currently plans to extend Applictions on Demand to other Lotus
 collaboration products over time.
--  Mobile Support for Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino Web Access: IBM is
 announcing Lotus Notes Traveler, a new client for Lotus Notes and Domino
 8.0.1 currently scheduled to be available in the first quarter of 2008. The
 new Lotus Notes Traveler will provide out-of-the-box, mobile support for
 Lotus Notes and Domino Web Access users, enabling access to Lotus Domino
 mail from Microsoft Windows mobile devices.  As currently planned, Lotus
 Notes Traveler will provide automatic, real-time replication of email,
 including attachments, calendar, address book, journal and to-do's, and
 will work over all wired and wireless connections.
--  IBM Lotus Quickr Content Integrator:  A new companion product to Lotus
 Quickr, the Lotus Quickr Content Integrator will provide an intuitive, self-
 service environment for content sharing and collaboration.  Designed for
 mass movement of documents from server to server, the Lotus Quickr Content
 Integrator can be used by administrators to import content from Lotus
 Domino Document Manager Libraries, Lotus Domino teamrooms, Microsoft
 Outlook public folders, and Microsoft SharePoint sites into Lotus Quickr
 services for Domino.
--  Lotus Quickr connectors for Lotus Notes 8 and Microsoft Outlook:
 Quickr connectors for Lotus Notes 8 and Microsoft Outlook will allow team
 members to save attachments into team workspaces, replace attachments with
 shared links, and use the collaborative content services of Lotus Quickr
 software directly in Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook clients. With drag
 and drop support, the Lotus Quickr connectors for Lotus Notes and Outlook
 will make it easy to move attachments directly into Lotus Quickr folders,
 so users can reduce the size of their mail files, enable access to the
 latest document version and get new team members up to speed quickly.
--  IBM Lotus Forms 3.0:  This major upgrade to IBM's electronic forms
 product uses open-standards based technology to make it easy for customers
 to integrate data across the enterprise and with existing IT systems.
 Customers can now extend business processes outside the firewall by
 offering their customers the ability to create, fill out, sign and submit
 forms data via a Web browser without downloading additional software.
--  Accelerators for IBM Websphere Portal: WebSphere Portal customers now
 have simple tools from within a company's website to create, connect and
 share content and gain access to community resources and contacts through
 professional networking tools.  The Collaboration accelerator uses Lotus
 Quickr, Lotus Sametime and Lotus Connections software optimized for the
 Web. The Content accelerator enables customers to easily build and manage
 web sites, intranets, extranets, and portals with features from IBM
 Workplace Web Content Management software.

IBM market research shows key work-style trends are reshaping the traditional office worker environment. The consumer and enterprise worlds are merging, while the technology-savvy generation entering the workforce is accustomed to the immediacy of gaming, instant messaging and social networking. As electronic bandwidth increases, content is represented in richer forms of digital media that can be combined or "mashed up" into situational applications to accomplish very specific tasks. A proliferation of new workers -- predisposed to playing and working with others in an online world -- are forming professional and social communities both within and beyond their companies' firewalls, collaborating in a multitude of new ways.

The Collaboration Summit is being attended by more than 300 organizations, including State Street Corp, The Federal Aviation Administration, Novell and Nokia -- that are pioneering innovative current and next generation collaboration software. Technology leaders showcasing new collaboration technologies include Ascendant Technology, Avaya, Axceler, Binary Tree, CGS, Gemini, Genius Inside, Innovative Ideas Unlimited, JustSystems Corp., McAfee, MetaLogic, Motorola, Perficient, Permessa, RIM, SCS, Sybase, Synaptris, Vamosa, VSS, and Workgroup Connections, among others.

For more information on IBM's collaboration portfolio: www.ibm.com/lotus

IBM, Lotus, Lotus Notes, Notes, Domino, QuickPlace, Quickr, Sametime WebSphere and Workplace are trademarks of IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. All other company, product or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

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Contact:
Mike Azzi
IBM Communications
+1-914-766-1561
+1-203-515-6324
azzi@us.ibm.com

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The Evolution of Business Networking, By Chris Pareja

Business networking needs to evolve in order to retain its usefulness to business-to-business (B2B) salespeople. The biggest challenge facing business developers is finding the right types of opportunities within the right types of companies. The second biggest challenge is having the appropriate resources at hand to deliver the product or service once the deal is closed. Luckily, business networks are adapting to accommodate both of these problems.

When people think about business networking, two images typically come to mind: Chamber mixers and traditional leads groups that cater to people who sell to small businesses and individuals; or “old boy’s clubs” known for closed-door meetings in smoky backrooms where “under the table” deals are made. Neither of these scenarios is very fruitful for the average entrepreneur, consultant or salesperson who is trying to sell to established businesses at senior decision making levels.

The other problem with these antiquated networking strategies is that they are dependent on a network being geographically-focused or controlled by a few powerful personalities within a specific industry. If a salesperson’s territory is regional or national in scope, networks focused on specific zip codes or cities that work well for insurance, financial services, real estate and other community-based leads are relatively useless. And if they represent a smaller company, they can forget about penetrating the “old boy’s club.”

Some innovative companies such as LinkedIn.com, Xing.com, MySpace.com and other online social networks are allowing geographically dispersed-colleagues and long-forgotten friends or acquaintances to exchange ideas, leads and help stay connected. Other networks try to add value through online message boards or interest-specific email distribution lists. While these valuable tools help connect people technologically, their adoption hasn’t been as rapid as some would expect, because people are hesitant to blindly trust technology as a replacement for face-to-face networking and relationships.

The solution is a hybrid approach that combines local face-to-face meetings with technology-enabled meetings that expand the reach of the individual so they can collaborate with other business developers interested in common geographies, industries and/or providing complementary products or services.

This new approach takes into account the fact that technology is an augmentation to interpersonal connections, not a replacement for them. It also allows people to form alliances nationally and internationally, so they can develop and deliver business on a scale that would have previously been nearly impossible.

A culture of collaboration is sweeping the business-to-business sales world. And new technology is coming into play to enable national and even international collaboration, so small and large companies alike can change the way they uncover, close and deliver new business opportunities. Business networking must continue to evolve in ways that enable this collaboration, and companies must understand networking is not a face-to-face or technology-enabled interaction alone, but requires both online and offline components working together to be truly effective.

By Chris Pareja

Founder of B2BpowerExchange.com

chris@b2bpowerexchange.com

925-200-5333

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Convergence Happens Because WE Make it Happen!

There seem to be several groups that want the same thing...convergence of technology over the internet that will support more efficient and meaningful online (and offline) networking.

So why aren't these groups collaborating? Doesn't that make the most sense?

The good news is that the technology is already here! We (as a human society) have everything we need to create open standards which will facilitate a safe and secure means of entering our profile data in ONE PLACE. It won't matter if you're on Facebook or MySpace or Friendster or LinkedIn or anything else out there - THEY ARE JUST FLAVORS OF THE MONTH...YOU'RE NOT!

So what's missing?

Structure, standards and agreement

A few months ago we started a non-profit trade association, The Relationship Networking Industry Association (RNIA) - www.RNIA.org to facilitate a seamlessly-connected Relationship Economy by working with its members to develop such standards as well as the educational initiatives and accreditation processes to support them.

The Relationship Networking Industry (social + business networking) is a Multi-Billion dollar industry. If you want to get involved and make a true difference, please check us out.

www.RNIA.org