For some reason, I was inspired to
start a “Quote of the week” post for this blog, so here’s the first of the series…

On the May 3^rd Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
podcast, Tina Seelig
(Executive Director, STVP)
asks Gil Penchina (CEO, Wikia) what the
business model for Wikia is. Here’s the
answer he offered:

If you operate on free
software…and your content is created by volunteers, and people come to you
because good content gets ranked well by Google and others, then you don’t
really need to make a lot of revenue to have a profitable business. So, our
goal is to just put some advertising on the site and use that as our revenue
source, but the other thing we’ve said is, if we create good content, we want
to share it with the world, so we operate under a GFDL (fee content)
license…Our mission is not just creating the best content, but making it
accessible to everybody in whatever form and fashion they want it.

This answer really got
me thinking…

Can an internet business really survive on
advertising alone?

Sure there’s little or no overhead,
but is this business model really sustainable?

Doesn’t it sound more
like beer money rather than BMW money?

Is this the new
economy—create for the greater good, attract a multitude of followers, and the
re$t will follow?

Hmmm…I guess it all depends on the
success (and HUGE numbers) of the Wikia community and how much that value can
command from advertisers. Let’s wait and see…

Hmm…are we one step closer to a Google Office challenge against MS Office Live? It certainly seemed like it was going in that direction when Google acquired Writely and it seems even more so now that it has just launched Google Spreadsheets, which will initially go into limited beta on June 6^th, 2006.

This was a real surprise to me as I had not heard any hype about this at all. Then again, even Mike Arrington at TechCrunch didn’t get the scoop out (and he often posts many, many scoops a day) till the day of the launch, so I don’t feel so bad.

Anyway, here are some of the highlights:

- Create basic spreadsheets from scratch.
- Upload your spreadsheet files.
- Familiar desktop feel makes editing a breeze.

So, from the initial (p)reviews, Google Spreadsheets appears to be quite well received. However, while there are some pretty nice features, like the ability to import excel files, sharing a spreadsheet with other people, and multi-user editing (editing ‘live’, together with a chat screen), it still lacks many of the features that makes excel a useful tool for organizing tabular data, such as a graphing/charting function and search/filtering functions (c’mon Google—that’s what you do!?!).

Here are some interesting early (p)reviews and other related items:

- A more detailed (p)review on Google Blogoscoped, including 2 screencasts
- Vinny Carpenter’s early (p)review
- Steve Rubel’s early (p)review on Micropersuasion
- CNet’s June 5^th report and June 6^th (p)review
- ZDNet’s June 5^th scoop, including some Om Malik comments
- All things “Google Spreadsheet” tagged on Technorati
- Brief commentary at TechCrunch

Here’s
another GREAT resource for Gettin’
ETech Support, particularly for those interested in applying ETech to intranets.

The Otter
Group’s Kathleen
Gilroy (CEO) and Bill Ives
(Author and Consultant) have
contributed a chapter on Intranet 2.0 in a book called “Transforming Your Intranet”
(Melcrum Publishing,
2006).

The
chapter, entitled “Preparing for
Intranet 2.0: how to integrate new communication technology into your intranet”
discusses how many of the new and emerging technologies—sometimes called “social
media” applications—such as RSS, blogs, and wikis, can be integrated into a
corporate intranet as a “…platform for
two-way communication, collaboration and innovation.”

Gilroy and Ives do a great job of explaining/simplifying
many of these emerging technologies and providing plenty of resources for “additional
reading.” But more importantly, I feel the greatest value comes from the various
real world case studies that really shed some light on the application of these
technologies, such as:

- How RSS is being used in Siemens USA
- Social bookmarking
at IBM
- Wikis at IBM
- Blog networks at a
global consulting firm
- Learning networks at
a global financial services firm
- The use of content “mash-ups”

Here’s a
quote from the end of the chapter:

This
program demonstrates how technology-enabled learning networks based on web 2.0 tools and
services can support innovation through greater transparency of ideas, better social
networking, and more targeted delivery of critical information…Like many
innovations, intranet 2.0 will be driven by users. …The very nature of these
changes – providing increased participation, an open platform that allows for
the integration of tools, services and data, along the work now going on to
take advantage of this integration through mash-ups – is only going to
accelerate the transformation.

You can download a PDF copy of the
chapter by clicking on the book cover here.

No, this is not a post about Salesforce.com. It’s not even a post about a great new CRM application. What it is about, is going back to the roots of developing actual relationships with customers and applying emerging technologies and trends as a catalyst for this process.

Dion Hinchcliffe—who is is well regarded for his blogs on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 (see: web2.wsj2.com and ZDNet)—has just posted a GREAT article on Using Web 2.0 to Reinvent the Customer Relationship. He defines Enterprise 2.0 as “Web 2.0 for business purposes, both internal and customer-facing” and goes on to say:

“Web 2.0's two-way conversations would provide instant feedback, rapid evolution of offerings through co-innovating with the people actually using the products, and even true symbiotic relationships where your customers are also your key suppliers.”

Dion believes that applying Web 2.0 mentality in a business can help develop “fuller, richer, customer relationships” and offers the following five tips to facilitate the process:

1. Dramatically Lower the Experience Barrier
2. Collect User (Customer) Contribution
3. Enable Formation of Communities
4.Become an Open Platform
5. Provide Self-Evolving Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

As you can see, many of his points revolve around the user, which is exactly what Web 2.0 is really all about—empowering the user/consumer and offering them a great user-experience based on information that they are able to contribute, communicate, and collaborate.

At its core, Web 2.0 is about harnessing collective intelligence and most of the rest of the Web 2.0 ideas fall out from this concept.  And that highlights a monumental difference between the way the Web was used in the past – and indeed is still largely used today – and the way it works best.  Most Web sites still push content one way out to their visitors, don't have any means to interact with them, or even engage them in basic conversation and elicitation of contributions. 

This article is a must read and will definitely go into my list of Getting ETech Support resources—what a great example of ETech@Work!