FreshBooks Opens API; Lets in Some Fresh Air

June 28, 2007 at 2:55 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, SaaS, Web 2.0

The Enterprise Web 2.0 revolution has been a godsend to small and midsized companies. Inexpensive, web-based tools and services mean the little guys now have access to professional office tools that rival those used by the Fortune 500–at a fraction of the cost. Think Thinkfree, Zoho, Google Apps, and literally hundreds of other web office purveyors whose innovation and effort has made the web a more effective and friendly place for business transactions for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and their customers.

FreshBooks, provider of a popular online invoicing and time-tracking service now used by more than 180,000 business users, wants to make the web even friendlier. The four-year-old Toronto-based firm today released its API and opened the door for application designers, businesses, services companies, and users to integrate the FreshBooks’ billing platform into what it hopes will be an entirely new category of products, features, and solutions for enhancing and streamlining productivity, workflow, sales, CRM, project management, and invoicing.

Application/service integrators can incorporate FreshBooks APIs into existing and new products to extend functionality, including timers, project planners, and desktop widgets. Services providers, such as ISPs, Web apps, wine, book or other product of the month clubs, with an existing sales infrastructure can use the API to add a professional-quality billing component. Tech savvy customers can also integrate FreshBooks functionality into their current workflow.

“Over the last four years, we have learned a lot about what small businesses and their customers need in order to improve the workflow, customer service and billing process,” said Mike McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks. “By making our API available, we’re helping other businesses enhance the process for delivering professional invoices over email and ground mail, efficiently tracking accounts receivable, cordially managing disputes, recording payment histories to ensure peace of mind for customers, and collecting payments online from customers.”

I spoke with Sunir Shah in FreshBooks’ Market and Communtiy Development yesterday and he told me the release of the API has three primary targets:

• import/export from existing applications, like QuickBooks.
• improving the workflow of our existing customers, through things like desktop widgets
• and the big one, providing a 21st century, professional quality invoicing and accounts receivable system for SaaS and other subscription-based services.

FreshBooks is already widely used by legal professionals, PR/marketing firms, advertising agencies, nurses, project managers, contractors, freelancers, consultants, virtual assistants, journalists, technicians, developers, web designers, graphic designers, and others who, among other things, love the idea of being able to bill clients the same day a project is finished rather than having to wait until the end of the month to squeeze an invoice out of a complicated spreadsheet or software-based accounting program.

This looks like another very smart move by our friends from the Great White North. The developers community is here.

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Policy-based management may help bridge some pitfalls in SOA’s evolution

June 28, 2007 at 11:33 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, SOA, Web 2.0, enterprise software

I had a nice chat with Rich Seeley at TechTarget this week on SOA and management, and he produced this story. The major theme of the article is that SOA forces a new kind of management, one that’s by necessity highly inclusive and crosses the borders of the emerging loosely coupled services landscape. A standardized fabric approach to SOA management that spans design, development and runtime — as well as the mixed services lifecycle (wide AND deep) — remains a goal, but not an easily attainable one for most enterprises and service providers.

Fellow IT software and SOA blogger Joe McKendrick had a post that factored this all into what may be holding SOA back at many organizations.

Not long after I spoke to Rich, I took a briefing with three other vendors that somewhat cheered me up about the topic. First Dan Potter, vp of marketing at WebLayers, re-energized my understanding of the role of policy-based management, and how SOA reshuffles the policy deck to include impacts on governance, registries and repositories, runtimes and processes. The recent IBM Rational Asset Manager announcement adds another major component to what policies may help coordinate, automate and extend.

Potter, who like me is a big fan of New Hampshire lakes right about this time of year, explained that WebLayers has some 1,000 pre-built policies that can be applied to SOA development, useage and extensibility. Nowadays, many organizations rely on peopled review boards and physical documents to admit and govern SOA components and processes. And that’s in design time, never mind runtime.

Such wetware/committee approaches just don’t scale well, are hard to repeat, and can not be applied well across the many tentacles of SOA penetration through the enterprise. The fruits of such labors remain largely outside of and separate from the architecture’s grinding gears and cogs.

Automating the review of artifacts and applying proven policies via visual interfaces for their use and inclusion, however, marks a significant step to technically managing loosely coupled activities comprehensively. Policy-based approaches — including wider adoption of WS-Policy — should become more common for SOA lifecycle management. But like the weather, a lot of people talk about WS-Policy but don’t do much about it.

WebLayers also had an announcement this week on its benefits in conjunction with Oracle environments. (Side note: How about those Oracle numbers?)

I also spoke this week with Ryan Martens, founder and CTO of Rally Software. Rally has some products that help development teams attain agile benefits, on the project, program and ALM levels. But what makes Rally relevant to this discussion is the way the products are delivered — they are predominantly software as a service (SaaS) offerings. And by being SaaS, development in fast iterations is far better managed, tracked, measured, and facilitated.

What’s more, Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 values can be quickly applied. Keep it allin the systems so the people and process can be better coordinated, leveraged and reused. As you manage your development activities online you can also gather and share as communities online — both communities of developers but also end users. Create a component or service and run it by a user focus forum as a blog or wiki (Rally prefers hives) before the build. Talk about feedback and iterative improvement.

Damon Poole, CTO at AccuRev, is promoting what he calls Hyper Agile — a mashup of lean and agile development principles. When I spoke with him this week, I learned his goal is to make agile mainstream. I’d like to see agile also go deeper into how SOA is managed and improved. Indeed, SOA should be a market driver in itself to Hyper Agile.

Get this: SOA could make Hyper Agile imperative for services development, which forces more need to manage and govern services, which then begs use of agile principles in SOA governance, which leads to better while looser coupling to operational demands and performance. And so on. We could see such an adoption virus. Again, we come back to people, process, and technology and how to make them work well together on a recurring and coordinated basis (wide AND deep).

Managing agile development workflow, I believe, has a bearing now on the SOA management discussion. Somewhere, somehow the data, control and shared best practices of a Rally approach, a Hyper Agile mentality, and a policy-based apparatus will coalesce into best practices that no SOA architect should ignore. It will provide significant value to the operators too. Policies may become the lingua franca of how these now disparate IT orbits become aligned and in ongoing collaboration.

Software development as a service elevates that role to more easily relate to policy-based SOA reviews and governance that then relates more to traditional management. The pieces are falling into place. People and process must now provide the mortar that binds refines, and standardizes.

This could become a major productivity boost to IT generally, and begin to knock down the higher ongoing IT costs dilemma that impacts us all. SOA is only as successful as its management.

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Is LinkedIn About to Be Sold?

June 27, 2007 at 2:39 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing

Is Linkedin in play?

Most of the recent flurry of reporting about Facebook has focused on the impact that its wildly successful foray into the world of adult membership is having on MySpace but there are signs that it is also having an effect on LinkedIn, the original social network for business users.

The signs are there, beginning with a series of executive changes being announced this week. Yesterday, the company named Steve Sordello, formerly of Tivo, as its new CFO. Tomorrow, it will announce that Patrick Crane, formerly of the Yahoo! Inc. Network Division where he headed up several key products, including the launch of Yahoo! Answers, is its new Vice President of Marketing. Crane’s mandate is to help head up LinkedIn’s first general marketing push with initiatives designed to build the community beyond its current eleven-million users. (Memo to PR people: if you want me to keep a secret, write “embargoed until …”) on the release.

More significantly, some Wall Street types I know and generally trust tell me that there are discussions going on between LinkedIn and one of the oldest and most respected family-run business publishers. (Okay, I’ll make it easy for you, McGraw-Hill.)

I think it would be a great move for both parties.

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JBoss takes Exadel tools to Eclipse open source

June 27, 2007 at 1:51 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, enterprise software

JBoss.org and Red Hat this week took a significant step toward finalizing Red Hat Developer Studio with the introduction of the Exadel Eclipse plug-ins under open source.

Tony Baer has a good write-up on this.

Exadel contributed the plug-ins, along with Ajax4sf and RichFaces, to Red Hat last March with the goal of making high-end Eclipse developer tools available to the open-source community.

Red Hat, which sponsors JBoss.org, an open-source middleware community, says that Developer Studio will provide pre-configured tools “that will offer significant time-savings and value, making them more productive and speeding time to deployment.” Launch of that is set for later this summer.

In addition to the new Exadel plug-ins, the JBoss Tools project encompasses the former JBoss IDE project with Hibernate Tools, JBoss jBPM Tools, Drools IDE, JBoss Application Server Tools and new JBoss Seam Tools, among others. JBoss Tools will provide nightly builds and an Eclipse update manager for easy access to the latest versions of all plug-ins.

Developers can now download the plug-ins from JBoss Tools to compile a powerful IDE with rich tooling for Java EE and Ajax development. Eventually, developers will be able to subscribe to Red Hat Developer Studio, which integrates JBoss Tools into a tested and supported IDE for development on all Red Hat runtimes, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat seems to be finding the right mix on tools, and with the Eclipse community’s sizable wind in its sails. And, as we know, the runtimes usually tend to follow where the developer preferences point.

In other open source arena news, Covalent Technologies has set its sights on becoming a one-stop-shopping support company for Apache and other open-source users with its announcement of add-on support for a dozen additional open-source projects.

Since the Covalent founders, who helped develop the ubiquitous Apache HTTP Web Sever, packed their wagons with venture-capital cash and joined the tech-boom gold rush from Nebraska to California nearly seven years ago, the company has continued to position itself as a leader within the open-source community.

It now claims to support more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 companies and 70 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, according to its Wikipedia entry.

Among the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and other open-source technologies Covalent will now support are:

• Apache ActiveMQ

• Apache Flood

• Apache Jakarta Commons Logging

• Apache James

• Apache JMeter

• Apache Log 4j

• Apache Lucene

• Apache Struts

• mod_aspdotnet

• OpenSSL

• The Spring Framework

In announcing the new support offerings, Covalent quoted Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst at Redmonk, as saying, “With Covalent now offering commercial-level support for projects such as Lucene and Xerces, we could be seeing the next wave of Apache projects on their way to becoming household names.”

I suppose Apache incubation projects are often the talk of the day at the O’Grady dinner table. But some of us would still have a tough sell getting the kids the finish their broccoli while chatting about the shifting requirements for Lucene. More likely they will finish their greens IF I were to stop talking about them. Hmmm.

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To Align or Not to Align? How Structured Should Enterprise 2.0 Initiatives Be?

June 27, 2007 at 9:06 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I recently told a Story on User Generated Content within the Firewall that covered knowledge management closely aligned with business process. Enterprise 2.0 is certainly much more than KM but enhancing knowledge sharing is more of its many opportunities. When I was involved in implementing knowledge management efforts, pre and post web, I always stressed the need for alignment with business processes and the need to have the efforts measured by metrics related to these processes (e.g. call centers, sales support, product development).

I never saw a knowledge management or collaboration effort succeed with the “let’s build it and see what happens” approach. I can remember conversations with several CIOs who said that they build a discussion forum but no one used it. When asked about the business purpose for the forum or what processes it was aligned with, it was like deer in the headlights. The proliferation of early intranets and the chaos that resulted was also a bad byproduct of just letting the users have free reign.

There have been many posts on this blog and elsewhere about how Enterprise 2.0 is different than Web 2.0. Getting people to participate within their work life will be a greater challenge than in their free time. One way to succeed is to follow the practice of successful knowledge management efforts and align the initiative with a core business process and demonstrate how it improves this process. But is this the only way?

Many of the successful Web 2.0 efforts like YouTube and MySpace have provided a platform for individual creativity and did not seem to be concerned with specific use cases, or at least not locked into them. A number of firms have launched wikis just to see how they will get used. IBM Research several years ago launched its Blog Central effort to give employees a blog for whatever reason they wanted as long as it did not violate business policies. There were some very interesting and useful initial results but I also read a bit later that the 3600 blogs average less than 10 entries but then many may have just started by then. I do not know the status now. A more recent conversation suggested that there are 12,000 active bloggers within IBM (less than 5% of the firm but still a significant number). Of course, Enterprise 2.0 is much more than individual employee blogs but that is a piece.

Since Enterprise 2.0 initiatives have many more potential applications than knowledge sharing, allowing for open-ended use might be an effective strategy. It did not work for intranets but we are way beyond that now. If a firm had the resources and commitment, a dual implementation strategy would make sense. Do some pilots structured around business processes and allow for some user exploration and creativity. What do you think? What has been your experience so far?

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How Simple Can Enterprise Software be?

June 26, 2007 at 12:22 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

With all of the fancy, expensive and new software out there, you would think that the ushering in of Enterprise 2.0 began as a call to build bigger software. You’d think it is a call to build software at all.

I wrote this post and posted it on my own weblog because it was so long. Let me know what you think.

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Composite Software tackles the speeds and feeds angle of SOA

June 26, 2007 at 9:11 am · Filed under SOA, enterprise software

As the amount of enterprise data explodes, so does the need to access this data from disparate and widely flung sources, increasing the market for data integration and management.

Composite Software this week announced a major release of its Composite Information Server (CIS), as well as a Composite Active Cluster, designed to enable companies to further scale their data services deployments.

Composite Software provides on-demand data integration. Its CIS 4.5 — the first major release since CIS 4.0 was announced last November — and the new Active Cluster will extend capabilities for creating, publishing, and consuming data for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and data virtualization. It is aimed at such data-intensive industries as financial services, pharmaceutical/biotech, e-commerce, telecom, and government.

CIS 4.5 includes:

• An all-new, Web-based server management console that allows administrators to monitor and manage the environment from remote locations.

• Improved security management capabilities that simplify the management and control of large groups of enterprise users.

• A foreign key relationship analyzer, that helps the query optimization engine improve execution of complex, independent queries.

The release also includes enhanced XML data type support, HTTP connectivity pooling, and user/group export and import.

According to Composite Software, Active Cluster improves data virtualization and data reuse capabilities by allowing users to deploy massively scalable, adaptable clusters. It also exploits native “active/active” clustering to help reduce total cost of ownership of the data services layer.

Both CIS 4.5 and Active Cluster will be available by the end of the month. The two will be sold separately and pricing will be based on the number of CPUs.

As we’ve said before, getting your data act together is an important foundation for moving to SOA successfully. The lesson many are learning the hard way is that getting you data act together means addressing both the management from an integration and consolidation perspective — but just as importantly more a volume and load perspective. It’s been a thorny issue for 40 years … making all that data jump through the hoops you want, and at a speed that meets or exceeds the pace of the business tasks at hand.

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Networks Groan Under the “MySpace Effect”

June 25, 2007 at 11:56 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, barriers

Leave it to the network guys to spoil all the fun. But, someone’s got to keep things running down in the engine room while the rest of us are up on deck searching the horizons for new worlds.

Terrible analogy, I know, but it’s a Monday.

Anyway, a new report in Network World warns that the incredible surge of social computing and Enterprise 2.0 activities across enterprises is stretching our networks to the limits.

Images of Scotty come to mind. “She can’t take it anymore, Captain!”

According to Network World, the “MySpace Effect” is putting new strains on already strained networks. The article puts it this way:

“Increasingly popular social-networking sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Facebook are accounting for such huge volumes of DNS queries and bandwidth consumption that carriers, universities and corporations are scrambling to keep pace. The trend is prompting some network operators to upgrade their DNS systems, while others are blocking the sites altogether. Moreover, the “MySpace Effect” is expected to hit many more nets soon, as these network-intensive interactive features migrate from specialty sites to mainstream e-commerce operations and intranets.”

Tom Tovar, president and COO of Nominum, which sells high-end DNS software to carriers and enterprises, says many enterprises are already feeling the pressure:

“One of the things we’re hearing more and more from carriers is that social-networking sites like MySpace and YouTube are contributing to an exponential increase in DNS traffic. A single MySpace page can have anywhere from 200 to 300 DNS lookups, while a normal news site with ads might have 10 to 15 DNS lookups. It’s an exponential increase.”

As the article explains it, “social-networking sites create large volumes of DNS traffic because they pull content from all over the Internet. Most of these sites use content-delivery networks to extend the geographical reach of their content so users can access it closer to home.”

Universities may feel the pinch before everyone else, but some institutions seem to have the problem under control for now. The University of Kansas, for example, already limits how much bandwidth students can consume from dorm rooms. Thus, university servers have been able to handle the load coming from a user population that averages 20,000 per day that frequents sites such as MySpace, FaceBook, and YouTube.

However, as we see more social computing within the enterprise, IT planners will need to prepare their infrastructures with additional bandwidth, additional servers, and, very importantly, additional storage — which has already reached the breaking point thanks to voluminous amounts of data that need to be managed and saved.

The kicker? It all has to be saved and stored somewhere. With the recent spate of mandates and regulations that affect corporate data, the onus is on enterprises to save all transactions and messages that flow through their systems. E-mail and instant messages must be archived, and social computing activities will also fall under this requirement. It’s a good thing disks are so cheap these days.

And remember, Scotty was always keep the warp coil intact with spare parts and know-how.

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Old Media 1, Federated Media 0

June 25, 2007 at 8:57 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing

The kerfluffle over Federated Media’s hamfisted attempt to obscure the line between advertising and editorial is neither trival, as Michael Arrington suggests, or some kind of of noble experiment in bringing advertisers “into the conversation,” as John Batelle would have it in his downright laughable defense of the practice.  All successful news publications, online and off, develop a trust relationship with their readers which is based on those readers’ belief that what they are getting is the publication’s best sense of the facts, unencumbered by deliberately obscured agendas like advertising money.  In this case, Federated Media pushed the line and the writers who agreed to be used in that manner deserve to lose credibility because of it.

That’s why there exists in all trustworthy print publications what is generally referred to as a separation of “church and state.’  And I can assure you that it is strictly enforced.   Over the past 25 years, I have written and/or produced maybe 150 advertorials–those ugly little hybrid mixes of text and advertising–for Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week.  Combined, I suspect they produced more than $100 million in ad revenue.  This would make me a success story in most companies but the truth is I have never met a Forbes or Business Week editor.  I know one editor at Fortune that I haven’t seen or spoken to for 10 years and although some of my most successful “sections” appeared when John Huey was editor there, I met him only a couple of years ago because he rents the apartment next to mine. I’m not sure he even knows I’m one of the mercenary trolls who made him look like a hero although he did admit to another rep I know that there was “a lot of money to made in picking up garbage.” 

In publications that care about editorial integrity and regard it as their most valuable asset, ad salesmen do not speak to editors and vice versa.  They don’t take meetings together; they don’t lunch together; their offices are deliberately separated.  No self-respecting reporter ever set foot in an ad agency unless it was to interview someone for a story.

In print publications, advertorials are required to be clearly labeled “Advertisement” and they are written, produced, and designed  separately from the magazine or newspaper itself.  There are also strict rules for informing advertisers that what they are buying is advertising and not editorial.

This is how it should be or else there is no point in pretending there is something called journalism that can be trusted to put the reader’s interests in truth, fairness and accuracy above all other considerations.  Over time, this becomes a reputation and even, if I may be naive enough to suggest, a positive contribution to society.  It’s why I trust the reporting of the Wall Street Journal, for example, although I wouldn’t have the opinion pages in my outhouse.  It’s why ad agencies don’t lean on great publications to do squirrely things.  It’s why Rupert Murdoch must never, ever be allowed to own the Journal, or the NYT or the Washington Post.

Michael Arrington has to decide whether he wants to be an editor or a publisher because no one can effectively be both.  And, I do know that if you produce a publication that a lot of people trust and want to read, advertisers will come–on your terms, not theirs. 

As for Batelle and his fine line of bullshit about making advertisers part of the conversation, most readers are sophisticated enough to realize that the Microsofts and Ciscos of the world don’t want to have a conversation; they want to sell them stuff,  and that ad agencies like FM are simply doing what marketers do–pimping for their clients and trying to turn trusted writers and sources into endorsement bitches.

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Age of Aquarius

June 25, 2007 at 1:23 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0

It was no coincidence that as consciousness was breaking this morning I recall the playing of Aquarius in my head. “Presumed to occur at the end of the 20th century”, indeed it did.

For those of us who were part of the purple sofa era, the year 2000 list of The Top 100 Interactive Agencies incites an array of memories. While standing as witness to the momentum of a new way of doing business, it belied the shift in direction. The wake-up call came from the larger economy that put these companies in a slide resulting in stock prices below a dollar and buyouts/consolidations throughout the end of 2001. These companies didn’t implode because of a bubble bursting (although there were certainly contributing factors of bad behaviors). The combination of circumstances exacerbated a natural attrition as the cycle of innovation sluffs the chaff.

There are significant signs to suggest we’re back on that growth curve again:

“The much-talked-about tipping point has been reached….
Business is back to 1999 levels, and it’s only going to grow.”

If you were to accept for a moment the health/movement of these companies as the canary of the industry at large, then you have to decide for yourself what the significance is of Microsoft buying one of the top agencies in the industry.

My own take is that what’s about to happen will dwarf the boom of the 90s, by several orders of magnitude. The greatest potential is inside of companies (ala. Enterprise 2.0), but only to the point that they leverage the potential to redefine their business models and focus more on innovating ‘doing’ business and creating whole new markets. Based on the insights gained from Wikinomics the real value of historic brands is to leverage the ‘machine’ of their core competencies to focus on the pursuit of new markets…not new products. This whole model relies on Enterprise 2.0.

While astronomically the Age of Aquarius will not reach its zenith for over 600 years, the real potential lies in the duality between Pisces (yin) and Aquarius (yang). Since the fundamentals of business are already too heavily weighted to the yang, the fundamentals of 2.0 thinking bring needed balance to embrace more yin characteristics. The high adoption of 2.0-related solutions is surely due to an unfilled ‘gap’ to achieve optimal balance, essentially a vacuum.

It was also no coincidence that the song this morning was being performed by The Fifth Dimension. We are making this journey via The Fifth Dimension, where by participation and interaction we fundamentally change who we are and what we can accomplish through active expression and shared experiences. Our potential is achieved through collective emergence.

Gaining knowledge and learning are simply the waste products left behind on the trail.

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Enterprise 2.0 Conference Recap - What did you miss?

June 23, 2007 at 9:19 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference has been interesting, and there is no question that it has been a success. The venue has been jam packed with people for the last 3 days, and you can’t turn around without meeting another interesting person.

Great Keynotes
Dave was the best speaker of the week. He is always compelling and fresh. Next up was Andrew McAfee, who gave an Enterprise 2.0 Report Card. Andrew posted some followup here.

Vendors all around
There were at least 70 exhibitors at this conference. Some of the exhibiting vendors seemed a little out of place, but overall I was impressed with the number of interesting startups. There were, of course, a slew of companies who are simply re-branding themselves as “enterprise 2.0″ but obviously don’t know what that means.

Worst Launchpad Ever
The Launch Pad Session was a huge flop. The companies were not very compelling and except for KnowNow, they were nowhere near “2.0″.

The hallways
Cruising the halls seeking out interesting people is something I wish I did more of. Have come off a weekend of writing specs, contracts and proposals, I was tired when I got to Boston, so I was slightly anti-social at times. The sheer volume of interesting people, with interesting jobs at some pretty cool companies didn’t strike me until the last day. The worlds largest and most innovative companies were all there and engaged in a way I haven’t seen in a long time.

Were you there? What did you think?

My biggest takeaway from the conference?
The customers are far more interesting, engaged and serious right now than any vendors or consultants who are trying to get in to this movement.

And hey, that’s not a bad start!

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IT Clueless

June 22, 2007 at 1:30 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, barriers

Such is my spin on Sue Feldman’s (IDC) recent impressions given to InformationWeek:

“IT managers and executives largely didn’t know any of this was going on”.

This was in response to IDC research numbers showing that:

“45% of companies have workers blogging,
 43% use RSS feeds, and
35% of companies have employees using wikis”.

These numbers were part of Marthin De Beer’s (Cisco) keynote at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Another favorite line of mine:

“IT managers better start preparing to deal with Web 2.0 technologies,
 …because sooner or later — and it’ll probably be sooner
– they’re going to have to deal with it.”

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UPS uses wireless tracking via SMS to extend shipping locations to today’s mobile set

June 21, 2007 at 2:34 pm · Filed under Social Computing, Web 2.0, innovator interviews, mobile, podcasts

Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: UPS

As wireless communications technology becomes embedded in the lifestyles of consumers — led by the younger generations that have always known it — small businesses are seeking ways to catch the mobile wave.

Gaining an advantage with younger shoppers online and off can be daunting to small businesses that would rather not manage technology — but instead exploit it. I recently moderated a sponsored podcast that tells the story of how UPS extended its global package delivery tracking and Quantum View services to the wireless domain, and reached out in whole new ways via Short Message Service (SMS) texting to mobile devices.

One small retail business in Michigan, Moosejaw, uses UPS as its technology and logistics source to wirelessly aid its clients — to help them stay in touch, provide a strong sense of community, and to give them access to whatever information they may want on how to get their purchases quickly and easily. Some even got some lessons in dating. Go figure.

It turns out that weaving the use of SMS into B2C and B2B conversations has some unintended and auspicious viral consequences. Hear or read more about how UPS and and Moosejaw teamed up to let mobile users get their delivery data their way. We’re joined by Jeff Reid, UPS’s Director of Customer Technology Marketing, and Robert Wolfe, the Co-Founder of Moosejaw.

Here are some excerpts:

I started the company when I was 21, and had absolutely no clue what I was doing. So when customers would come in the store we were playing Nintendo or whiffle ball, and we asked them to join us. And that ended up turning into our marketing theory. So we really try to connect with the customer on a level that’s not just about the product.

So far it seems to be working. We definitely have more high school and college students, not only as our customers but also as our staff. And that’s really how we ended up being so proactive about wireless technology. Because when I look around and see everyone at Moosejaw, they don’t even talk to the people three seats away from them — they SMS text them. And half of them don’t even use their computers anymore; they just use their mobile phones and personal digital assistants.

When we began seeing that internally, we knew that we have to be first-to-market with all of that kind of wireless technology — and UPS has helped a ton, and not only with traditional tracking. I call it “traditional” even though it’s still pretty new. UPS began helping us all the way to getting tracking numbers tested, which we just started very recently. And it’s already been hugely successful. And when I say, “hugely successful,” we have had a lot of people sign up — but more importantly, the people who have signed up have loved it.

It sounds funny. You really don’t need to find out where your stuff is at that very movement, but it’s just that the whole idea of being able to use your phone for everything — our customers expect it. If we are not texting information to them, then we are yesterday’s news. We have to be able to embrace that kind of technology.

If it so happens that we sell products that our demographic loves — and it wouldn’t really matter if that product were coffee mugs — the fact that we are sending tracking information through a mobile phone is what’s important. Our customers are more likely to tell their friends that they just got their tracking number to their phone telling them when their new sunglasses are coming.

Our customers have become more mobile as their businesses have grown, and their lives converge with their day-to-day work activities. So we find a lot of customers are using our mobile capabilities to extend their flexibility and productivity outside of work.

Small businesses and individual users are the primary users of our wireless capabilities. So it is meeting our expectations of who would use the wireless capabilities. Yet it’s amazing how wireless services and our tracking information has made it even onto the golf course nowadays, where people are using it in all facets of their life — to check on that birthday gift to all the way down to managing their global supply chain. … The majority of the usage for wireless tracking comes from individuals in sm