Lots of exciting things happening at FirstRain lately! With a mixture of some great new customers, fun company events, new FirstRain faces, giving the office a fresh, new look, and a big award announcement— June has been busy and we’re only eight days into the month!
First, we announced this week that FirstRain is a finalist for the 2012 American Business Awards in the new product or service of the year, business-to-business products category. As a finalist, FirstRain will either be the Gold, Silver or Bronze Stevie Award winner in the program. The ABA will present the awards at two award ceremonies, the ABA traditional banquet on June 18th in New York, and a new tech awards event on Monday, September 17th in San Francisco. A fantastic honor for us.
Last week, the FirstRain team held one of our traditional potluck lunches. Jordy brought in a special French dessert, baked by his mother, who is in town visiting from France. Our special guest was Eugene’s new 1 month old daughter. Our potluck lunch turned into a baby shower, welcoming her to the FirstRain team— our youngest and smallest team member yet!
![photo[3]](https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8021/7176830067_b3c53190e4_c.jpg)
Along with Eugene’s beautiful new daughter, we are excited to welcome two new additions to FirstRain this summer, Patrick and Sebastian. Patrick is a student at San Jose State and is working with Eugene and Connie in our accounting department. Sebastian (who worked at FirstRain last summer) will be assisting Ryan and the marketing team this summer, before starting college at NYU this Fall. We’re thrilled to have them.
Last night, some of the FirstRain team participated in the annual Splash and Dash race at Stevens Creek Reservoir in Cupertino, CA. We had 9 rainmakers competing in the race, Doug and Aaron finished first for the relay teams, but everyone did a great job and all finished the race strong. Afterwards, everyone went back to Penny’s house for a barbeque. We will partake in the event again in August, when our east coast team is in town to join in on the fun.
![photo[1]](https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8162/7362048898_0eeab08da2_b.jpg)
Looks like another FirstRain summer is definitely off to a fun and full-forced start!
Today’s Facebook’s IPO although a more consumer focused interest story then what most of our customers are interested in, brought a huge amount of tweets on the subject as expected. (I would even venture to say that it was more then a ‘consumer interest story’ but rather a ‘human interest story’). None the less, being that FirstRain is a Silicon Valley based company, the buzz is also being felt strongly outside the digital world for those of us that live here and have friends and acquaintances that are being directly impacted by facebook’s IPO. Exciting times.
Yesterday, prior to Facebook’s IPO we ran some stats using our FirstTweets™ technology and then redid the same exercise at the close of the market today. FirstTweets™ uses our patented FirstRain technology to uncover and deliver only high-quality, business-relevant tweets to sales and marketing professionals across the enterprise. Our analysis shows that less than 0.1% of daily tweets contain quality, business-related content, yet this still represents more than 200,000 tweets per day of business-focused intelligence.
The picture painted by the stats that we captured, aren’t surprising but are interesting and illustrative on why our customers are seeing value in our FirstTweets- as YY Lee our COO tweeted this morning allowing them to “cut through the frenzied roar to net out the actual business discussion…”.
On the day before Facebook’s IPO:
At the close of Market on the day of Facebooks IPO:
We’ve had an amazing year here at FirstRain. Over the course of just the last year, we’ve launched an intuitive new Web app interface, elegant iPad and mobile apps, and then our powerful new Enterprise Customer Intelligence System for end-to-end, company-wide intelligence integration.
And now today is another big day at FirstRain—but it’s also a big day for the social enterprise platforms like Chatter, Yammer and Jive because now, for the very first time, Twitter is useful for B2B professionals.
For some time now, media and brand monitoring solutions like Radian6 have been tapping into Twitter so that companies can see what their customers are saying. If United Airlines loses your luggage and you gripe about it on Twitter, United can see that. But solutions that provide consumer tweet monitoring are hopeless if you are a B2B professional trying to find useful and breaking industry news in Twitter about specific companies, products or business lines.
We’ve now solved that problem, and are announcing FirstTweets today. This is the world’s first solution for extracting business-relevant Twitter Intelligence. FirstTweets™ is a part of our FirstRain Enterprise Customer Intelligence System. It is a technology breakthrough that solves the Twitter problem for business executives: how to get business value and intelligence out of the 250 million tweets that Twitter produces daily.
Our analysis shows that more than 99.9% of all Twitter is non-relevant to business professionals, making it effectively impossible to get to the still more than 200,000 tweets per day of daily business intelligence buried inside.
Now, by using FirstRain’s patented semantic analytics, our system provides the ability to easily and effectively access the business intelligence hidden within the Twitter stream. FirstTweets™ collects and organizes real time industry and customer-specific information to uncover revenue opportunities, including customer developments, industry trends, news, market analysis, emerging themes and so much more.
This intelligence is then be easily integrated into different workflows, including iPads and other mobile devices, CRM systems,social enterprise platforms like Chatter, Jive, Yammer and SharePoint, or any workflow that works best for sales and marketing teams.
FirstTweets™ will be available to all users this Wednesday and will be included for FirstRain subscribers. It’s another exciting innovation by FirstRain, and I look forward to hearing what you think.
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We try to capture everything – we really do. But the reality is so much of our wisdom is in our heads and it’s never more apparent than when trying to train someone new.
At FirstRain we have a new executive – the fabulous Daniela Barbosa who just joined us from Dow Jones. She’s smart and experienced and I want to bring her up to speed as fast as possible but pointing her to our systems is, I know, simply insufficient. We think we capture everything about our users and workflow in our salesforce CRM system. We think we capture our contracts in Netsuite and our central wiki. But of course so much of the deep knowledge is tribal – to quote Wikipedia “Tribal knowledge is any unwritten information that is known within a tribe but often unknown outside of it.”
The reality is that the really interesting stuff about your customers, your technology, why people truly buy is in people’s heads. Our customer facing technical team knows the customer’s workflow, the nuances of why they want one choice over another, what internal projects – and opposition – they are facing and need our system to help them solve. It’s impossible to write it all down, and so it’s crucial to share as much verbally as possible.
And it’s one of the reasons that turnover can be so damaging to companies.
Sometimes turnover is good. If you want to change the culture of a company you typically will have to change 50% of the leadership — or more as when Cadence fired it’s entire executive team. If you want to dramatically change your strategy and go-to-market you have to change your business team — as Dell is now bravely doing.
But short of dramatic change, turnover is expensive simply because you lose and have to re-learn so much tribal knowledge. Especially with your R&D team and with customer support. The R&D team knows where the bodies are buried in the code; the customer support team knows the truth about customer use and where they find value.
It is, of course, important to document the knowledge you have, but when you are growing and moving fast it is also important to value, and protect tribal knowledge and bring your team together frequently and efficiently to talk through and share what’s in people’s heads.
Today, Lead411 released their “Hottest Companies in Silicon Valley” awards for 2012. It’s extremely gratifying to be a part of this list, and we are honored to be among this exciting roster of cutting-edge companies. Thank you so much to Lead411 for their recognition, and congratulations to all of our fellow award recipients.
FirstRain was chosen from a pool of over 3,190 companies in the Software, Wireless, Internet, Hardware and Media industries after the Lead411 research team scoured through press releases and business articles, including venture capital financings, company launches, office openings, new customer press releases, etc., and used this information to select the list of Silicon Valley’s hottest, fastest growing technology companies.
This award comes on top of the KMWorld 2012 “100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management” award we received earlier this month, and the great press coverage we got following the release of our “Enterprise Customer Intelligence System”. It’s been a great start of the year for FirstRain and you can expect to see more exciting news coming from us soon!
For more information on this award, please check out the Lead411’s press release.
Last week was a very exciting week here at FirstRain! Beginning with the launch of our unique new Enterprise Customer Intelligence System on Wednesday, FirstRain now has the ability to deliver a seamless, end-to-end, customer intelligence solution that’s customized to each user in your enterprise and can be simultaneously delivered to iPads, mobile devices, email, CRMs, and social enterprise or collaboration platforms. As Penny blogged about on Wednesday, it’s an amazing B2B technology and one that a number of large companies in technology, communications, life sciences and materials have been using in beta to great success! And It was wonderful see this exciting launch covered by our industry in publications such as CRM Magazine, BtoB Magazine and, just this morning, KM World and CRM Buyer/E-Commerce Times.
Then, on Friday, more good news! First, we were mentioned by Fidelity as one of the featured investor research tools available in their updated Fidelity App for iPad. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s an excellent app and we’re really glad to be a part of it.
And, to top it all off, it was announced on Friday that FirstRain has been selected as one of KMWorld’s 2012 “100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management.” Being selected is a tremendous honor and is yet one more sign of our growing momentum and the exciting place that FirstRain now occupies in the customer intelligence space. And what’s more, we know there’s lots more exciting things soon to come, so stay tuned!
Today is a very exciting day for FirstRain, as we accomplish yet another important milestone in delivering groundbreaking intelligence solutions to our customers. This morning we’re announcing the launch of the first ever Enterprise Customer Intelligence System.
The news today is the release of our new workflow and integration system that lets you use FirstRain intelligence on your customers and market wherever you are: it doesn’t matter if you’re on the road, at a customer site, on your iPads (see the FirstRain iPad App in action here), iPhones or Android phones, via email, or integrated directly into company CRMs or social enterprise portals such as Salesforce.com, Jive or Microsoft SharePoint - it’s all easy now.
We are seeing two huge waves of change impacting sales and marketing teams today: the introduction of Social Enterprise platforms and the iPad, which over 90% of the Fortune 500 are deploying or evaluating right now. Our new solution is intended to make it easy for you to use FirstRain seamlessly in your new workflows and so grow your revenue and market share.
This new system is an extension of the powerful semantic analytics technology you may already be using, but now it’s an end-to-end integrated solution for highly personalized, yet easily managed, customer intelligence across your entire enterprise. This is the information that customers like you already rely upon to continuously stay aware of the critical developments that impact revenue growth and renewal in your business—it’s what we call Enterprise Customer Intelligence (ECI).
We’ve been working on this version of the system for over 2 years – first we went after the quality of the customer and market intelligence our customers are already using – and now we have released the workflow to match your enterprise. We have developed it in collaboration with many of our leading enterprise customers in technology, communications, life sciences, materials and financial services.
If you’re one of the customers who has helped us develop and hone this exciting innovation, thank you! And if you’re one who has not yet had the opportunity to see how our new ECI System can help your organization get even more out of the great FirstRain intelligence you receive today, please, drop me a line.
There is nothing that feels as good as an email from a customer like this one we received today. This is from a company who wishes to remain confidential – but suffice it to say they are a large customer and have 9,000 employees using FirstRain intelligence. Well done Cory, Sagar, Ashutosh, Sweety and the rest of the support team. And thank you Jeff for your support of my team.
Cory and Team:
I just wanted to pause and say “thank you” to each of you for the hard work you do to produce and modify the [internal name they use for FirstRain daily intelligence briefs]. Your good work is evident each and every week and our [internal] clients are very pleased with [internal name]. Please know that your hard work is not going unnoticed and that you are having a positive impact with each [one] you produce and modify on behalf of our [internal] clients.
Job well done!!
Jeff
Long meetings can progressively sap energy and create altered states of being. Yes they can.
We went offsite as a management team for 2 days this weekend to talk through our strategy and 2012 planning. 11 of us in 2 houses at Pajaro Dunes, lots of flip charts, heated discussions, cooking together, walking on the beach and generally spending time together thinking about our business. It was really fun but, even so, it was intense and, combined with long discussions late into the night about the state of the world accompanied by some excellent wines, pretty tiring for some.
Two of our jokesters memorialized their progressive states of mind as they helped clean up after the meeting. They sent me the photos – the editorial is all mine.
Thanks Nima and Ryan – it was fun – and despite the warm sun and sand, amazingly productive!
FirstRain celebrated the holiday season on Monday with our annual company potluck and a lively version of the white elephant gift exchange game. As usual, the FirstRain “chefs” brought in a variety of fantastic foods, ranging from Thomas’ salmon to Doug’s Chili!
This year, FirstRain made sure to leave most of the gag gifts at home (well, besides a banana holder and a re-gifted gift). Bottles of wine and alcohol were high in demand and eagerly fought for. Julie ended up with the best gift, a bottle of wine and jars of David’s homemade jams and jellies. Eugene received the “worst gift”, a re-gifted chip dish. However, ironically the worst gift was brought in by Eugene, himself! Julie and Eugene won office gifts, a brand new iPad2 and Kindle Touch.
The party was a big hit and we’ll definitely continue the tradition next year. It was a perfect way to end a fantastic year.
We’re looking forward to 2012 and the exciting events that lie ahead for FirstRain.
Happy Holidays!
