FirstRain COO, YY Lee, is giving a speech at Thomson Reuter’s Data Science Meetup “Rubber Meets the Road: What’s hard about deriving real meaning from data” tonight in San Francisco.
In her presentation, YY will share her expertise on deriving business developments, implicit relationships, and “meaningful insight” from vast swaths of online and social content across the global web. She will share FirstRain’s experience in addressing the following data science problems to deliver deeply personalized information experience to business professionals:
The event is being held at Galvanize in San Francisco tonight from 6:00 – 9:00pm. We are looking forward to meeting you!
We are proud to announce that FirstRain has won this year’s Bronze Stevie Award for Most Innovative Company of the Year in the US and Canada! Stevie Award winners were selected by more than 250 executives worldwide who participated in the judging process from May through early August.
The International Business Awards are the world’s premier business awards program. All individuals and organizations worldwide—public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small—are eligible to submit nominations. The 2014 IBAs received entries from more than 60 nations and territories.
We’re so happy that the world is recognizing the value FirstRain brings to our customers, as we help them drive more revenue by truly understanding what’s affecting the customers and markets they care about most. We’re constantly striving to bring the best and most advanced experience to our users, so this recognition from the Stevie Awards is a wonderful validation of the value we bring to our customers.
The FirstRain team had a very successful and productive day at the Salesforce1 Tour’s Dallas Stop. Besides announcing Personal Business Analytics for Salesforce1, the expo floor was lively and the FirstRain staff was busy all day giving demos and talking to attendees—not to mention that we got lots of compliments on our booth! Even SaaSy stopped by.
It wasn’t all work for our team, though. They were able to get a real taste of Texas at a pit-style BBQ joint, complete with live country music. Then, after the Salesforce1 event, they had great appetizers, drinks and conversation at the FirstRain happy hour. All in all, it was a great trip for FirstRain. We loved mingling with other ISV partners & looks forward to seeing them at other events… and at Dreamforce in October.
Are you attending Salesforce1 Dallas?
Join us for drinks and live music after the conference! FirstRain is hosting a happy hour at Sambuca Restaurant immediately following the event.
Enjoy cocktails and appetizers as you network with your peers and continue the conversations from the conference.
The event will go from 6-9 pm. Sambuca is located a 1/2 mile North of the Fairmont, across from the Ritz Carlton.
We hope to see you there! Register here to reserve your spot.
According to Hugh McKellar’s article, KMWorld has been publishing their annual list of companies that matter in Knowledge Management for “almost a decade-and-a-half”; that’s about how long I have been in this industry and have been reading this annual list, so I understand precisely the focus of it, which is to “spark a larger discussion of knowledge management.”
We are extremely happy and proud to be named one of KMWorld’s 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management for 2014 as we continue to apply our Personal Business Analytics™ to solving issues related to what KMWorld calls “discovery and delivery of the right information to the right people at the right time.”
Read the full list of winners here.
KMWorld (www.kmworld.com) is the leading information provider serving the Knowledge Management systems market and covers the latest in Content, Document and Knowledge Management, informing more than 40,000 subscribers about the components and processes – and subsequent success stories—that together offer solutions for improving business performance. KMWorld is a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc. (www.infotoday.com)
Penny shared her insights into the changing relationships between CMOs and CIOs on The Economist‘s marketing blog, Lean Back. The post looks at how CMOs need CIOs more than ever as the marketing budget grows.
She writes, “Regardless of how much injustice CIOs feel, the success of their companies is increasingly reliant on their teams learning to align with CMO teams whose priorities—and very nature—are incredibly different from their own.”
Read the full blog post, “Why CMOs won’t lock CIOs out of the C-Suite,” here.
Dreamforce is over, so it’s time to make good on our promised donation to Soles4Souls!
We had a wonderful time meeting so many people this year. The booth team was constantly busy—and we loved it. The numbers show just how busy we were: in addition to countless conversations, we gave 582 product demos! At $2 donation per demo, that’s… a rounded-up total of $1,200 going to delivering shoes to people in need.
Soles4Souls is focusing efforts on the typhoon victims in the Philippines, and have committed to donate 200,000 new pairs of shoes to the cause. They need help getting the shoes there, though, and we’re extremely happy that we can do our part to get the people affected back on their feet.
If you’d like to donate, Soles4Souls is accepting donations through their Southeast Asia Disaster Fund website.
Ashutosh Joshi is FirstRain’s Principal Data Analytics Engineer. He attended The Big Boulder Initiative last month and learned some interesting things. Read on:
Last month the Big Boulder Initiative, organized by one of our vendors, Gnip came to San Francisco and I was lucky enough to go on behalf of my team. FirstRain is a Gnip Plugged in Partner and we consistently get great value from being part of the program and attending Gnip events.
The meet was attended by about 20 companies of varying size – from large companies to a few start-ups with less than 10 employees – all Gnip customers. The conference started with Gnip CEO Chris Moody giving an introductory talk about the objectives and agenda of the conference. What was different about this conference, compared to others that I’ve attended, were its objectives. The goal of the meeting was to discuss what the biggest obstacles, current and future, facing the social-data industry and what steps could be taken to remove those obstacles (boulders). Gnip recognized that it was in a unique position to understand the concerns of both the publishers – the creators of social data like Twitter and Facebook – and the companies who, like FirstRain, use that content to deliver high-value business solutions. A main focus of the Boulder Initiative events is to reach out to its customers to identify the problems they, and the industry in general, face, and to brainstorm solutions to them.
Several problems were proposed, but the biggest that emerged were:
1. Cost of Data
2. Ethics of Data Use
3. ROI to be achieved
4. Access to data
We broke up into teams and discussed short- and long-term steps to be taken around each of these areas. The problem that I found most interesting was the problem of access to data. There is so much data out there, but the access to that data is restricted to those that can afford to license the expensive pipelines. Also, because the data is costly, the primary focus of those accessing the data tends to be turning a profit. Having freer access to the data would lead to more innovation, bringing down the cost of data creation as well–which could be facilitated if the publishers could grant limited/free access to academia or non-profits.
The social data industry is in its infancy, and is still figuring out all the advantages and pitfalls of the different decisions it makes. Gnip’s Big Boulder Initiative events are valuable because they introduce standardization around social data. This includes the different properties of data, like the chain of custody and control that each individual element – the creator, publisher and multiple levels of consumers – can have over the data at different stages of data analytics and the finished product, to the ways to access the data and the rights of the consumer. It was a great to be a part of this process of discussing and proposing standards that hopefully will facilitate more innovation in an up-and-coming industry.
Unlike many other vendor conferences I have attended, it was’t about Gnip giving us demos of their latest features and then trying to sell them with a day of presentations pushing products–It turned out to be quite the contrary. At the end of the event, a board of 3 attendees was elected and they along with 9 similar board members from three more Big Boulder Initiatives around the country were tasked with acting on the solutions proposed in the conference. All in all, a good day for partners and, most importantly, long term for the users that use our services leveraging social data.
FirstRain is revving up for Dreamforce 2013, and to make sure we’ve got all the latest information, we’ve been watching The Road to Dreamforce on Salesforce Live. It’s been really informative and has helped get our creative juices flowing—except they stillwon’t tell us who the band is! Come on, guys!
The best part is that anyone can participate. If you have a question, you can easily ask in real-time: just go on Twitter and use #salesforceLIVE during the session. You might even get an on-air shout out and be famous like Justine!
If you missed yesterday’s episode, don’t worry. You can watch it here.
As we saw last year, there’s been a massive wave of Fortune 500 companies adopting touch-based tablets and devices. One result of that has been the proliferation of a whole range of B2B iPad and smartphone apps from companies like us and salesforce.com to enable those mobile, touch-powered professionals with the intelligence and data they need to understand and engage their customers, as well as open up new opportunities.
However, there’s a second big enterprise trend that’s picking up momentum as well: that of large companies who are developing internal enterprise apps for touch-based tablets and devices, for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.
And because it’s a need that more and more of our customers are requesting every day, we’re very excited to announce this morning the launch of FirstRain for Touch, a new, powerful and yet easy way to drop highly relevant customer intelligence for your sales and marketing teams into your enterprise iPad app—and the first enterprise customer intelligence solution built for the Salesforce Touch Platform.
Last fall, at their annual Dreamforce ‘12 conference, along with their high profile launch of Salesforce Touch, salesforce.com also announced the launch of the similarly named (but very different) “Salesforce Touch Platform.” And unlike Salesforce Touch—which is a downloadable app for iPad, iPhone and Android created for their users to easily access salesforce.com data and capabilities on their devices—the Salesforce Touch Platform is a Software Developer’s Kit that developers within a large enterprise can use to create their own, internal touch-device apps for their sales and marketing teams.
Our new FirstRain for Touch solution is an elegant and personalized set of components that have been optimized for use on touch-based devices, and can be easily dropped into enterprise apps created by companies, just like those developed using the Salesforce Touch Platform SDK. And the demand has been notable. For example, we have at least 3 large, current customers (all in the Fortune 500) who are each planning or have already created and deployed their own iPad apps for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.
But perhaps one of the nicest aspects of this launch has been the opportunity to work with the great folks at salesforce.com. We have lots of clients in common and solutions that have always been highly symbiotic, and so this area is just one more place where we find common opportunity to help each other succeed. Our thanks to Clarence So, their Executive Vice President of Mobile Strategy, for his kind comments about our release: “It is exciting to see the rapid innovation that partners such as FirstRain are delivering on our trusted mobile platform, FirstRain for Touch will provide customers with the right intelligence to help them connect with their customers in entirely new ways and accelerate business success.”
If you’re interested in more information about FirstRain for Touch, let us know!
