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DoorsTouchMe

TOUCH ME: FirstRain is bringing touch-powered Customer Intelligence to the enterprise!

Mar 2013/in , , , /by

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!

firstrain carrot

And the winner is …

Oct 2012/in /by

And the winner of the FirstRain ‘be the carrot’ iPad contest is … Talitha Baker from Invisible Children! She came in first with over 600 Facebook Likes and 75 retweets (in fact, that was her winning count as of our Friday evening deadline—but as of this morning, Talitha’s Carrot pic has more than 800 FB Likes and over 80 retweets)! Great job Talitha on ‘Being the Carrot’ and rallying your networks to help you win. It was quite a battle between the close second-place finish of George Messiha at Citrix, who had over 520 Facebook Likes!

And thanks again to EVERYONE who participated in this fun contest. And of course, if you’d like to hear more about how FirstRain gives you the “carrot” to drive Salesforce adoption by delivering customer intelligence to your company’s major account sales and marketing teams–and makes your entire team as knowledgeable about your most important customers as your top performers already are, drop me a line!

FirstTweets

Announcing a Breakthrough in B2B Twitter: FirstTweets™!

Apr 2012/in , , /by

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.

FirstTweets in Chatter FirstTweets from FirstRain
FirstRain Customer Intelligence System

Announcing FirstRain’s New Enterprise Customer Intelligence System

Feb 2012/in /by

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.

 

baby-ipad

Black and White and Dead all over

Oct 2011/in /by

It’s always interesting, as we begin to approach the end of another year, to think about how far technology has taken us once again. With the holidays right around the corner, I’m confident that more people than ever will be hoping for an iPad2 in their stockings. Since the new release of the iPad2 in March of 2011, Apple’s iPad sales have rocketed over the sales of any other tablet device. As a result (or perhaps vice-versa), people are shifting their behaviors when it comes to reading and consuming information. Maybe people are feeling compelled to help the environment and go green (saving trees is a great thing!). Perhaps more people are taking advantage of awesome applications like our very ownFirstRain, which helps deliver news in a faster, more efficient way than ever before (in fact have you tried our FirstRain iPad app?).  Or maybe people just feel compelled to keep up with the pace of modern technology—the iPad is a perfect, modern example of how amazing technology can be.

In the morning, I ride San Francisco’s Caltrain from the city down the Peninsula to our FirstRain office in San Mateo.  I can’t remember the last time I saw a rider reading the actual newspaper—and I take the Caltrain every day.  The typical Caltrain passenger behavior (and we’re talking about mostly Silicon Valley employees) is coffee in one hand and iPad in the other.  For the few not lucky enough to have a new iPad, you have people like me who scan news on their iPhone (although thankfully I am able to access news using the FirstRain iPhone app!) Either way, I’d say 8 out of 10 Caltrain riders definitely use technology to access the news they may have been receiving years ago from printed versions. I feel badly for the guy who stands at the end of the station trying to sell newspapers! This shift in behavior is not limited to just business professionals. Last week Mashable.com published a video portraying a 1-year old baby using an iPad. When handed a magazine, this adorable baby girl began to press the non-existent buttons, not turn the pages. She resorted to her only knowledge of how to “read,” that is: how to read using technology. Is this a sign of what’s to come for the next generation?  Will turning the physical pages in books, and magazines become ancient history? Was there a generation that mourned the physical satisfaction of pressing cuneiform into clay tablets, or decried the loss of reading an elegant scroll?

Last week, here at the FirstRain office, we had our own conversation about the lack of reading print media in today’s society.  Ryan Warren, our VP of Marketing, noticed and commented on the fact that I printed out a colleague’s blog to read over, instead of just editing and reading it on my laptop. I tend to focus better on what I’m reading when I print out a physical version (Facebook & Twitter are not floating around in the background this way). Proof that printing out someone’s paper to edit is becoming less common, he asked if this was something I did normally. What if I’ve been the only person out there who still prints out things to read?

So I decided to investigate. I sent out an email survey to a network of friends, all millennials, all in my age bracket, mostly young business professionals and a few graduate students, asking them all if they preferred reading text online rather than printing out and reading a hard copy.  I wasn’t surprised by most of the responses. 90% of those who answered preferred to read online.  Some preferred to read online only when the length of the reading material was limited to four pages or less. Others preferred to read online if it was reading for pleasure rather than reading for business or school. And sure enough, some opted to read online because it was “greener.” One friend said it was easier to “stay organized while having everything in one place” on their laptop.  I was quite impressed with the reasoning behind each of their answers. Am I the only person still printing!? Don’t get me wrong, I read articles online every day and I don’t buy physical paper newspapers. I use our FirstRain apps and use the Web to access the news. Yet, sometimes, I still chose to print things out in order to help me focus… even though I suppose this makes me old fashioned. Maybe when I finally purchase an iPad, I’ll give up my old habits. I’m really curious to see what lies ahead for future generations and how they’ll consume the media of tomorrow.  Will the baby with the iPad write this same blog post, wondering how many people still prefer touch interfaces instead of just having it plugged directly into their brain?

ipad1

Two of my loves just merged: FirstRain and the iPad

Oct 2011/in /by

We announced the FirstRain iPad app yesterday. Our new iPad app marries the elegance of the iPad with the precision of FirstRain’s business Web. It’s visual business monitoring – slick, fast, cool, beautiful, powerful – all the adjectives we can’t use in a press release but want to say. I truly love it and it’s now how I stay on top of my customers, our industry and everything else business wise that I need to know in a few minutes a day.

If you are in sales, marketing or purchasing, or you are a partner in a law firm, or a librarian, or a MI or CI professional, you are going to want a FirstRain subscription and this app. You are missing developments in your market, your customers, your vendors TODAY that you can now see real-time with the gentle swipe of a finger.


Punch Bowl Drink

Be Wary of the Kool-Aid

Aug 2011/in /by

Like many folks I have a Facebook account.  I check Facebook on the iPad daily – it is great to keep up to date with the whereabouts of my friends, follow various interests, and to occasionally share notable events with my social circle as well. And these are all common ways in which social media adds value to many of our lives as individuals.  But at the FirstRain lunch table the other day we also did some grousing about some of the shared pet peeves in our social media lives as well: the over-posters (5-10 posts an hour, do these people do anything else?), the way-too-personal posters (did I need to know about the re-appearance of your lunch?), the aggressive-posters (would you make that sarcastic comment at a podium in front of 300 of your friends, family and associates? Well you just did), and the simple fact that keeping connected via Social Media can eat significantly into your day, pushing out time spent watching news, or other methods for keeping up to date.

But after thinking about how time consuming these platforms can be, I also started to wonder if something counter-logical is going on.  Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter make it easy to connect with friends and co-workers. It also makes it really easy to reach out and make friends with like-minded people across the country and the globe.  At face value, they seem to be great tools to associate with people interested in the same things you are. My sister, for instance knits socks (very fancy socks!) and she uses the Web to be part of a community of sock knitters, to share patterns, post pictures and discuss types of yarn, which significantly enhances her enjoyment.

Thinking more broadly, however, even the best of intentions can result in undesirable outcomes. The Web—and Social Media in particular— can make it easy to cocoon oneself in a warm environment of like-minded people. If I do not like what a person is saying I can easily tune-them out. The posts I see on my Facebook newsfeed are filtered based on who I have looked at or commented on in the past.   Over time it is all too easy to unconsciously create an environment of like-minded people, who have similar views, and reinforce each other’s behavior. In a circle of fancy sock knitters, this is great, but when mapping this to politics, demographics or any political agenda item, such as gay marriage, the results are less wholesome. On the political front, if Democrats only hang out with other Democrats, and Republicans only hang out with other Republicans, each reading the news from their respective biased sources, each reinforcing their own perspective on events, the result is polarization.

 

In the past, before the time of the Web and social media platforms, we had to co-exist with the people living around us, or working with us. News outlets were fewer and had to be broad-based.  Now we can choose from a multitude of channels, and create our own custom filters. We now have the luxury to only hear what we want to hear. Sharing this with my co-worker, Ash, it turns out that we’re not the only people questioning the impacts of the web. Eli Pariser, in his book The Filter Bubble, articulates this problem (he also did a great Ted talk on this subject:  http://on.ted.com/9BwR).  Rather than having to live in the physical community with people around us, we unconsciously end up “opting-out” of reality and “opting-in” to a narrow view of the world defined by our friends and filters.

Many years ago a group of like-minded people came together in Jonestown. They isolated themselves from a diversity of views, associated solely with each other, self-reinforced each other views and allowed their worldview to become dominated by a loud and extreme fringe.  Eventually, when their leader told them to drink the cyanide-laden Kool-Aid, 918 people died. Clearly, this is an extreme example, but it really is illustrative of how philosophical isolation and the filtering out other views and interactions can lead to extremely unfortunate choices.

What does this mean in the context of the business world? Obviously, mass suicide is a little extreme. But, the cautionary message still applies. Are people obtaining the necessary information they need to make the right business decisions?  It’s very possible that valuable information is not being received due to filtering. The beauty of social media is that it allows access to business intelligence that was not accessible years ago. In order to make the best business choices, professionals must look beyond the people and news they WANT to follow, and direct their focus to the channels they NEED to follow.

Are we entering an era of extreme polarization?  Working in the Bay Area, I hope not. The wide diverse backgrounds, ideology and experience of the people in this region are something I value greatly.   To travel, and experience how different people live is a great privilege.  It’s important that we as Web users take the initiative to expand our bubble beyond our closest circles. Use social media to track areas you wouldn’t have initially thought you’d be interested in. Follow the newscasters and politicians you disagree with, and maybe even hate. Seek out opinions from smart people different than yourself. I see richness in diversity and believe it creates stronger solutions for everyone over the long term.

Tablet and Finance and Data

Financial Firms Fastest Adopters of iPad

Jan 2011/in /by

Interesting report from Good Technology was written up by Securities Technology Monitor today on the different rates of adoption of the iPad between different segments – and not surprisingly the financial services industry is way ahead.

Typically we have seen financial services be more conservative among our customers – especially when it comes to security and technology on the desktop (IE6 anyone? Ugh) but when it comes to facing the client the financial services industry has always been nimble at creating the most attractive image. Having your financial advisor, or your sales person, show up with an iPad has sex appeal and raises the client’s confidence that the advisor is on the leading edge. And the visual appeal of the iPad’s crisp, clear screen would make almost any performance charts just look better.

Good’s fourth quarter report shows that in the battle between iOS and Android tablets the iPad is taking share – activations climbed from 60% to 68%. Blackberry is not included in the study since Good’s value to their customer is adding Blackberry-like security to non-Blackberry devices. It will be interesting to see what changes, if anything, once RIMM has a competitive tablet.

water ripple

Can the Telcos calling business survive the iPhone now?

Feb 2010/in /by

A warning tremor rippled through the telco business last week – did you notice it? Apple announced that it will now allow iPhone users to use Internet calling services over cellular networks. Up until now you could use VoIP but only through Wi-Fi, i.e. not in most of the places you’d like make a phone call.

Last week “Apple … confirmed the change and said it applies to applications for the iPhone and the new iPad tablet device unveiled this week, some of which will come with 3G capabilities”.

You may remember that not long ago Apple blocked Google Voice which then triggered an FCC inquiry. Now “FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on Thursday praised Apple’s latest decision”.

This is just the beginning of a disruption that will eat away at the core calling businesses of AT&T and it’s competitors. iPhone 3G apps from VoIP providers like fring, iCall and a soon to be upgraded Skype will start to eat away at call time and, while there are some technology challenges that are still annoying today, it’s only a matter of time.

Like many other technology trends it’s starting small but the disruption will be long term and profound. If your customers are in this space, or you invest in this space, there is a How To on our support blog you can use to get FirstRain to watch this space for you.

book store

Do the Kindle and the iPad ring the final deathknell for the traditional bookstore?

Jan 2010/in /by

There is a fundamental change already underway in the world of books and it just accelerated yesterday. I don’t know whether to be happy to sad.

I have a Kindle. I love it, but I know I am a bit of a geek. To me, evidence that the world of books was shifting forever came when my mother (who is over 70 but how much over is private!) stated that she wanted a Kindle. And then yesterday Steve Jobs announced the iPad which has my kids friends all a’twitter (actually a’texting would be more accurate since Twitter is for old people) about ebooks now.

A couple of days ago I starting researching Amazon in FirstRain and, thinking about this phenomenon, went hunting for interesting content. As with most of our users, I tend to read certain sources and types of content more than others because of I believe they have better insight and are more reliable. FirstRain helps me sort through the noise easily by choosing the content type or sources I want to read. By selecting blogs only, I noticed a story from November titled Amazon (AMZN): “The best is still ahead”

“Amazon announced that its Kindle e-book reader is now its most popular selling item, both in units and in dollars. That led to a big acceleration in revenue growth (28%, the fastest in five quarters), while earnings leaped 67%.”

Expectations are that the holiday season was extremely successful for Amazon as online retailers, by most accounts, took share from brick-and-mortar retailers. The economic disruptions of the past two years have actually meant an acceleration in consumers’ adoption and use of the Internet as a retail channel.

Amazon’s earnings call is today so I’ll be looking for the transcript on FirstRain tonight (I can’t take the time to listen but I will speed read it) since this change to ebooks is such a ground shift in my way of consuming books – which I do voraciously.

But Amazon has bigger plans than my reading addiction. “Amazon is no longer content to be the world’s biggest e-tailer. Its new goal is to become the world’s leading retailer. Period.”

Aside from the other markets that Amazon has aspirations to dominate, I believe the company will own the market for books, both hard copy and e-books, in the next few years. Sadly the independent bookstore will all but disappear – although maybe there is room for one large single chain for the older readers who like to walk the isles, touch and smell (Yes, one of our engineers at FirstRain actually used the word smell) the books.

From looking into this in our system, it looks like the winner here will be Barnes & Noble (BKS), but I don’t believe the company will grow organically. Over the next few years, Barnes & Noble can prosper by becoming the brick and mortar bookstore choice and Amazon and Apple will garner the rest of the market share for books with both online hard copy sales and e-book sales.

Borders is definitely in decline. It will close an estimated 240 stores during the three months ending January 31, 2010 for a total of roughly 300 Waldenbooks stores over the past 13 months, or close to 70% of all Waldenbooks outlets! Retail analysts at Davidowitz & Associates give Borders Group a 50-50 chance of survival. (Added note – right after I posted this I saw the CEO has announced he is leaving and they are cutting 10% of their corporate staff).

From the Barnes & Noble website, as of October 2009, the company operates 775 stores. However, keep in mind the number of stores Barnes & Noble had at the end of 2004 was 820 so they are also down a bit. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that analysts expect an avalanche of bookstore closings this year. A new report by Grant Thornton report says 10,000 retail stores will have closed by the end of 2009. Of that number, 400 will be bookstores, which is a 500% increase in bookstore closings over 2008.

Within large department stores like WalMart and Target, the small numbers of book titles are probably safe and books will continue to be sold in niche markets like the point-of-sale newsstands in the airport where Hudson Booksellers seems to have most of the market – unless everyone who flys gets an iPad the way everyone who flys today has a cell phone .

Sadly used bookstores will probably disappear as well as no industry undermined by its greatest partisans survives for very long. Remember when CD sales plunged after music could be downloaded? Today, we can find any used book in the World for pennies on the dollar on Amazon and on other sites. “With the Internet, nothing is ever lost. That’s the good news, and that’s the bad news” says author Wendy Lesser in a New York Times piece by David Streitfeld (12/28/08).” But would this mean when I buy a first edition as a gift (as I did for a dear friend’s 50th birthday last year) I would not be able to hold it first? Hmmm… not sure about that.

What is certain is that the earthquake for books has hit, the after shocks and still coming – the iPad being the latest – and ten years from now I will probably only be buying the really hard to find history books I read in hard copy. Everything else will be coming from the cloud… another area Amazon wants to dominate but for another post.

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