Next week, FirstRain COO YY Lee is traveling east to Boston for the 2012 Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Enterprise 2.0 is an annual conference & expo for social enterprise tools and technologies. The conference focuses on the importance of embracing new enterprise technologies, as they are developed, in order to maintain competitive advantage within your industry. It’s a subject of great interest of FirstRain and our customers, and we’re really happy to be participating in this great conference this year.
The conference takes place from June 18th- June 21st, 2012, at the Hynes Convention Center. YY is a special guest this year, participating as a panelist on the “Innovation versus Integration” panel, which takes place on June 19th at 2:30pm in room 311. The panel, led by Oliver Marks, will discuss how new technologies are influencing the current role of HR and how they are directly changing companies’ innovation.
Make sure to follow us on Twitter @firstrain for continuous updates on Enterprise 2.0.
I had hoped that my second blog post for FirstRain wouldn’t, once again, be about Google (you’d think that we’d all be sick of hearing about Google 24×7? And we may be, but sick in that ‘I-still-must-tune-in-and-see-what-is-happening-kind of way’ …). Still, I found myself captivated by their announcement this summer that they would phase out a major program called Google Labs by the end of September. And as we’re now approaching that shutdown date, it’s gotten me thinking again about this interesting decision.
For the most part, I’ve always been quite impressed by Google. I am a long term Gmail user (Gmail has its own Labs, as does Google Maps) and I am still a firm advocate that Google+ will eventually be big (especially after seeing all the complaints of Facebook’s new design on my Facebook newsfeed the past two weeks). Google has launched so many winning products over the years that I was shocked to hear that such a successful and interesting part of Google was to be phased out.
For those unfamiliar with Google Labs, it was a playground for users who are interested in trying Google prototypes and providing feedback directly to Google Engineers. It allowed the public to freely experiment with pre-released Android apps, Google Maps experiments, Google Search betas and much more. Although, not all of these prototypes prove to be effective, it is still a nice way to get the public involved in ‘designing’ and evaluating some of Google’s most popular ideas.
So exactly why has Google decided to pull the plug on this program, when it seemed so many people (albeit, adventurous tech people) were benefiting from it? According to Bill Coughran, Google’s Senior VP for Research and Systems Infrastructure, Google is now beginning to prioritize their product efforts more strictly. And although some of their biggest products had started in Google Labs, they’re now focusing much more of their efforts into dominating the products already in progress, such as Google+. Google has decided that ultimately there are too many ‘small’ projects and they want to channel the company’s focus on the larger and, *cough*, more lucrative options. By simplifying and focusing Google’s product line, Coughran said, more “extraordinary opportunities are ahead”.
The Google Labs decision is more than just phasing out a neat program, however. The last few years were spent testing potential golden projects. And they did this successfully. Google beat out competitors like AOL and Yahoo in numerous departments such as search, smartphones and Email (does anyone use AOL for email anymore?). And Google Labs has significantly helped develop some of these platforms. But the need is no longer necessary as the trial period is officially over. What’s interesting is what a signpost this is for where Google is in their lifecycle as a company. Instead of the fun, pioneering tech startup playing in many sandboxes, looking for ideas and doing no evil, they’ve now evolved into a focused and mature company that—for the most part—knows its market, where the money is, and is coalescing around key products like Search, Gmail and Google+.
Now that the deadline is upon us, I was curious to check out the status of Google Labs, especially since I haven’t come across much recent news about the Google Labs termination. If you go to GoogeLabs.com, they inform users directly (no sugarcoating) that the Google Lab’s program is being phased out. Also, it is obvious that many of the experiments have been visibly shut down.
Not all of Google Labs’ programs will completely disappear. Google claims that they will be integrating some of their better prototypes into many of their already existing experiments but the actual “Labs” name will be retired. The real question for Google now, is how they can retain the spirit of Google labs—that open sense of valued community feedback in a beat environment, now that their flagship vehicle for those values has been lost.
Consider the sale as just the beginning – as a friend of mine used to say – there is no post sales – there is sales and more sales!
Look on the bright (aka solution) side of the news. – the Selling Power editors say FirstRain is an ideal option.
Turn features into benefits – yep – don’t speed and feed.
My team were prepping me for a talk I am giving at NYSSA next week, and gave me some great statistics on why it is now so important to incorporate the web into your research process. For anyone who needs to get up-to-date, relevant information on business topics, if you don’t have an application to make the web practical you’re missing significant information. In fact, based on our analysis of the web results database we run, 12% of the content is on alternative sources like blogs, trade journals, transcripts etc. but then, when you focus it on business topics and companies, clean it up, de-dupe it, age it (only look at new content) and remove irrelevant documents an astonishing 27% is from alternative sources.
That means if you don’t have an application like FirstRain, you are probably missing more than a quarter of the content that impacts your business. Wow.
I discussed FirstRain’s perspective on what we’ve seen in the financial services world. In this world the challenge in adopting a Web 2.0 platform like ours — which we’re seeing big momentum on — is working past the strong cultural bias toward established, authoritative content providers to consider Web 2.0.
Our clients typically believe that the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times and sell-side research will cover the majority of the qualitative information that they need to know every day. Our client is also typically risk averse about their research process. It’s worked for them in many cases for 20+ years and they don’t want to change. So it takes time and effort to get them to open up to the fact that there is relevant, original, useful, and unique alternative research coming out of user-generated sources like blogs.
I also talked about the level of junk on the web and how our system removes it through a series of processes, both human and automated. My fundamental belief is that the buyside demands very high quality and that is a key to our making our customers successful.
As a panel we also talked about what had surprised us selling Web2.0 services to our traditional customers and where we thought the world was going. I discussed both the level of service our customers require, and the coming era of transparency. Both mean that we need to have a very hands on support process for our customers so that their FirstRain usage is configured both to their topic needs, and that they don’t miss anything that impacts their investment strategy.
The other panelists were all interesting, but the one I found most interesting was the GM of a Thomson division called FindLaw.com. This is a service that helps consumers find lawyers, and the most challenging thing Chris Kibarian talked about was getting lawyers to go on line. Lawyers are an inherantly conservative group and often not very tech savvy so he was very amusing describing what they go through to bring up web sites for law firms. The consumer is much more online typically than the lawyer and they’ve been delighted to see the rapid adoption of services like video and social networking within their clients web sites.
