New Data on Social Business: Communities Are the #1 Initiative in 2013
At IDC we do a social business survey a couple of times a year and I now have fresh and just out of the field data to share. It’s proven very interesting and telling to trend the survey results over…
Is Social Business Dead?
Has social for business run its course and now we should just move on, because there’s “nothing to see here”? Have businesses given it a good go and, finding no value, are they abandoning their efforts?
The Internet of Things
In a world of smartphones, mifi mobile hot spots, wifi hot spots and broadband home Internet most of us live an always connected life. Smartphones are extending this connectivity around the world and into place where it would have taken…
Reviewing 2012 and Preparing for a Successful 2013
Happy New Year! After a longer than normal holiday break, I’m taking this opportunity to reflect on 2012 and provide my early thoughts regarding investment activities in 2013. During 2012 50 companies went public, the most of any year since 2007, but only 8 venture-backed companies during 4Q12, the lowest number in any quarter since [...]
Breaking "Things" into Smaller Pieces
One of the byproducts of the Internet is a phenomenon that is impacting all sorts of things, the trend of breaking things into smaller and smaller pieces, dramatically changing the subsequent consumption models. The ability to connect everything using the Internet opened up new business / economic models, new ways of working, new ways to [...]
Trident Capital Update and Areas of Investment Interest
It has been awhile since I provided an update on our firm, the overall venture capital investment environment and some of the areas where we will be looking to invest during 2013. We recently met with our SaaS and Internet advisory boards so it was a good time to reiterate our firm’s investing posture, assess the performance [...]
The End of the Successful Tech Startup?
Last weekend an interesting conversation (or maybe that’s debate) started about start ups, innovation and the state of tech in general. It started with a Facebook page post by Yammer CEO David Sacks stating that "I think that Silicon Valley…
Psychology of Crowd Funding: Kickstarter
Crowd funding is a growing force in starting and/or growing small businesses or creative projects. The concept is simple, put together a compelling story and get people interested enough to pledge an amount of money in return for "something". The…
Customer Centricity Requires CMOs to Drive Data and Channel Integration
In a post last March I wrote about how Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are starting to drive the corporate application agenda. I had concluded that as corporations become more customer-centric, they are looking for, or starting to use, a new generation of data-driven applications to help them extract insights about their customer behaviors so that they can improve their interactions with customers and prospects regardless of the communication channel. Technologies such as big data, mobile, social and cloud are at the core of these new applications that are being aggressively embraced by CMOs. Since I wrote that post I continued…
Responding in "Social Web" Time
When we talk about the impact of the social web, social business, social CRM, consumerization of IT…almost anything that has to do with the changing business environment, the topic that universally comes up is the change in people’s expectations. This applies to employees, who want a user experience for the enterprise that is as “good” [...]
