Pandora Squared - Web and Business Architects, Consultants, Social Media Marketing, Software and Blogging hope not hype

Now being used by four of our clients and live for more than thirty days. Built upon the Genesis Engine Operating system. Play with it today:

teamfocus

The Consumer Web is A Social Web

Forums

• (Gaia-Online has 709m posts contributed by 4.2m users)

Blogs

• (8% of all Internet Users have one; ~200m blogs exist)

Wikis

• (Wikipedia has 63 new articles per hour, and maintains over 1m total)

FOAF Networks

• (MySpace.com has 55m users; receives more traffic than Google.com)

The Enterprise is A Social Enterprise

• From expanding social networks to building group memory, social software creates new possibilities for workflow

We Apply the best of the Consumer Web for the Enterprise (SME)

On demand Enterprise Software for the SME Market Safe, Secure, Powerful and works with existing systems and IT Policies, and requires No Installation.

Enterprise Software: Catching up to the Consumer Web

The enterprise software market, catch up to the consumer Web, where people are becoming used to melding data from their desktop with services online.

Social Enterprise Software is Disruptive Technology

“Blogs and wikis are starting to move into businesses as a simpler and lightweight way to do collaboration,” said Anne Thomas Manes, an analyst at the Burton Group “With all new and interesting applications in the consumer space, I’m sure someone is going to figure out how to take those concepts and use them in business,” she added.

Hosted Social Enterprise Software Successful for SME Market

Hosted business applications are conducive to a “try before you buy” approach, particularly for midsize and small companies. Rather than spend $100,000 for on-premise software, a business customer can quickly sign up for a hosted application, like one from Salesforce.com, and pay on a monthly basis.

Focus Family of Products MORE THAN JUST A WIKI

Play with it yourself: http://teamfocus.pandorasquared.com/

We had to move away from a static, dead intranet,” says

Myrto Lazopoulou. “The wiki has allowed us to improve collaboration, communication and publication. We can cross time zones, improve the way teams works, reduce email and increase transparency.”

Enterprise Software Landscape

• Business Intelligence: ERP and Supply Chain Management

• CRM: Customer Relationship Management Look at what SalesForce.com did to Seibel.

• Social Software: What is your invisible corporate knowledge? Where is it stored?

• Social Networks: “If HP knew half of what HP knows, we would be twice as profitable.”

The Enterprise Software Market Shifting to Disruptive Technologies

“Everybody is calling the enterprise software market dead. But it’s really not dead. There are just new models at work.”—Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot

Gartner Group: Enterprise must Adopt Best of Consumer Web

Companies need to work out how to incorporate consumer technologies in a secure manner to provide business value for the enterprise. –Fenn Gartner Group

The Enterprise Software Market Shifting to Disruptive Technologies

“Our customers now include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley, and intelligence agencies,” says David Gilmour, CEO of Tacit Knowledge Systems.

“And they all have come to believe this technology that watches and compiles — for the benefit of the individual — is going to become a permanent backdrop and the dominant paradigm for enterprise software.”

Focus Family of Products: enabling the Social Enterprise

Enable any community to…

We were forwarded this link by Jay this afternoon: The Adventures of scaling, its close to the work that Hunter and Luis have been so hard a work to deliver…getting our engine tested on the scalability meaning what load will millions of users deliver and it raises a lot of architecture problems. Luis and Hunter, (If they ever take the time to Blog) could write a book and series on the backend scaling applications required for development in Ruby on Rails. Its important to note that by building an operating system for social networks via the Genesis Engine and The Leviticus Project we aim to enable any brand or community.

Become Part of The Trust Economy

The World is moving into something I often call “The Trust Economy” where trusted networks are becoming through technology enablement more important and active in peoples lives, directly affecting how they buy.

This is important and to now as I’ve been playing with LastFM a bit today as we have a pretty interesting Mash with the Genesis Engine the quality of the engine with its various mashes and extensions is timely especially with LastFM. Music is after all social currency.

We have an engine for peer recommendation we can use for any topic, Filmcrowd is taking off like a rocket.

So very much the point we have been making: Companies embrace Communities

A public relations firm Text 100 just opened an office in Second Life and offers to help companies to tap into the creative genius of the virtual communities.

But when you think about it, a lot of us have been doing the “New Media/ Community/ web two point oh!” work for years.

Our Mate in the UK Gary Reid has been advising and doing just this for nearly ten years this is not really anything new, its more social science than it is technology…we are simply enabling natural human behaviour

I about jumped out of my seat this morning when I read the article in Australian IT, that was oh so generously linked by Frank Arr Microsoft’s Evangalist and former CTO of NineMSN.

The Australian IT article does so many generic things like research Accenture, Gartner and IBM. They didn’t of course delve too deep into the IBM Blogging world or they would see that IBM itself is a leader in the world in: Blogging, Social Networking, and so called Web 2.0 initiatives.

The point is STOP IT. STOP the WEB 2.0 banter as if it is something new and some wonderful term that encompassess everything.

IT IS NOT ABOUT WEB 2.0 or some other naming cool thing of the day.

We have been saying it for years in Australia, we flew the team in and said it this morning in Manila, and we have been saying it in 5 major markets now for over 3 years:

It is about business and using technology as the enabler.

From the Article:

Accenture Australia technology consulting senior director Darren Russ says consumer sites that adhere to Web 2.0 principles are starting to make their corporate counterparts look tired in the eyes of new entrants to Australia’s workforce. bq. However, he says, he’s yet to find any major Australian enterprises or organisations prepared to commit to adopting Web 2.0 on a large scale. “Not at the moment,” he says. “Enterprises are just dipping their toes in the water, but we’re not aware of any organisation in Australia that’s moving to proper Web 2.0 interfaces.”

Gartner senior analyst Dion Wiggins says the Web 2.0 phenomenon is part of wider trend that has made the consumer market the “testing ground” for internet services, which later supply blueprints for enterprise applications. “I’d say that in a year’s time there’ll be a large number of enterprise products using Web 2.0, but today there are very few,” he says. We have Web 2.0 Enterprise Applications Today

Pandora Squared has an entire family of products that we have released for the Enterprise.

These products are being used TODAY, in corporations throughout south east asia.

Expect Pandora Squared’s announcement soon on these client partners and as well as our exciting investment news…

This was very interesting to discover, certainly makes sense once you look at the very basic code. Being able to move the behaviour into a style sheet and then simply changing the style sheet as required or for the target platform.

Quote from Ben Nolan ... After all the work of WASP and others to promote clean markup, valid pages and graceful degradataion via css – it sucks that we’re going back to tag soup days by throwing javascript tags into our html.

The better way to do javascript is to do it unobtrusively. And it’s definitely the way to go. The only problem is that it’s a bit of a pain in the ass.

That’s why I came up with Behaviour – my solution to unobtrusive javascript behaviours.

Ben waxes poetical on everything relevant to a user centric business model. Through this Ben Barren reinforces our concept of a user ecosystem meme that we keep beating the crap out of clients with. (pun inteneded) http://benbarren.blogspot.com/2006/07/marketing-budget-crap.html

Rupert Murdoch: The speed at which it has grown. It has had no marketing. Not a penny has been spent marketing it before or after the purchase, and it just grows faster and faster every week. Now we’re taking it out to other countries. BB : The test of new products now is how much marketing they need. The more; The worse. “The future of local stations is very good provided they remain true to their roots, be very local, have their own local Web sites and do all that properly. And if they are aligned to a leading television network, they are going to be in good shape.”

The Internet is old news and boring.. Deal with it

A phenomenal blog post by Mark Cuban who says everything short of STOP WEB 2.0

We havent seen anything new for the net itself for years.

Web 2.0 ? Not as exciting as going from Dos to Windows. Not by a long shot. Heck, its not as exciting as going from WordStar and all its keyboard combinations to WordStar 2000 was. Now that was progress !

This is what I really like:

flickr, MySpace, Digg, Google, Filesanywhere.com, Goowy.com, IceRocket.com, YouTube, etc, etc, all happened and have had an impact because the cost to create each of these companies have fallen to next to nothing.

We want to show established companies how they can achieve success by embracing Social Software toolsets NOT just building big huge websites…

Here are some ways you could apply our concepts to your enterprise:

1. A social software framework for client business applications built around Search
2. A powerful social software ranking system that can be deployed for your brand or company intranet
3. An 80% product, which requires integration into current business processes or marketing efforts
4. Provides information architecture for knowledge management for your enterprise

We have launched three web two point oh! applications this quarter and will have many more exciting news coming.

The point is…And we will keep doing it, is that

It is easy to build the tools, the real power is the knowledge of applying it to your enterprise and business purpose.

I don’t know how to preface this, other than to say one of the coolest things to happen to us so far on our journey is meeting Tom W. Lee and having him come aboard the Pandora Squared Team. A night with Tom is like an unfolding narrative upon the Technology industry as we know it.

Stories start off like:

So when I first met Micheal Dell he was doing his Periphials products company we had this tape drive called The Patriot, Michael Dell wanted it for Tape back up- file transfer for Unix platforms or something…

Wait, some of us interupt over him, how do you know Mike Dell?

Toms answer:

Cause he kept calling me…

It doesn’t stop there. Should you ever want a run through of the technology industry as a whole, these live-in-technicolor stories complete with head on crashes and late night doobies with some of America’s Finest and now wealthiest. Call Tom.

Oh yeah, and he has a sword collection and a dinosaur egg.

Thomas W. Lee – Chief Operations Officer, Chief Guru and Strategic Business Director

Thomas Lee Is the Chief Guru of Pandora Squared possessing nearly 40 years of Marketing and Business experience within the Technology Industry. With a battle cry of “Three Years or less!” Tom Lee has been an active participant in successfully taking four high technology companies from fledgling startups into solid growth Billion Dollar companies. Tom is unabashed in his approach to life and business and rarely delineates from the two. Freightingly brilliant Tom Lee possess a very independent streak. He is currently National Vice Chairman and President of the Makati Chapter for the three hundred and fifty thousand strong Citizens Foundation for the Prevention of Crimes and Injustices, Inc. (CFPCI)

Previous companies and positions:

Fujitsu Computer Products of the Philippines – Advisor to the Executive Staff

Fujitsu Computer Products of America – Director for Special Projects

Quantum Peripheral Products – Manager, Strategic Accounts

Conner Peripherals – Director, Strategic Accounts

Philips Peripherals / Philips Kommunications Industrie – Director, Marketing

Apple Computer – Director of Peripherals Products Marketing. Father of Apple Printer Products

Apple Computer Fifth Wave (A Think Tank) – Marketing Strategies

XEROX PARC, Hayward Extension (A Think Tank)– New Printer Development

U.S. NAVY – Manager, HF/UHF Communications, Meteorological Services, etc.

Tom’s hobbies include singing and dancing to The Doors and Sinatra, Tom Lee’s Lifestyle lines within the Pinnacle of Maslows Hierarchy of Needs. His favorite dishes include French Snails and Philippine Pork Adobo Tom Lee resides in the heart of Manila has three Daughters and one son living in the San Francisco Bay Area, California and he spends his time between the two cities.

My adventure started today with me staring at the large advertising hung in the distance met with the scent of equator heat exhaust, and sounds of Manila traffic. Another Saturday afternoon finds me deep into research and enjoyment of being a nerd.

BlackPlanet.com sent me an email today. Wow I thought I am on a lot of pretty various social and community sites…

Blackplanet.com: Design ADD

One ongoing theme with the TMP/Monster crowd is the focus on “Community” as if it was this thing that you can generate and create. The focus, of course, is to aggregate users and sell advertising. This is against the principles underlying the leading social software disciplines.

Interruption advertising is oh so 6 years ago.

Wow- you interupted the users desire line (the path between point a and b) with an inserted advertisment. What will the user do…that is right- you just killed their trust in you, they now know and feel that all they are to you is “An Eyeball”. So they will navigate to the upper left and click out of the ad. you just wasted their time versus allowing intuition

Users Just Love Explicit Information Gathering Screens

Here we see the joy of DataBase driven websites. That is right- remove the term website and all we have going on here is “Member Management” that is really all Social Software is…Managing a database of users and letting the users themselves manage their memebership and interaction with your organisation. But the OLD way of doing it means you have a lot of screens.

from wikipedia: social software

Common to most definitions is the observation that some types of software seem to facilitate “bottom-up” community development, in which membership is voluntary, reputations are earned by winning the trust of other members, and the community’s mission and governance are defined by the communities’ members themselves.[3] Communities formed by “bottom-up” processes are contrasted to the less vibrant collectivities formed by “top-down” software, in which users’ roles are determined by an external authority and circumscribed by rigidly conceived software mechanisms (such as access rights).

More Screens Must Make More Happy Users

This isn’t the end though. See this type of thinking means you can apply it to multiple cultures and multiple concepts including knowledge management and the trendy media driven sites. I spoke yesterday on the Long Tail and how it applies to social software, and this emerging trend of a connectivity.

More examples of doing it wrong…

Yet all these- dating and community and job sites are really the same rehashed CRAP of the late 90’s.

Common Guidelines for doing it right:

1. use social interface design versus defensive design
2. Don’t design like a magazine, JEEZ
3. quit making forms and REQUIRE the users to fill them out.
4. use folksonomy informational and navigational structures versus traditional information architecture
5. Use contextual advertising versus magazine type
6. Love your users, play nice, tell the truth
7. read a lot of good blogs and talk and interact with successful designers
8. get someone who really knows social sciences for reals its more important than you think
9. get a nerd who really “Gets Search”
10. quit using crappy technologies!

...And embraces Social Software

When I first read the long tail, I immediately saw the application of social software tools. The millions of markets of dozens applies to everything. It is more social sciences than it is technology. Yahoo has recently released a GAY PRIDE portal Next is: Jews for Jesus Portal, then perhaps the Scientologist Portal, and perhaps Coalition of the Willing Portal, World Cup…and why not?

Fuzzy Strategy: Myspace and News Ltd know why you need an IM client.

See Myspace lacks a desktop Chat client and they know it. That is why they are pushing to mobile to go around yahoo. In 2002 I was initially planning on releasing a search toolset / IM client called Fuzzed. Fuzzed was a job tool that could keep track of your database of intentions when you searched on everything. So if you were a java developer and looking at job ads on banking sites it would use Implicit AI to send out agents and return to you “Banking Jobs”. We never got to the AI but we did have a tool in Websphere that could search every job site in the world. Then you could apply that tool to commerce, maybe dating…

I wasn’t as seasoned then (mistakes are good) as I am now. Now I realize you have to never finish something- that is right – get it out there have people using it. Watch what they do, learn, adapt and focus on agility. Build small toolsets, release, build more, release.

Be then Do.

This is why this is the best darn time of our life. We get to announce new cool toolsets all the time.

Yes the color codes are a pun and their on purpose, but I want to dissect this and show

• Green: Podcasting- the integration of podcasts is a nifty no brainer. One step further is shared video casting…

• Blue: Feedback mechanisms, and push to the non profit. This is the ECOSYSTEM I frequently speak of.

• Pink: What else to do on Yahoo… this is the user at the center concept they surround the user not by creating the wave but riding the wave- showing the conversations already in market.

• Red: integration with your avatar… genius brilliant. This is why avatars are so powerful. It stems from Myth…we use myth…

Yahoo incorporates some really interesting bits to showcase how using Portal technology tied into a single sign on you can take simple member management into social software. All of this is done with modules (I am not sure if they are using say JSR 168 portlets or not) But there is a big huge difference in PORTAL technology and engines such as Drupal or…

Genesis Engine.

Drupal is PHP and enough is written about it. So I will focus on Genesis Engine our Ajax RoR toolset, Tribe tried to do private label tribes, but like any Yahoo it requires you to share with their brand, versus the client owning their own…ok some people don’t mind this- and Yahoo is posed with 360 to do some real Myspace killing.

Many toolsets exist but The Genesis Engine in mobile ready, already (many competitors are soon rising- hence our focus on mobile, social sciences and search too. You must have a complete solution or you’re a commodity.

Prometheus Fire team leader Hunter works with genesis engine, mobile, search and more.

So we can offer you or your organization that toolset today= we are looking into a few strong deals here in South East Asia.