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…

We have been so busy working on our TEAM Focus Family of products that we have neglected to start communicating about our most recent project…

TS MOO

We call this (for lack of a better definition) Top Secret Maybe One Organisation. OR TSMOO

We are kidding of course.

Truth is we have flown the entire Pandora Squared Team into Manila for The Leviticus Project.

A big part of The Leviticus Project is education, and of course launching brands around the user.

We just finished our Kickoff discussion with our client partner on the shift in the Web, and technologies behind this, most of this mornings discussion was a distilled version of our training program. We perfected this in April when we did our training at the Philippine Defense College, but no matter- each and every time we present and educate I feel we could have done so much better.

Here are the Points we suggest as the most important when it comes to understanding this shift.

Desire Lines

The Search

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Abandoning the news

Small Worlds phenomenon(network)

User Centric Business Models,

Agile and Extreme Programming as part of your markeitng!

(Youtube link of this mornings meeting will be inserted here)

Customers are getting more and more fickle. Perhaps more like smarter. Like it or not, companies still need to be more innovative. P&G innovation practices may hold some promise.

In March 2006, the Harvard Business Review showcased a new innovation paradigm in an article titled “Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble’s New Model for Innovation.” Its editor summed it up like so:

Procter & Gamble has operated one of the greatest research and development operations in corporate history. But as the company grew to a $70 billion enterprise, the global innovation model it devised in the 1980s was not up to the task. CEO A. G. Lafley decided to broaden the horizon by looking at external sources for innovation. P&G’s new strategy, connect and develop, uses technology and networks to seek out new ideas for future products. “Connect and develop will become the dominant innovation model in the twenty-first century,” according to the authors, both P&G executives. “For most companies, the alternative invent-it-ourselves model is a sure path to diminishing returns.”

Similar articles are here.

Now Luiz Moutinho argues: “Business products and services are more bought than sold! The internet has given prospects access to almost “perfect” information. They can control the buying cycle on their terms . . .”

Implication: Knowing how consumers think, is just a keyword/tagword search away. Consider that the ability to pull in consumers’ thoughts and insights is a key ingredient to the innovation process.

Then you may wonder: Just what kind and degree of search capability do suppliers/marketers need? We could go beyond google.

I can remember the first time I read the book, As a Man Thinketh.

It was a pretty cold day I was in Australia wondering what to do with my life. I drove to Ben Buckler (which is the phenomenal overlook of Bondi Beach), and being that the sea’s were incredibly choppy, and a winter storm pushed in from the South I was the only one in the world on this cliff face overlooking the black seas.

Sitting midst this approaching storm I sat alone in a Black VW Golf and just like the nerd I am I read this on a Mac Powerbook via PDF, You can download for free at www.asamanthinketh.com

As a Man Thinketh So is He.

The aphorism, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” not only embraces the whole of a man’s being, but is so comprehensive as to reach out to every condition and circumstance of his life. A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

Anyway suffice to say, I ended up crying you know the real kind with snot out the nose and everything. Here I saw an answer, philosophically taken to action that I could understand.

Only by much searching and mining are gold and diamonds obtained, and man can find every truth connected with his being, if he will dig deep into the mine of his soul. That he is the maker of his character, the molder of his life, and the builder of his destiny, he may unerringly prove, if he will watch, control, and alter his thoughts, tracing their effects upon himself, upon others and upon his life and circumstances, linking cause and effect by patient practice and investigation. And utilizing his every experience, even the most trivial, everyday occurrence, as a means of obtaining that knowledge of himself which is understanding, wisdom, power.

So here I realised in pretty plain language that my thoughts dictated everything in my life. I was the perfect result of my thougths and my energy. I started another leg of my journey that afternoon when after my revelation I decided to pursue my ambitions in developing innovative technology. That was 4 years ago.

Ok. How does this relate?

As a Company Thinketh So is it.

One of the things that we as a company are seeing manifested before our eyes is the result of our thoughts years ago, our repeated actions based upon those thoughts and the discipline to continue despite the toughest tests. As Jim Collins writes in the Startup Bible Good To Great,

• First you get the right people on the bus.
• Then the wrong people off the bus.
• Then the Right People in the Right Seat.
• Disciplined Thought
• Disciplined Action
• Hedgehog Concept (singleness of vision and purpose)
• Technology as an enabler (not business purpose)
• Greatness

It all starts with thought.

If you enter a phone call conversation speaking to a new prospect or lead and your not thinking about the client and what they need, you end up speaking versus listening, resulting into the typical sales chest beating.

If I enter a weekly meeting and not controlling thoughts and I let that get to me, I may bring an entire section of the team down into my state.

• Disciplined Thought

However, working together- if we realise our thoughts are the key, that if your thinking about value, compelling reasons for clients business needs just come forth.

By helping (sometimes teeth pulling) your development team into thinking they are a not development but a sales team delivering the solution to the clients needs, you see powerful focused client specific results. We have found that what was taking us 30 days can be done overnight when we pull together and through the dawn.

• Disciplined Action

It isn’t fun, people may yell and scream and everyone from the AJAX RoR ninja’s to part time computer tech realises that a Startup isn’t hard but it is work. You have to answer client emails, you have to return phone calls, you have to help with sales information…

It is rewarding for us now to see that our previously held concepts about almost everything were false! Our thoughts are what held us back these years…

Now:

Everyone is a salesman, everyone must not ever think, That isn’t what I am good at, or That isn’t my job, or This is impossible.

But its always thought that gets us over the next sales call, over the next month with no salary over the 27 hour work day hacking out code to make sure its bug free for the sales presentation in the morning.

As your Company Thinks so is it.

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.”

On the radar:

” The Cambrian House crowdsourcing website was launched Tuesday, with a mission of gathering like-minded individuals from all over the world to contribute ideas, code, graphics and other skills in an effort to commercialize software.”

“The community had signed up over 1500 members before the site was launched through their network of developers, and they are estimating over 10,000 new member sign ups and 1000 idea submissions after their first week.”

“Using the internet to harness the wisdom and participation of crowds, Cambrian House seizes creative software ideas from the ether and builds them into real software. With the use of online market testing, Cambrian House then objectively determines if an idea should be built or be terminated.”

” If you require additional information or have any questions or concerns please contact:

Cambrian House

Michael J. Sikorsky, CEO

Tel: 403-263-2042”

There were some great things coming out of the recent RailsConf, its nice to see others have the same thoughts about desire lines. This quote is from Martin Fowler’s keynote:

Don’t spend a lot of time aiming. Just fire… In this age of Web 2.0™… there is this culture of just give the product to the customer. Then see how they use it. Ship the product, then gather the requirements. The opposite of the traditional process. Fire, aim, fire, aim. As long as the bullets are cheap.”