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

Crappy design could also be one reason why some “popular” sites get a lot of hits. Xeni Jardin demonstrates how this has happened to Myspace.

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…

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.

A plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 that allows you to program Ruby on Rails, called Sapphire in Steel, not sure what the reference to steel is all about ?

A blub from the FAQ

Steel is a free Ruby language add-in for Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005. It provides an editing environment for Ruby programs complete with syntax colouring and the ability to run console applications with one keystroke.

Go Forth if your that way inclinded….

I’ve been following Microformats with interest for a while now as a great way of standardising the various bits of data that are used through our engine. With the annoucement the other day that Yahoo is implementing it across Yahoo Local, I thought they shouldn’t get all the fun.

This morning I sat down and implemented hCard for the core engine. This will enable basic card details for the user profiles across all the sites. It was much easier than I was expecting, at least for the basic parts of the spec. Down the track we will added support for the custom profile data and then start looking at some of the other formats. For the moment, fire up Tails and get ready to browse around some profiles.

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.”