At the recent telcon9 conference in Auckland, Michael Cranna, managing director of Epitiro Technologies had some interesting things to say about our broadband. Epitiro is a global provider of broadband benchmarking data and hence is apparently as neutral as they come. While Cranna admitted that we’re a work in progress, his comments give some cause for optimism. Key points;
Our focus should shift from penetration to speed (a contention that I don’t 100% agree with)
Our current average BB speed is 3Mbps which is comparable to the UK (but behind Australia)
Our results are close to the international benchmark
Our planned, and announced future investment put us “up there” with the rest of the world
There were criticisms, but Cranna said our new regulatory framework puts us in a good position going forward - at last some optimism!
I’m currently in the throes of doing some work around creating a business community (more to come on that one) and in my research I came across The Ruby Connection, the network set up by Westpac Bank in order to create a forum for dialogue amongst and between women in business. The idea of TRC, in the words of Westpac’s Head of Women’s Markets (and as an aside I’d be very surprised if they had a head of Men’s Markets!) is to;
inform, educate and provide online networking opportunities for today’s busy women in business
Which is a pretty commendable aim to be honest but the work I’ve been doing around social media has led me to a few conclusions about their method.
Make the dialogue constant
In her “blog”, the Head of Women’s Markets announced TRC on 12 May as her first post. The post was well thought out (actually felt like it was written by a PR staffer somewhere) but that was the last we heard of her. This is a major failing. There is no feeling that the offering is dynamic, rather it is a static (and ever more dated) location which gives a perception that the information contained within is also similarly out of date.
Have an ambassador
There is no feel that visitors to the site are really connecting with anyone. Had the Head of Women’s markets kept up the dialogue, and actually taken an active part in the Forums, there would be a feel that we were actually entering a community that someone was facilitating. While ambassador’s become less important once a community has gained sufficient momentum, they are critical in the early stages.
Neutrality is everything
Let’s be clear here - TRC is sold as a place where women can come to talk about being in business, it’s not sold as where women can come and be assailed by Westpac branding. Clearly it’s a difficult concept for marketing folks to understand but in order for a social network to have any semblance of transparency and neutrality it needs to meet certain tests;
The site must be branded neutrally (sure a “sponsored by” logo is fine but that’s about it)
The site must have minimal (or no) sponsor editorial control. I’d suggest creating a touchstone document at inception which lists the expectations of the sponsoring organisation - thereafter the ambassador should have editorial control
Dynamic, dynamic, dynamic
While there is some solid content TRC. It seems pretty static - there is no thought given to creating the dynamism of the forums for example within the content delivery of the “how to” sections. Again it’s a major limiter and does nothing to make the offering feel active and busy.
Overall
TRC did pretty well - there offering looks good and looks fun. The areas they’ve failed however are pretty important.
I tend to come back to a couple examples of social networks in various sectors that follow all the rules for effective community creation.
Vorb, New Zealand’s favourite sporting community site has a massive following, total neutrality and a passionate ambassador
Geekzone, has cornered the tech community, the founder/ambassador has given some control over to the community moderators and the neutrality of the site is unquestionable
The Ruby Connection isn’t a contender to the crown, kudos to Westpac for seeing the value in communities and hopefully they’ll have the vision to keep it going long enough to get some momentum.
One of my businesses is a design and manufacturing operation. Cactus manufactures backpacks and outdoors clothing. For years we’ve been using PAD which is a CAD/CAM software package to make patterns for the apparel industry. PAD works well but has always been a little backwards in terms of development, online availability and the like.
A new offering that one of my colleagues mentioned to me today is pretty interesting. Pattern pieces get created in the installed application as they always have but from here things have changed. In the past, when one wanted to make a marker (the template to cut out all the pattern pieces) one spent ages playing around with the pieces to get the highest efficiency. Obviously given labour costs, this is less than efficient.
The new system combined the PAD offering, with some technology created by New Zealand business ShapeShifter. ShapeShifter is apparel optimisation software - it uses some cool algorithms to reduce fabric consumption and optimise production planing.
In a nice little SaaS/Traditional combination, we can now email our pattern pieces directly to PAD where, as an added service to owners of their software, an automatic process occurs which creates the most efficient lay plans possible using ShapeShifter’s offering.
In our case - it formerly took a highly skilled (and paid) worker 30 minutes or so to create a marker with 80% efficiency. The new offering achieves higher efficiencies, at no cost and in a similar amount of time.
Great to hear that under-the-radar New Zealand startup Pingar has been chosen as one of its arrows in the quiver it uses against Google.
Pingar produces customised responses specific answer to queries. It does this by scraping content from multiple sources and creating a single document summary. According to Pingar, their service;
..provides an advanced search platform which delivers dynamic reports from a user’s natural language search query. In short, it changes the face of mainstream Internet search.
Rather than using the keyword search technology deployed by traditional search engines, Pingar uses an advanced underlying technology that understands the context of the query. Users can therefore search online data by asking a direct question.
‘What private equity opportunities exist in China?’ Rather than looking for documents that contain all the keywords in the question above, Pingar instead sets out to find the documents which contain the answer to the question. When the relevant documents have been found, Pingar’s advanced technology scrapes the content from each document that answers the question and dynamically creates a new single document containing the answer. This, we call, ‘Dynamic Publishing’. Others call it the ‘Future of Online Search’.
Pingar has joined theexclusive Microsoft Start-Up Accelerator Programme in the UK. Pingar is one of only 16 software companies chosen for the programme from over 35000 UK Microsoft partners.
It’ll be interesting to see where Microsoft takes Pingar heading into the future.
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