Trineo is a development and consultancy service focusing on both salesforce.com implementation and custom force.com development out of the Canterbury Innovation Incubator in Christchurch. Managing director of Trineo, Daniel Fowlie, is going to spend around 26 hours in a plane in order to make a seven minute presentation of his LegalSoftOnline product. LegalSoftOnline is still in stealth mode but I’ve seen both early versions, and the current iteration. In talking about his product, Fowlie said that;

A typical server-based legal practice management system can cost tens of thousands of dollars, with additional IT, deployment and upgrade costs. An online system such as Trineo’s, however, does everything a server-based system does, but is far more flexible, equally secure, and has no large upfront cost.

I’m stoked to see Daniel doing well – both becuase he’s a really nice guy, and more generally becuase he’s building a product from here in EnZed! See more here.

Good luck Daniel!

Taking a line from street theatre, Ben is offering free marketing advice to companies. As he says;

Given all the doom and gloom in the media at the present.

A rough start to the year for some.

I thought I would offer Free Internet Marketing Advice.

That is you email me with your problems, questions, advice on strategy.

Anything Internet Marketing related.

Who is this suited for? Any kind of business, maybe your a small business who hasn’t ventured online, a tourism business, owner operator, b2b, b2c….

You probably have made cuts of your marketing expenditure.

And so you should, if it has questionable returns.

BUT with internet marketing you can measure your returns. Down to the dollar.

If you know how.

So to help clear misreprentations about it and encourage spending in internet marketing I am doing this.

The catch? Well the catch is I ask you to pay me what you think my information to help you out is worth to you. If its worth nothing pay nothing, if its worth $50 pay that. Up to you, no pressure, my aim is to help you.

I just want to repeat that, my aim is to help you!

You can find out the details here.

Bizchat has arrived on the world and awaits its members. So what is bizchat? Well in our own words;

Bizchat is a community site targeted at New Zealand small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). It aims to recreate the peer-to-peer conversations that currently occur around a barbeque or beer. Founded by SME owners themselves, it aims to fill a hole in the market – other offerings tend to have two main failings;

• They tend to be very static – not allowing any real conversation to occur around a resource
• They tend to be either a corporate front or hosted by a government department

Bizchat is an independent and neutral site that will become a vibrant and dynamic forum.

Bizchat is being funded via sponsorship and will have three main channels of information;

• SME specific newsfeeds from existing news media
• Events calendar for SME relevant events
• Resource library sourced from various business support organisations

All of these three channels will be dynamic with community members able to ask questions, comment and rate the advice and stories contained within the site.

So what does all that mean?

Well for years I’ve been involved as an owner, manager and adviser of small businesses and it’s never ceased to amaze me the common features that SMEs have. For example, most business people I know would far rather seek advice from their peers than from a Government agency, and similarly, given their time constraints, SMEs yearn for one place to fulfil all of their resource requirements.

We all know that there are a heap of sites out there, from Government departments to industry bodies to lobby groups. We reckon that the main failing of the other offerings is that they are all pretty individual – just having one story – it’s like being at a bar and having a choice of one type of beer!

Bizchat attempts (and it’s an ongoing project) to get all of the information offered at those other places, but also allows users to talk about the information in a dynamic way. It’s like having a choice of ALL the beers and also being able to taste test and compare tasting notes about them all.

The first stage is live now, we’ve partnered with a bunch of different organisations – some central/local government, some private industry and some professional bodies – but all of these partners are here for the same reason – they see a need for what we are doing, and belief that a united approach is going to be the most successful way to build the capability of NZ SMEs.

Like all community sites, bizchat is dependant on an actual community – so for know it’s a little echo-y in there – we’re working on it though and are looking forward to seeing the community develop over the weeks, months and years to come.

Finally thanks to Telecom New Zealand for seeing the value in this thing and being prepared to support it at arms length.

Well know local (local in New Zealand) luminary Rod Drury, Founder and CEO of Xero agreed to contribute to the series.

His ten broad predictions can be seen below – check out the full post here.

1. Online accounting won’t exist as a product category for long

2. Bookkeeping will go away, slowly

3. Governments get very interested in online accounting

4. Business Internet Banks will emerge

5. The Accountants channel becomes more important

6. New global leaders will emerge

7. It really will become software plus services.

8. The channel changes

9. API standardization

10. Microsoft will enter the market

How to publicise the party? You guessed it – he invited all of his Facebook friends.

To cut a long story short – he invited all his friends, had 15 definite attendees and 60 possibles (which in itself is interesting – if I hold a dinner party I’d expect the vast majority of those invited to attend – Hal’s response rate was pretty goddam low)

But it gets worse.

Out of those definites and maybe, you know how many turned up?

ONE

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – a Facebook friend may be a real friend, a real friend may be a Facebook friend but any definitive expectations of that type are unsound.

I spend a lot of time speaking with both proponents and sceptics of Twitter (and by extension microblogging in general).

Basically the proponents say that Twitter;

• Breaks down silos
• Connects them to people they wouldn’t otherwise be in a position to communicate with
• Is a fantastic way to leverage the knowledge of the masses
• Is a great way to transmit information quickly

While those on the other side of the fence claim that Twitter is;

• A waste of time
• A hang out of the digital elitists
• A security risk
• Just a passing fad with no chance of becoming a "real" business

I’m a relatively heavy user of microblogging (Twitter for general stuff and Yammer within a workgroup) – but the best thing I’ve seen thus far to explain what it is all about is a video from Martin Weller – it nicely sums up both the value of Twitter, and the questions that will need to be answered if it is to survive.

Given this article in Wired where the Twitter funders said

It’s like the stupidest question in the world: How’s Twitter going to make money?, it’s like ‘How was Google going to make money? Eventually Google was going to make money and they figured out how to do it and they figured out a great business, and I think the same thing is true with Twitter

Or to paraphrase… we’ll get back to you on that one… Ouch

Details are;

How to create, develop and evolve a social media presence to increase collaboration, drive awareness and improve customer loyalty

Social networking and online communities have received significant attention in the past 12 months, as services such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn attract and connect communities of people. For organisations wanting to truly bring their marketing and customer service strategies into the 21st century, creating and fostering an online community can be the most powerful –not to mention the most cost effective – marketing tool available.

For marketers and communicators social media is proving effective at reinforcing an organisation’s brand, understanding and capturing customer feedback, and creating and sharing information across communities of interest. Organisations can take advantage of similar technologies to create their own custom community experiences.

Recognising the importance of this trend, Intergen has invited Andreas Stjernström from Swedish enterprise software company EPiServer to New Zealand. He will highlight the reasons why developing a community is important, and give real world examples of organisations that have successfully created and maximised the benefits of online communities.

Intended as an introduction to online community development, these free events are targeted at:

- Organisations that are currently creating or are looking to create or sponsor an online community.

- Agencies who want to offer your customers options for taking advantage of social media.

- Marketers and communicators who are looking for new mediums to communicate your organisation’s value proposition.

Events are scheduled on the following dates:

Wellington Wednesday 5 November, Level 7, 126 Lambton Quay – 4.30pm-6pm

Christchurch Thursday 6 November, Level 2, 158 Hereford Street, 8am – 9.30am

Auckland Friday 7 November, Level 2, 15 Huron Street, Takapuna – 12.30pm – 2pm

To register for these free events, email events@intergen.co.nz.

I’m a starter for the Christchurch session – I’d advise anyone looking to leverage the power of the people to check one of the sessions out.

What blogs do to newspapers, so to Cooreea wishes to do to traditional transportation services.

Check it out!

Tim is quoted as saying that;

(These are) pretty depressing times in a lot of ways, and you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call ‘Web 2.0,’ the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I’m not talking about an investment bubble. (It’s) a reality bubble.

Tim, in a pretty bold move at the home event for all things hyped, proceeded to use two examples, the first was the popular Facebook application SuperPoke, while the second was the popular iPhone app "iBeer," which simulates chugging a pint.

Time then rhetorically asked;

You have to ask yourself, are we working on the right things?

At last – I mean it is so patently obvious that we’re living in an over-hyped world where real estate that has no current or indeed plausible future monetization path can be heralded as the "next best things".

Over on Broadstuff, Alan Patrick did a "back of the envelope" calculation and came up with the following;

The total global Ad industry is circa $0.5 trillion, the online biz globally is about 10% of that at most, and the 80/20 of that goes to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. That leaves about $10bn for everybody else, and much of that (say 80/20 again) is being hoovered up by existing high quality and/or high volume existing web assets, leaving in the order of $2bn for everyone else. Assuming every Web 2.0 startup wants to be worth at least $100m, and assuming that is on a 10x multiple of revenues, that means every successful company is running at $10m ad revenues pa. Thus, $2bn / $10m = c 200 startups can live on Ad funding globally on average. Even if I’m 10x out, so its 2,000, you can see that 100% Ad supported business models are not a majority play. And Advertising overall is likely to be in the decline for a few cycles now.

Of course what Alan didn’t factor in is the impact of the eventual discover that online advertising doesn’t really work, and that there are a bunch of emerging technologies that could cause a significant dent in how much of the ad biz comes the online way.

Tim gave some examples of businesses that actually mean something – he used the example of online businesses founded to effect social or political change – as opposed to those founded to enable virtual poking.

So let’s once and for all give up on free – find a way to monetize that doesn’t rely on ad revenues and stop over-hyping the latest time and effort wasting social offering out of the valley.

Related articles by Zemanta

• O’Reilly signals Free Web 2.0 party is over?
• Microsoft Rushes To Defend Display Ads; Now If Only Marketers Would, Too
• O’Reilly: Stop throwing sheep, do something worthy

At the recent Techcrunch50, Twitter-for-enterprise startup Yammer took out the top prize. I was interested to read a post by Bernard a couple of days later where he uncharacteristically lashed the decision. Basically Bernard calls Yammer a "me too" offering that offers little that existing offerings do not. Bernard’s specific criticisms were;

1. No barriers. Lots of alternatives already exist, some very credible. Even some open source. This looks like an engineer’s side project. In engineer speak this is "trivial". I am sure there are dozens of clones already and many more being hatched right now.

2. The incumbent can replace their advantage way too easily. What stops Twitter adding some features to make it more appealing to enterprises? I imagine they are already considering this.

3. No natural early adopter. The normal early adopter is on Twitter. The early adopter within companies? If you are a good corporate citizen Yammer would look a bit career-threatening – for reasons explained below.

It’s interesting to see just how many offerings exist in the microblogging-for-enterprise space (list courtesy of Jeremiah);

Prologue, by Automatic, makers of WordPress
Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment (ESME)
Yammer
SocialCast
Laconica – The Open Microblogging Tool
Status
Trillr
I Did Work
OraTweet -Oracle
Joint Contact
BlueTwit-IBM
Present.ly

So it seems Bernard was a little justified in his criticism… of course all of this overlooks the value that microblogging brings to an organisation – those of us who use it (I use both Twitter publicly and Yammer within a closed organisation) have already been convinced of that fact.

The real issue lies more in aggregation – following an RSS reader, a social network news feed, email, a couple of microblogging services and all the other data streams just get’s too much – I’m looking forward to the day when truly open standards allow me to aggregate whichever services I want to all in one place – there’s nothing worse than having to manipulate multiple desktop apps and browser windows just to stay in touch – MAKE IT EASY FOR US VENDORS!