Orange Couch

Socializing Is Different From Enterprise Collaboration

The success of Facebook has been amazing. But unfortunately, to many enterprise software vendors, Facebook has become THE solution to emulate, and in some cases copy. Socializing engages people, and Facebook is excellent at that. But in the enterprise, socializing and collaborating are two very different things . Unfortunately, enterprise vendors, particularly the ones with collaboration solutions, do not seem to get that (sorry Chatter, Jive, Quad and more). Emulating Facebook in hopes of delivering a solid collaboration solution is simply wrong and ineffective. Users do not embrace “enterprise Facebook emulators”. The reason: emulators deliver socializing and not effective collaboration.  And it is effective collaboration what enterprise users need in order to do their jobs.

A few more thoughts…

Cocktail Party vs. Collaborating:

“What am I doing now” is interesting when socializing with friends, but not very beneficial in an enterprise environment. Sharing pictures is cool, but virtually useless in the enterprise. 

Centralized vs. Decentralized:

Facebook Emulators force the user to leave whatever app or web page they are working on when it is time to collaborate.  Basically, if the app I am working on provides me with a lot of valuable context, why should I have to leave it in order to collaborate. 

Dynamic vs. Procedural:

Facebook Emulators force the user to come into the application every time, resulting in slow and procedural collaboration. Users do not embrace procedural collaboration solutions. That’s probably why the vast majority of enterprise users still rely on e-mail for collaboration.

All in all, we are thrilled our competitors continue to go down the path of emulating Facebook. We wish them the best in delivering fascinating “cocktail party” solutions. We will stay focused on delivering unique and effective enterprise collaboration solutions.

Think Inside the Box!

The Team  

Something Unique in Collaboration

We launched SimplyBox 2.0 late last week! And we are proud to say that our approach to enterprise collaboration is different from all other solutions out there. We combined our ease of use with some key enhancements on speed, contextuality, and decentralization. The result: users can simply collaborate wherever it makes sense to them – no need to be forced to go to one place to collaborate.

We wanted to thank Ray Wang from the Altimeter Group for clearly articulating our differentiators in his blog post from late last week.

http://blog.softwareinsider.org/2010/04/29/thursdays-tech-showcase-simplybox-2-0-simplifies-enterprse-2-0-collaboration/#more-4895.

Customers across different industries are validating the broad appeal of SimplyBox. Why? Because we designed it with the users at the center and delivered a solution that is appealing to them. It works the way they work – constantly dealing with different applications, teams, and topics.

With 2.0 we also decided to file additional patents. Just in case the other vendors in collaboration get jealous.

And we continue to strengthen our partnerships with major enterprise players … more on that soon.

It’s going to be a great Summer.

Keep thinking inside the box…

The Team

Back from CRM Evolution 2009

Had a busy, but solid stay in NYC attending the show. Congrats to Paul Greenberg and the folks that put this show together. The place was packed with folks that Get It.

Wanted to thank our friends from SAP for bringing us along. It was excellent to see the response our joint story got from some of the attendees and analysts present at the show.

Quick summary … SimplyBox enhances SAP CRM by driving contextual collaboration around structured and unstructured content. The result is a CRM system that is more useful, and popular with the users. Users then bring more content into the system and have conversations inside the system. With SimplyBox, SAP CRM becomes the “place to be” for users.

Great show. Great to have met some bright minds like Jesus Hoyos, Brent Leary, Ray Wang, and Esteban Kolsky.

 http://www.estebankolsky.com/2009/08/27/what-i-liked-loved-and-gotta-have-right-now-from-crme09/

Good to be back in the Bay Area though …

Think Inside the Box!

The Team

SimplyBox Wins Education Award

Exciting news! SimplyBox was selected by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) as one of the “2009 Top 25 Web sites for Teaching and Learning.” According to the Association, SimplyBox delivers on a key Standard for the 21st-Century Learner: “organize knowledge so that it is useful”. This is award is wonderful validation of our value proposition for Education.

http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/aasl/aboutaasl/bestlist/bestwebsitestop25.cfm#collaboration

We continue to show great traction with educators and learners throughout the world. And as a response to a number of institutions that have contacted us lately, we are currently finalizing the packaging of our offering for school districts. This will, among other things, allow for on premise installation, centralized administration, and customization.

Well, our thanks to the AASL. We will continue to improve our solution, and we will keep on delivering value to Education.

Think Inside the Box!

The Team 

SimplyBox and Japan’s NEC BIGLOBE

Well, this past week was an important one for us. NEC BIGLOBE, one of the largest ISPs and Portals in Japan, launched our service in Japan. We have worked on this for a few months and we are glad we are finally live in Japan.

You can check it out at:

http://arena.biglobe.ne.jp/simplybox/

We got excellent press in Japan during the launch. The Nikkei article (print version) was absolutely fantastic and it had a tremendous impact.

We are working on putting the final touches on a couple of other partnerships with other large web players … stay tuned. We will be sharing the news on that soon.

Think Inside the Box!

Sharing, Japan, Enterprise …

It’s been a while since our last entry. We have been extremely busy over here. Let us share some highlights with you.

The design adjustments we made a few weeks back to our Sharing functionality have worked really well. Not only our organic traffic is growing at a faster rate, but we are now seeing solid growth in the number of items and boxes shared.  The “stickiness” of the site has also increased tremendously in the last couple of months. We’re happy with the metrics.

We are about to go live with our partnership with one of the largest portals in Japan. We will disclose the name of the partner around the 3^rd week of May. Lots of work went into making this happen, and we are looking forward to solid growth in Japan.

We just added the “SimplyBox in Business” page to our site. We are currently talking to many solid Enterprise Vendors that believe our solution can bring a new dimension to collaboration within the Enterprise/SMBs. We need to thank the folks at Gartner for the great support they have been giving us on this front.

We added servers in Europe and Japan. It has certainly improved the SimplyBox experience for our users in those geographies. We are currently working on some nice improvements to the service … more on that later.

As usual, many thanks for using and supporting us!

Think Inside the Box!

VentureBeat & More!

It was a hectic week. A lot of work trying to get our new release ready. SimplyBox will introduce, in February, a whole set of new features that will further simplify and enhance our Sharing capabilities.

On Wednesday, VentureBeat did an excellent review on us – basically stating that we were more “intuitive” than Google Notebook. That same day Google decides to kill Notebook! However, we are pretty sure it was not due to VentureBeat’s review…

http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/14/simplybox-lets-users-organize-info-images-snagged-from-the-web/

The last few weeks we have seen a lot of buzz about SimplyBox on Twitter. Here is a link to a Public Box where we compiled a sample of tweets on us.

http://simplybox.com/embedded/?cid=19908

We also wanted to thank a few individuals that in the last couple of weeks have put together videos that do a great job in explaining our solution, particularly as it applies to education.

Will Richardson at http://weblogged-ed.com

And here is Will’s video:

 http://www.screencast.com/users/Weblogged/folders/Jing/media/98f65cc1-f65f-4b3d-96ad-8d8d424d47e3

John Patten at http://eett.sylvan.k12.ca.us/wordpress/?p=525

And here is John’s video:

http://www.teachertube.com/search_result.php?search_id=Simplybox

One more link! Jerry Swiatek wrote a solid summary of our solution.

http://blogs.learnnc.org/instructify/2009/01/08/think-inside-the-box-with-simplybox/

That’s it for now.

Think Inside the Box!

Back to Normal!

Monday and Tuesday were a bit stressful as we were experiencing problems with our hosting providers. Everything has gone back to normal in the last 36 hours or so.

Once again, thank you for your patience, if you did experience issues with our service on Monday and Tuesday.

SimplyBox Support Team 

Hosting Pain!

SimplyBox Users, we are experiencing issues with our hosting provider. The service at times works normally and at times the performance is bad. We are working on it with our provider. We hope to be functioning normally as soon as possible.

Growing does cause pain sometimes … Thanks for your patience.

SimplyBox Support Team

Traction in Education!

Back in 2007 when we were still defining the concept behind SimplyBox, we already knew that the solution would appeal to students and educators. So, we are very pleased that our “guess” back then is actually materializing now.

In the last couple of months we have seen a lot of growth in our user base within education. And the growth has been very noticeable here in the US, but also in France, Australia, UK, New Zealand, … We are very thankful to a number of educators throughout the world that have been blogging about how our solution adds value to learning. Here are a few people that we wanted to thank (our apologies to those that were not listed, but the list would have been too long if we included everyone):

Jane Hart
http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2008/11/simplybox.html

David Fair
http://learningjourneys.wordpress.com/about/

Jerry Swiatek
http://citrushightechnology.com/2008/10/31/simplybox-revolutionizing-student-research/

Joan Vinall-Cox
http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/?s=simplybox

SimplyBox can play different roles in education. For some it is a fantastic research tool. For others it enhances virtual learning/tutoring. Students like it for writing papers. But what many educators are telling us is that the biggest value our solution offers is the improvement in the learning collaboration between teacher and student.

We thank all the students and educators that are embracing our solution. Stay tuned - there are a lot of enhancements that we will be releasing soon that will make your experience even more valuable.

Think (and Learn!) Inside the Box!