• Clio – Web-based Legal Practice Management

    September 4, 2009

    Product reviews
     

    A few weeks ago, after reviewing LegalSoftOnline (see here), I took a very brief look at Clio. Afterwards I had a discussion with Jack Newton, President of Clio who was eager to show me under the hood of Clio…

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  • Free Sometimes Comes at a Huge Cost

    September 2, 2009

    Strategy, General
     

    The other day I was having lunch with a bunch of technology entrepreneurs and the subject came up of the falling service levels we all experience. The conversation was particularly around the telecommunications field but could have easily been any aspect of commerce.

    The chap sitting next to me had a particular perception;

    When I ring up a telco help desk, I want to get the right advice quickly – it’s as simple as that. I don’t want to talk to someone in Manila or Bangalore, I don’t want to have to wade through multiple levels of AVR, I want to talk with a real person who understands my requirements

    Now this isn’t, at first glance, an unreasonable requirement. But let’s look a little closer. At the same time as wanting a high level of service, my friend also bemoaned the fact that traditional telcos charge such high amounts for connection and call charges – he pointed out the existence of cut price VoIP services that would seem to offer the same thing as the traditional telcos (phone line, calling, data etc) but at a lower cost.

    Anyone see a disconnect here?

    We then got talking about office productivity applications. My friend proudly announced that he uses Google apps free account – he rightly realized that with a free service, there is no guarantee of exceptional uptimes or, for that matter, data security and availability. While he thought it reasonable that he should suffer the odd short outage to his service, when confronted by the reality that his choice of free applications may impact upon the very security of his data – he was incredulous.

    I read an interesting post the other day by the always succinct Phil Wainewright. Now Phil is one of the most well known SaaS bloggers and has used, and does use almost every SaaS service available. Phil has an interesting, and somewhat unusual ethos in that he prefers to pay for the services he uses, feeling that it gives a form of contract and some sort of recourse if things go wrong.

    Phil listed a number of services he’s used, in their paid versions, only to have the provider acquired by a larger business who then makes the products free – Blogger, Feedburner, Omniture’s Hitbox Professional all fall into this category. And as Phil so rightly points out;

    In each case, the withdrawal of paid services has coincided with a lack of investment in new
    features, a deterioration in service quality and worsening customer service. Which is exactly what I had wanted to avoid by signing up for a paid service in the first place. In my view, online services that want to be taken seriously should always offer a paid option for those that want a business-class service with certain guarantees.

    Of course we’re in an unhealthy spiral whereby vendors, in a race for mindshare, target the one easy attribute – price. As consumers we become more and more accustomed to getting something for nothing, and start to expect professional grade levels of reliability, robustness and service, on a free service. Again, as Phil so rightly points out;

    The true villain here, though [is] the mass of users who want to save a few dollars and let someone else worry about how the service is going to remain viable. What they forget is that the service provider will make money by splicing ads into their work processes, selling off their data to the highest bidder and cutting corners on service delivery , either that or simply giving up on the service one day with no warning.

    So please – think a little about the offerings you, as consumers, use. And think about the level of service you expect from those services. Ensure that there is some reality around those two things – while a business can run a free offering with a high level of service for a very short period of time, eventually something has to give. In the best case scenario it may just be the introduction of a paid service, in a worst case scenario it may just be the loss, or illegitimate use, of your data…

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  • YouCalc for Zendesk, Analytical View of Helpdesk Data

    September 1, 2009

    Product reviews
     

    I’ve written many times in the past about Zendesk (see here) and have also written about YouCalc. These two companies have much in common, YouCalc founder Rasmus Madsen was actually part of an early “friends and family” funding round for Zendesk, they’re both from Denmark (although Zendesk is now based in San Francisco) and they both have a friendly, open attitude that makes people comfortable with their businesses.

    Recently Zendesk and YouCalc jointly announced the YouCalc Dashboard for Zendesk and Personal Performance Widget, integrations that display Zendesk ticket analytics either standalone or embedded into a website. In a nice example of the proof of the pudding being in the eating, Zendesk themselves are using the YouCalc dashboard to track their own rapidly increasing customer base via their global support team.

    The Personal performance widget is aimed at individual Zendesk agents, and runs as a widget inside Zendesk, inside iGoogle and on the iPhone, providing a personal performance overview. It analyzes tickets assigned to a particular agent and gives a graphical depiction of:

    • The number of tickets created and solved in the past 7 days
    • The average resolution time on their tickets
    • The average waiting time on their tickets
    • The number of open tickets grouped by priority
    • Ticket backlog development.

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    The Dashboard for Zendesk is aimed at Zendesk administrators who need analytics across the service & support organization.

     zd-for-blog

    It gives overview and insight into agent performance, ticket type distribution and resource planning issues.

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    I spoke with VP of Sales from Zendesk, Michael Folmer Hansen. Michael was the first employer Zendesk took on, so has had first hand experience of the stresses caused by the rapid growth that Zendesk has enjoyed. I asked him what the YouCalc integration means to him, heading as he does the support team.

    Hansen, not surprisingly given his role, was quick to complement the functionality of his own product saying;

    Zendesk already has strong reporting facilities which have, with the Zendesk Plus+ release last week [see CloudAve coverage here], been significantly improved with near real-time CSV feed of ticket data including resolution time metrics and custom fields. This enables you to use a wide range of tools to do your analysis.

    Realizing though that advanced analytics is not something the majority of users will want or need, Hansen was very complementary of the YouCalc dashboards ability to give a rich visual display of metrics, all with little or no configuration required;

    I manage the Zendesk Global Support Team with 9 members in 7 Countries. The Team also uses Zendesk to interact with the whole company and with external partners. Our customers are simply interested in quick resolution, which I also am, but I have to provide this with optimal manning across the globe while Zendesk continues its rapid month on month growth with resulting increase in Support tickets.

    With the YouCalc Dashboard I can, using 3 views, see our matrix of KPIs. In the Tickets Overview I see tickets created compared to tickets solved per hour, day, week + evolution over time – this allows me to plan the current and future manning of Zendesk Support, not just numbers, but also time zone location. In the Tickets Analyzer I can see the Resolution time and can drill down by date, type, group, agent e.g. for July 2009 the Resolution time for Level 1. tickets was under 1 hour for 44.03% of the tickets and under 10 hours for 71.13%. Under the Agent Performance view I can drill down to better understand the performance of the team and individual members – last month we had one Agent who solved 438 Tickets with an average resolution time of 51 minutes, while another Agent solved 183 Tickets with an average resolution time of nearly 3 hours. A little analysis shows that the first Agent palmed all the difficult Tickets off to the second Agent.

    It’s this sort of valuable analysis that YouCalc is aiming for – it allows for in-depth analysis of a number of different applications, from Salesforce.com to Highrise, from Google Analytics to Ebay and now includes Zendesk. I was excited when I first saw YouCalc at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston earlier this year – the power of this latest integration shows why.

    CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

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  • How to be a Media Darling…

    September 1, 2009

    Design
     

    At the recent New Zealand WordCamp, one of the sessions looked at building successful media relationships. In a session titled “How to be a Media Darling”, Doug Casement from Renaissance talked about building relationships and pitching for coverage with mainstream media. I covered the event for Idealog magazine but thought it was worth returning to for this audience.

    His advice was good, and was, in my opinion, applicable to organizations wanting to foster relationships with both mainstream and new media – there’s significant crossover and it’s certainly not black and white as to who is traditional and who is new.

    Anyway, Casement contends that the mainstream media still has a place, it can deliver;

    • General publicity and profile
    • Increased awareness in a target audience
    • It helps boost word-of-mouth (what viral marketing USED to be…)
    • If SEO and content are similar, mainstream media can make the difference
    • Multiple information streams – the gestalt effect, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts

    But you need to remember that everybody sells… Even you. You need to answer these questions;

    • Can I trust you?
    • Do you understand my issues?
    • Do you care?
    • Are you committed to working with me?

    Because people do business with people… and prefer to do it with those that they like and trust.

    Given his experience in journalism, Casement had some good lessons for the most successful strategies to engage with journalists. Some press myths he advises that it’s best to ignore;

    • The press is not always adversarial – they’re just often busy
    • That influencing the press takes lunch, trips or tacky giveaways

    But, he said, not all publications (or journalists for that matter) are equal – there are those who, like a common street hooker, will sell themselves for a junket, a gadget or some cash.

    Questions you shouldn’t ask of technology journalists;

    • Do you have a technology section?
    • So you’re a weekly – how often do you publish?
    • Can I have my advert next to the story
    • I’m booking an advert, any chance of an interview?
    • I’m considering advertising – but I need a front page story first..

    Seduction for dummies;

    • Journalists are people too – find out what interests them, invest in the relationship, engage with them – not just when you want something
    • Don’t hide behind “off the record”

    Simple tactics that work when engaging with journalists;

    • Read, and understand, the publication. Understand the “editorial window” of the publication, understand the readership, what’s the angle of the story and the relevance for the particular journalist/publication
    • Don’t call at deadline time!
    • Never demand or harass them
    • Regard it as a sales call – be comfortable talking

    The Zen of press releases;

    • Short and simple
    • Don’t tell fibs or exaggerate
    • Delete superlatives, adjectives and adverbs
    • Customize to fit their editorial window
    • Don’t shotgun – the press love exclusives!
    • Press releases should be teasers

    Above all else… Be Relevant!

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  • CloudCamp – Thoughts from the Unpanel

    August 29, 2009

    General
     

    Reporting from CloudCamp Auckland – “CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.”

    Questions from the floor about Cloud Computing…

    What is the Value? – CloudBreak was involved in the New Zealand Post Google apps implementation. For them it’s about value – NZ Post discovered hard savings of $500k per annum by moving to a Google email infrastructure.

    Why develop in the clouds? – Gen-i talked about the development benefits of a cloud dev environment – allows for rapid A/B testing and means that a business is used to thinking in terms of integration – the use of APIs and the like. To make the decision though metrics are needed for current costs – to make an informed decision based purely on ROI is difficult.

    What shortages does New Zealand need to overcome? We suffer from latency, the speed of light cannot be sped up. Need local cloud hosting offerings in order to remove this problem. Local companies need to develop with a global perspective and ambition.

    Tools and techniques for highly variable load? James Valentine from Fronde has recently been using EC2 for a client. He contends that PaaS is cheap but tends to be inflexible, force.com will shut off service once API limits have been breached – ensure you chose the correct platform based on where the bulk will be – page impressions? processing cycles? storage?

    There were murmurings of discontent from the audience about the lack of focus on value proposition around cloud computing – hopefully later sessions will address those concerns.

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  • T-Shirt Friday #6 – Webstock

    August 29, 2009

    Just for fun
     

    Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

    If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps)..

    Not completely a tech company t-shirt but rather the t-shirt of a tech event. Webstock is one of the best web events I’ve been to, anywhere in the world. Held at the start of the year, Webstock attracts a fantastic line up of speakers who generally take the opportunity of a late summer tour of LOTR-land. Webstock has the best schwag of any conference, always impeccably designed and made. The Webstock T is a chic black number with exceptional tailoring.

    DSCF5085 Hot  

    • The Webstock logo is uber cool – gold text with a native New Zealand Tui bird relaxing on the curve of the “b”
    • Lovely tailoring – form fitting and flattering (or so my more sartorial friends tell me) 

    Not

    • Made in China – and we all know what that means….
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  • Finding the Hub – A Common Data Model

    August 28, 2009

    Business
     

    A couple of weeks ago I roused myself at 1:30am to moderate a radio show in my ongoing series for VoiceAmerica “Kepes in the Clouds”. This time I had the pleasure of speaking with Sunir Shah, Chief Handshaker from…

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  • Aggregation May Be Dead, But No One Has Told the Advertisers

    August 26, 2009

    General
     

    Just getting my own 2 cents in on the theme du jour – Zoli’s had his, and Marshall has come back with a blistering post. But anyway…

    Over on ZDNet, Sam Diaz posted what can only be described as a silly post 9actually one of my blogging heroes Bob Warfield called it just that) in which he declared, in a sermon-from-the-mount type way that RSS is dead.

    His post was a result of a Google reader team blog entry that looked at what items an elite group of users where reading. Google came up with a “recommended list” for some industry “elites”.

    So far, so good. But then Sam went on to pronounce that he no longer logs into a feed reader but rather gets his information from other sources. In his words (highlighting mine);

    I catch headlines on Yahoo News and Google News. I have a pretty extensive lineup of browser bookmarks to take me to sites that I scan throughout the day. Techmeme is always in one of my browser tabs so I can keep a pulse on what others in my industry are talking about. And then there are Twitter and Facebook. I actually pick up a lot of interesting reading material from people I’m following on Twitter and some friends on Facebook, with some of it becoming fodder for blog posts here…my sources of for reading material are scattered across the Web, not in one aggregated spot.

    In a somewhat cutting comment, that only someone of his stature can get away with, Bob commented saying;

    If you’re getting your news every which way but blogs, why blog here? Your readers evidently would do as you do, no?

    Sure there are plenty of new channels to aggregate, what with Facebook, Twitter et al, but to proclaim the end of RSS and, by association, aggregation is ludicrous. Techmeme is, after all an aggregative channel, what is Twitter if not a large aggregation point? And if aggregation is truly dead, then why is ZDNet seemingly able to attract advertisers with what is, essentially, an aggregative model?

    Sam’s knee jerk analysis that “RSS readers are a Web 1.0 tool” is also simplistic (sorry Sam). True a pure aggregative play with no viewer input would seem to fall into the general “1.0” pool. While a fully engaged medium feels more like 2.0 – but the fact of the matter is that RSS is an excellent tool to cross the divide between those two forms of consumption – especially so since Google have introduced more engagement-centric ways of users too communicate in reader.

    So no, RSS is far from dead, aggregation is alive and kicking and Sam’s, Zoli’s Marshall’s and my pay packet depends, at least in part, upon that. SO… if Sam’s not using a feed reader, what are others doing?

    Marshall has gone all hyper-tech on us, his explanation was kind of 2001 A Space Odyssey;

    Our team scans over thousands of company RSS feeds each morning for updates (what news writer wouldn’t do that?) and we use an open source customizable meme-tracker to make sure we haven’t missed anything important. We use open source RSS parsing software to set up a dashboard tracking all our competitors’ feeds, we use an RSS to IM alert system to get some feeds sent to us right away and at least some of us use Gmail Webclips for another layer of ambient feed tracking.

    We use Postrank to track breakout hits in niche blogs and we use tools like Snackr or the just-launched LazyFeed to keep an eye on specific feeds or general topics.

    My head hurt just reading that! Here at CloudAve we’re a little less analytical than Marshall – but we’re all still using a bunch of tools. Personally I use Google reader, a bunch of Google searches RSS’d to my reader. A few Twitter scans and the ever present TechMeme. That and a watching brief over most of our direct competitors keeps me pretty much in the loop.

    So it seems the jury is back and, while not quite unanimous, the RSS brigade would seem to have the numbers at this point – and if revenue is any indication, they’ll continue to do so for awhile yet.

     

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  • Dell Adamo – Slim and Svelte

    August 26, 2009

    IT
    , , , , ,
     

    A few weeks ago my friends at Dell graciously agreed to send me an Adamo to test for a couple of weeks – to be honest I’d have rather they just made it an open ended deal but ah…

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  • BNZ, Outsourcing Design to Xero

    August 24, 2009

    Business, Design, IT, New Zealand, SaaS, Strategy
    , , , ,
     

    The Bank of New Zealand is a reasonably significant shareholder in Xero and so many of us expected that they’d be working together on the odd project. What we didn’t expect was that the bank would seemingly outsource their…

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