Cerego announced the North American beta launch of iKnow! iKnow! helps people to “learn faster, remember longer, and manage their memory for a lifetime”. iKnow!’s patented learning algorithms generate personalized learning schedules that improve the absorption and recall of chunks of learning content called “items.” Combining cognitive science and neuroscience with the social nature of the web, iKnow! lets users remix the web for the purpose of learning. iKnow! measures memory strength and generates a personalized learning schedule optimized for each user. The iKnow! platform is a collaborative network that will allow learners all over the globe to leverage and remix content produced by the community. As a demonstration of its social learning platform, iKnow! currently offers a set of tools and content for English speakers to study Japanese, with support for other major language pairs to follow within the year. Users soon will be able to upload any kind of learning content into the system – language and otherwise – and Cerego will open its learning APIs to the developer community. This will let third-party developers take advantage of the system’s memory management capabilities and build custom applications tailored to specific domains. http://www.iknow.co.jp/
Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 45 of 94)
This category is focused on enterprise / workplace collaboration tools and strategies, including office suites, intranets, knowledge management, and enterprise adoption of social networking tools and approaches.
While you may be wrapping up your summer vacation or preparing for a ramp up to a busy fourth quarter of business, the Gilbane team is securing the speakers for an exciting conference Dec. 2 – 4 in Boston. Evaluations of past sessions always give high marks to case studies delivered by users. We have several for the search track but would like a few more. If one of your targets for search is documents stored in SharePoint repositories, your experiences are sure to draw interest.
SharePoint is the most popular new collaboration tool for organizations with a large Microsoft application footprint but it usually resides with multiple other repositories that also need to be searched. So, what search products are being used to retrieve SharePoint content plus other content? A majority of search applications provide a connector to index SharePoint documents and they would not be making that available without a demand. We would like to hear what SharePoint adopters are actively using for search. What are you experiencing? If you would like to participate in the Gilbane Conference, and have experiences you to share, I hope you will get in touch and check out the full program.
On a related note, I was surprised, during my recent research, to discover few identifiable user-groups or support communities for search products. Many young companies launch and sponsor “user-group meetings” to share product information, offer training, and facilitate peer-to-peer networking among their customers. It is a sign of confidence when they do help customers communicate with each other. It signals a willingness to open communication paths the might lead to collective product critiques which, if well organized, can benefit users and vendors. It is also a sign of maturity when companies reach out to encourage customers to connect with each other. May-be some are operating in stealth mode but more should be accessible to interested parties in the marketplace.
Organizing functions are difficult to manage by users on their own professional time, so, having a vendor willing to be the facilitator and host for communication mechanisms is valuable. However, they sometimes need to have customers giving them a nudge to open the prospect of such a group. If you would value participating in a network of others using your selected product, I suggest taking the initiative by approaching your customer account representative.
Communities for sharing tips about any technology are important but so is mutual guidance to help others become more successful with any product’s process management and governance issues. User groups can give valuable feedback to their vendors and spur product usage creativity and efficiency. Finally, as an analyst I would much rather hear straight talk about product experiences from those who are active users, than a filtered version from a company representative. So, please, reach out to your peers and share your story at any opportunity you can. Volunteer to speak at conferences and participate in user groups. The benefits are numerous, the most important being the formation of a strong collective voice.
Zoho announced Zoho Share, a central repository that aggregates and lists all business and personal user content published in Zoho Show presentations, Zoho Sheet spreadsheets, and Zoho Writer documents and PDFs. Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show give users several options to share and publish their content, including sharing it with select users, embedding it in a blog or making it public and accessible to anyone online. Published content, however, remains in the individual Zoho applications, with no single point of access to all published content, regardless of type or author. Zoho Share gathers all the Zoho users’ content published in the individual Zoho applications and makes it available from a central interface. When Zoho Business moves out of private beta, Zoho Share will serve as the dashboard for all published content within an organization. When users first arrive at Zoho Share they will find the following tabs across the top of the homepage: Content – displays all presentations, documents, spreadsheets, and PDF files published by Zoho users. Each content type can be sorted by criteria that include featured, recent, popular, top rated, and license based; People – shows all Zoho users who have published content. These content authors can be sorted by top contributors, recent users, and all users. Clicking on an author’s name reveals all content published by that author; My Area – displays all of the individual user’s files, both private and public. Users can also edit their files and publish content that was previously private; Upload – lets users publish desktop files directly to Zoho Share. Users can define the license type for their uploaded content. From the Upload page, users can select from “all rights reserved,” “public domain,” and six variations of “attribution.” Users do not need a Zoho account to view published content on Zoho Share. Publishing content, however, requires a Zoho account as does posting messages and adding comments. http://www.zoho.com, http://www.adventnet.com
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Regina Bustamante, Director of Globalization with Plaxo, to discuss the company’s content globalization strategy and how Plaxo users are integral to its success. Plaxo offers a suite of online solutions for social networking. Top services are the address book and calendar applications in addition to Pulse, a sharing and networking tool.
KK: How has the growth of global web access affected the adoption and development of your social networking solutions?
RB: Plaxo’s user base continues to grow steadily since we reached the 15 million user mark back in October 2006. As a result, our product release cycles have accelerated from two or three months to just one week. At the same time, Plaxo’s non-English base of users and users with international connections is growing rapidly. Shorter product cycles coupled with user demand for multilingual products made it necessary for us to explore new ways to release products to major markets in local languages.
KK: What model did Plaxo use for its initial localization/translation efforts?
RB: We localized our address book and calendar tools into French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Simplified Chinese over a year ago, using LSPs for the initial translations. We then provided early release versions to specific “power users” in each international market who reviewed everything, including the UI and suitability to local cultures.
KK: So Plaxo users provided quality assurance in this effort?
RB: Yes, users were even willing to test and report on features such as sorting, name and address formatting, etc. When Pulse was released with localizations into the same languages, non-English users continued to send suggestions, comments, and to act as informal quality control agents. The involvement of the user community improved the quality of local versions of our software.
KK: The Dutch version, released in July, increased the role of longtime power users, correct?
RB: Absolutely. The Netherlands has quickly become one of the largest markets for Pulse and we expanded the involvement of the user community, relying on a group of long-time Plaxo members for the development of the Dutch glossary.
KK: What’s in store for the future of Plaxo’s localization/translation efforts?
RB: For future product releases, we will move to a crowdsourcing model based on a translation portal we are developing that will enable any Plaxo community user to submit and comment on translations. To ensure high levels of quality, this portal includes separate roles for a language moderator and project manager.
KK: What will be the key to success for this model?
RB: Plaxo’s position as a provider of no-charge consumer software helps us to engage users for localization/translation assistance. The key is to only ask users to help with things that directly benefit them. Our crowdsourcing model is not intended to entirely replace LSPs. For example, we have no plans to use crowdsourcing to translate the corporate website or documents such as the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy.
As social netwoking sites proliferate, extending the metaphor of organic connections between individuals and communities, one aspect that has so far been under appreciated is the spread of malicious viruses via connections between network members. Just as biological viruses tend to spread faster as individuals are brought closer together by a shrinking world, so too computer viruses are finding a vehicle to spread via Web2.0 social networks.
Most Web2.0 sites, and these include Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and even Google pages, offer users a potpourri of applets that add cool little functionalities to member’s profile pages. Google for instance offers Google “gadgets” like calendars, news feeds, photo display applications, accounting applications, weather, and a whole host of other apps.
Increasingly these are targets for malicious hackers who exploit people’s lack of awareness (as well as lack of protection), and their natural tendency to being open to adding new friends and applications without worry, to spread virus attacks. The problem is not necessarily Google’s programming, but the open source and shareware nature of applications being developed by programmers around the world, and offered on sites like Google and Facebook.
This was one of the issues discussed at the recent Black Hat USA 2008 conference in Las Vegas where two security experts, Robert Hansen, chief executive of SecTheory, and Tom Stacener, of Cenzic, the security software testing maker, demonstrated how a malicious gadget could break into a user’s web browser and read searches in real time and conduct other attacks, including stealing information from other gadgets that store personal information (like accounting applications).
This is particularly a problem with younger users who are seemingly less concerned with privacy and security issues, and see social networks as a vast playground of social interactions and free form play — putting up personal information, installing unchecked applications, and generally mingling their digital juices with abandon. Interestingly, older users who should know better, also fall prey to these lapses in judgment.
A word to the wise for people, especially companies, who are exploring how to deploy Web2.0 and Enterprise2.0 applications in their corporate networks. A word of caution too the next time you decide to poke someone after seeing their cute (and perhaps fallacious) profile picture.
Until protection tools get better, remember to Inspect ‘Yer Gadgets!
Virus update: Social networking sites targeted by worms
Well, we can now let the cat out of the bag. Google released Knol yesterday. Knol is guaranteed to generate lots of discussion in the blogosphere and press, especially among fans and detractors of Wikipedia. It is not really the same kind of animal as Wikipedia however, and we’ll talk more about this in another post, but it is something you will want to check out.
Udi Manber, was planning to announce Knol’s release in his keynote at Gilbane San Francisco last month, but unfortunately, it wasn’t quite ready. Fortunately, we had a back-up plan and Udi instead gave an excellent and audience-pleasing presentation on search quality.
Google announced that Knol is now open to everyone. They announced Knol back in December. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. From their blog post:
The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good. With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call “moderated collaboration.”
With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it! Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol.
At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements. We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker’s extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics. http://knol.google.com
OutStart Inc. and Eedo Knowledgeware Corp. have combined their operations, making the new company a provider of software for creating and sharing organizational knowledge through learning and social collaboration. The company will work to serve the LCMS and learning market, while supporting the emerging need for a business social software platform to enable effective informal knowledge sharing. The combined company has more than 300 customers, including commercial, government and defense organizations; a global base with close to 40 percent of its business coming from international clients; and, solid finances with 50 percent of its revenue coming from recurring business. The company will make its headquarters in Boston and maintain offices in the United States, Canada, England, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. http://www.outstart.com
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