I have been a fan of the DataDistilleries technology for a long time and we have worked closely with with them in one of the companies I have founded. Their core products are an analytical tool and a real-time recommendation engine; the latter typically used to provide cross-sell and up-sell offers on inbound customer contacts through the call center, retail stores, web site and so on. My opinion has always been that the real-time engine was the jewel in the crown, and that seems to be the main reason for SPSS (who are of course strong in the offline analytical market already) buying the company.
Social Software Review Part 3: Ryze
Somewhere between a collection of discussion forums and a networking site, the focus at Ryze is on making contacts through shared interests. It is not dissimilar to The Well.
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Social Software Review Part 2: LinkedIn
With an unabashed business focus, LinkedIn is perhaps the nearest successor to the original SixDegrees site. The focus is on connecting business contacts through your network. Lacking automatic integration to your email system and other communications tools, the site requires manual maintenance but somehow it does work: this is the site from whose users I get the most consistent feedback. LinkedIn works.
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Social Software Review Part 1: Introduction to Social Network Software
There is a growing class of software that allows you to manage your social network online and to use this network to make new contacts. Different implementations of this idea have different focus on why you would want to make new contacts, and we will review some of them over the next days and weeks.
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Requirements for Electronic Representation of Social Networks
It seems to me that the requirements for systems like LinkedIn, Friendster, and many others, all of which allow you to document your social networks and, ultimately, profit from them, can be understood by considering normal, “real-world” social interactions and their limitations.
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A Definition of Collaborative CRM
The term “Collaborative CRM” seems, like so many other phrases associated with customer relationship management (CRM), to be confused and confusing. We need to define what it means.
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Trust Networks
“You really should listen to this guy”, said one of my friends, and so I went along and have a very interesting meeting with somebody I didn’t know. Very unremarkable, you may say. True as an event, but isn’t it interesting how trust can be transferred? I trusted my friend and therefore I was prepared to listen to the third party. In a sense, my trust was transferred to the other person through my friend.
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Welcome Amazonians: Amazon facts and figures
Returning from a short project we find more than usual activity on our website. Some investigation uncovers that our research paper Business Platforms: Profiting From Networks was mentioned in the latest Amazon Web Services newsletter.
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Where and how middlemen add value
One of the ideas of the late nineties’ e-commerce boom was that of disintermediation: that brokers, middlemen, and other layers between buyers and sellers would disappear, squeezed out by price competition. While later observers tried to debunk the idea as a myth, it has never completely gone away. It is easy to see why people are arguing both sides: in some sectors disintermediation is alive and well, while in others it is nothing but a myth. In this note we point out that new understanding of network effects is to a very large extent able to predict where disintermediation will and will not occur.
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New research paper: Business platforms
A new research paper is now available on this site. The paper, Business Platforms: Profiting From Networks discusses network effects and how to profit from them using lessons learnt from Amazon, eBay, and others.
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