Enterprise Social as Enterprise Platform #YamJam12

During the opening keynote address at the YamJam ’12 Yammer user conference in San Francisco, Yammer Founder/Microsoft Corporate VP David Sacks and two other speakers discussed how enterprise social technology is quickly evolving to a point where in the near future the enterprise social platform will actually serve as the main platform where employees communicate and do business.

Consumerization Starts Trend toward Enterprise Social Dominance

While the personal benefits of social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter are well-documented, Sacks said in business we are “still primarily communicating through the organizational chart, top-down.” However, thanks to consumerization, he said this is starting to change.

“Employees bring enterprise social tools to the company, invite their co-workers, and it is later made a strategic initiative,” he said. Interestingly, Sacks said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told him PCs followed a similar “consumerization”-driven path to enterprise adoption in the early 1980s, as individual employees brought in their own PCs while corporate IT departments still focused on mainframe computing.

In the future, Sacks said he expects all enterprise applications will be social and allow all employees to work off the same data set. This will solve the current problem of “social network sprawl” Sacks sees at many businesses.
“There are many social networks in one company,” he explained. “The CRM application has its own social feed, the ERP application has its own social feed. We’re going right back to the siloed world we came from.”

In response, Sacks said Yammer is developing an “enterprise graph” that maps connections of people with things, such as files and documents,” in the enterprise. He said social networks like Facebook already create similar maps in people’s personal lives that connect them with things such as movies they like and books they have read.

Changing How Employees Talk to Each Other

One of the two other featured speakers during the keynote was Microsoft Corporate VP Jeff Teper, who said Yammer is changing how employees talk and share information in organizations. He said Yammer is making employee conversations more “contextual.”

In addition, Teper said Microsoft, which purchased Yammer in June 2012, is trying to move all of its applications to the cloud as quickly as possible. “We hope the Yammer model will serve as a catalyst to move the infrastructure to the cloud more quickly.”

Teper said Microsoft has previously used the “viral, end-user-driven motion” of the development process used by Yammer to help drive development of consumer products such as the XBox, but never used it to drive development of enterprise products until purchasing Yammer. “It makes it much more fun for us to build software for you guys and allows us to get software to you guys faster.” He said Microsoft will offer Yammer both as a free standalone solution as well as an integrated paid solution.

Enterprise Social Growth Spurt

The other featured speaker during the keynote, Gartner social media analyst Sue Landry, said social media is growing at a pace that eclipses that of other disruptive technologies such as the telephone and television, and is becoming much more prevalent in the enterprise space.

“Forrester expects 60 billion enterprise social applications by 2016 and Gartner expects 40% of large enterprises will at least have corporate casework completed by 2015,” she said.

According to Landry, enterprise social technology’s rapid growth is driven by four reinforcing forces: everyone, anytime, anything and everywhere. “The rich experience is with the person in context,” she said. “That makes the technology invisible.”

As a result of the “invisibility” of enterprise social technology, where it is so integrated with user’s daily lives they don’t notice it, Landry said it will become a platform, or “part of how everyone lives and breathes. Thus in the near future, enterprise social tools will enable the augmentation of business processes and applications from any source.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Putting Words In Ronald Reagan's Mouth

Would you rather talk with Angelina Jolie than Siri? What if Ronald Reagan gave the RNC keynote address? A novel technology could make it happen.

By filming a person speaking various phrases, Seyyer can begin to build a video avatar.

“Form is henceforth divorced from matter,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of photography in 1859. I was reminded of Holmes’s sweeping pronouncement in talking with Behrooz Rezvani, the CEO of the extremely eerie Seyyer. In the future, explains Rezvani, we might have a video presence that is divorced from our physical one. Read on to learn more about the panacea for Jewish mothers, the ghost of Ronald Reagan, and Angelina's possible future stint as a Siri replacement.

FAST COMPANY: What’s the idea behind Seyyer?

BEHROOZ REZVANI: The genesis of the whole thing is the idea to convert text to video. In order to convert text to video for a particular person, and have that person be animated saying certain things, you have to learn a lot about the way that person talks, and their facial expressions.

So you mean, I would write an email or text, and it would show up for my recipient as my face talking.

That’s the ultimate goal. If the recipient has a model of you on their phone, then when they receive the text, they can actually see you talking on it.

Behrooz Rezvani

Why would you want that?

In many countries around the world, there’s a kind of bandwidth starvation. What if you want to share a magical moment with grandma, with her grandkids texting from far away distances? Also, texting is now more popular than calling someone. A change really took place around 2008 or 2009.

I feel guilty all the time because my grandma doesn’t have email or receive texts, so we can only communicate by phone, but I never call anyone anymore.

To me that happened because my son would not answer my calls, but he would respond to my texts. That was my “Gee” moment. I thought, what does it take to actually hear his voice or see his face talking to me?

So the idea for your company comes from your son refusing to take your calls? This is stereotypically a Jewish mother problem.

There was some epiphany around both kind of topics. Getting forced to use SMS by my son, and also the lack of bandwidth in the developing world.

The idea being: if we can’t have bandwidth for Facetime, at least we’ll simulate it.

Right. Once the idea started taking shape, I realized that so many other things would become possible: texting, e-books, Twitter. Imagine people having their tweets come alive--so Anderson Cooper would be tweeting from some place, and all of a sudden his picture pops up on Twitter.

"Applications include video texting, books read by their author, or by your favorite actor. Angelina Jolie could be the one setting up your schedule, instead of Siri."

Of course, you can’t record an infinite number of videos with Anderson Cooper to transform anything he might write into video. So how does your tech work?

For full control, obviously you cannot record all of it--it becomes obscene. So we develop models. We record enough visual expressions of a person that we have a range of emotions and expressions available to use. Then we do the same thing for audio: the person talks for a certain amount of time, we record that, we build a model. For the vocabulary and expressions that are not there, we can interpolate them from past history.

At this point let’s have readers take a look at this video you recently release demonstrating your technology:

When I first saw this, I thought you just took a 22-second clip of Reagan and fiddled with his mouth. Did you do more than alter his mouth here?

Absolutely. We changed the whole face. Variations of the mouth are all connected to the rest of the face. There’s a lot more than a 22-second set of data. We looked at probably about 20 minutes of total video to extract a model from.

In behind-the-scenes features on Pixar movies, you see “wireframe” builds of the animation. Is there a wireframe here?

There is a wireframe--but not the way you’re familiar with in cartoons. You have a huge number of possible variations that the wireframe could move--for example when the mouth opens, depending on the expression, the cheeks could be in a different place.

Essentially, this image of Reagan is a sort of model or puppet that you can manipulate in all sorts of ways.

Right. We’re not modifying it--we are generating the face from scratch.

Is this completely new technology?

From our knowledge, and we’ve talked to a number of experts, this is the first time. It’s actually quite complex and difficult.

Why’d you choose to demo on Reagan? Isn't it partisan, and also kind of creepy?

I’ll take all the credit and the blame.

You should have reached out to the RNC and told them Reagan could have given the keynote.

We didn’t want to particularly take sides on either party.

How do you commercialize the technology in the near future?

One of the most interesting things for us is the advertising space. To a lot of advertising experts, personalization and video are important. If you have a brand--take for example the T-Mobile girl. It takes a lot of time and money to get these actors in front of the camera to shoot them. Now if you want to update the message about the brand, it may be expensive and impractical to get these guys in front of the camera again. So the question was, can we do this one-time shoot and generate any message dynamically?

The T-Mobile girl’s agent is screaming out in pain right now.

No, I think the T-Mobile girl would be extremely happy. She could continue to monetize her image, and her agent would get a cut of that too.

But licensing your likeness for infinite permutations--that’s kind of scary.

All these things are negotiated. I think they would not allow--I’m just making it up--using her image more than once a week, or not more than two times a quarter.

So do you have advertisers or brands interested?

In the past week I had some really exciting conversations. I don’t know where they’re gonna end up, but there were some really big names. In the next couple of months, we could come up with our exciting first application.

Where do you imagine this tech in five or ten years?

I strongly believe that text-to-video will be a mainstay, but whether it will blossom into full bloom in five or ten years, I don’t know. But applications include video texting, books read by their author, or by your favorite actor. Angelina Jolie could be the one setting up your schedule, instead of Siri.

That’s trading up. But wouldn’t it dilute Angelina’s brand?

I don’t know. Let’s say someone offers hundreds of millions of dollars...

Returning to the idea of having a text-to-video chat with a family member--won’t there be the issue of the Uncanny Valley?

I think the technology would get to the point where we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

But then if someone can hijack my mom’s likeness and impersonate her, isn’t that problematic?

With every new technology and paradigm, we have to deal with philosophical questions of how to prevent abuse. There are several ways we think we could do this: with a watermark on the audio or video, for instance. There are ways that you can assure that people know the difference, which one is real, and which one is not real.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com