Ondango Receives US$500K to Scale Facebook Shopping Platform

Ondango, a third-party provider of Facebook stores, has secured a US$ 500,000 capital investment from a group led by London-based venture capital fund Connect Ventures. The new capital will be used to scale Ondango’s Facebook-shopping platform.

Based in Germany, Ondango provides a platform the company says allows users to set up a Facebook store in minutes, with no technical knowledge. Users pay a monthly fee and Ondango also says no e-commerce experience is needed to run a Facebook store on its platform.

According to Ondango, it will use the new investment to accelerate growth and scale its services for small- and mid-sized businesses. Specific areas where Ondango plans to focus improvement include driving traffic to Facebook stores and overall customer experience.

Not Waiting around for Facebook

A posting on DailyDealMedia credits Ondango for “subscribing to the theory of tapping into what is becoming known as Facebook commerce.” This refers to a Facebook commerce performed without the assistance of apps. While Facebook “flounders around trying to figure out how to best monetize its unofficial 1 billion users,” DailyDealMedia says third party providers like Ondango are trying to tap into its “massive user base.” 

Independent data suggests Facebook commerce, whether supported by Facebook itself or a third party, could prove quite lucrative. DailyDealMedia references Booz & Co. estimates that the worldwide market for social commerce will be US$ 9 billion this year and top US$ 30 billion by 2015. As DailyDealMedia understates, “It’s anticipated that Facebook could perhaps amass a rather large slice of that social commerce pie.”

Social Media Has ‘Science Fiction’ Potential

In a recent CMSWire column about the Social Media Intelligence Conference, Matthew O’Connell indirectly supported the notion of Facebook becoming a major direct e-commerce channel by discussing the “science fiction” potential social media has to change our daily existence.

The pervasiveness of social media on the internet is obvious,” wrote O’Connell. “Within a very short time, we'll be (social networking) in our Google Glasses, Facebook Phone, contact lenses (MIT has a patent on these) or brain implants, with less effort and easier access. By integrating this worldwide system of information seamlessly into our reality, we are on the precipice of an entirely new language; one of vision, intuition, transparency. In this world, we are everywhere at once without leaving our homes… The power that companies like Google and Facebook have is nearly unlimited.”

While O’Connell does not discuss social commerce per se in his column, clearly he is describing a world where social networking becomes a pervasive, everyday means of interaction with the world, and we all know how big a role commerce plays in our daily interaction.

Several angel investors, including Andy Goldstein, executive director of the Ludwig MU Entrepreneurship Center, have also participated in this round of financing. More than 400 Facebook shops use the Ondango platform, mainly in the music, sports and lifestyle market segments.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Inside AT&T's Democratic and Republican Convention Apps

The apps are similar, but only one party asked for a feature for "farm-to-fork foodies."

Chris Hill, the VP of the Advanced Mobility Solutions unit at AT&T, was a driving force behind smartphone apps made especially for the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Guess which party’s app features a “farm-to-fork foodie” section?

FAST COMPANY: Are apps like this new for AT&T?

CHRIS HILL: We’ve been doing them for the better part of the last two and a half years. Advance Mobility Solutions is a dedicated business unit within AT&T that started three years ago. We took a lot of learnings in the entertainment, media, and hospitality verticals and applied them to a large event like these conventions.

What features do the convention apps have?

There’s live video streaming from the convention, there’s social media integration. We have messaging functionality in both applications, and breaking news feeds and alerts. Then you have attraction-finders, the ability to find local businesses and attractions. You have an interactive schedule, showing how events map to the convention floor.

You’ve essentially made a disposable app. Why dedicate resources for a one-off app?

It makes a big impact for the attendees. You can increase the value of the event considerably. We’re building these applications on configurable platforms, so we can reuse a lot of the intellectual property built up around these applications. This isn’t millions of dollars going into designing applications that are disposable--there’s lots of reusable components.

Are the RNC and DNC apps fundamentally the same?

Lots of the underlying components are similar, but each was custom designed to the specifications of the particular host committees.

What differences leap to mind?

For the DNC, they wanted to make sure we had a number of things in the Fun category. So we had a number of different applications for experiences set up, for shopaholics and farm-to-fork foodies, for example. The RNC app had a QR code scavenger hunt, directing attendees to see local businesses in the Tampa area.

Was the farm-to-fork foodie feature not quite a hit in the RNC’s app?

We didn’t have that in the Republican version.

With AT&T making apps for both the RNC and DNC, was there any concern over a conflict of interest?

We had different teams working on the finished interface and user experience.

Did you put Republicans on the Republican app, Democrats on the Democrat app?

No, we didn’t ask that, and that wasn’t asked of us.

This interview has been condensed and edited. For more from the Fast Talk interview series, click here. Know someone who'd be a good Fast Talk subject? Mention it to David Zax.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Customer Experience: A Cost Benefit Analysis of Simplicity

Simplicity for the customer causes complexity for the organization.

When Manish Chandra was launching Poshmark, a shopping party app, one of the design decisions he faced related to the payment system. It was relatively easy to plug PayPal in. However, Chandra was focused on making everything really easy for the customer. So, instead of using PayPal, his developers spent two months developing a system where payments could be made in two clicks.

The result of Chandra's relentless pursuit of simplicity for the customer was a mobile app that has been a big hit.

Very few organizations have the tools to develop a business case for simplicity. There are no models that I've come across that articulate the return on investment on making something easy to do. This is a huge gap in management metrics.

We know the costs of making things simple; Two extra months of developer time. But we rarely know the value that will accrue. So, in most organizations the pressure is there not to spend those two months.

Making it simple for the customer causes many challenges for the organization.

Customer simplicity is internally disruptive. I once worked with a bank that had an online mortgage application form that requested 14 separate pieces of information from the potential customer. This application perfectly integrated with the bank's internal systems. The problem was that they were getting 2 enquiries a week through the form.

A new manager arrived and demanded improvements.

The web team radically simplified the form, requesting only three pieces of information. The organization was shocked. Internally, everyone hated the form. It's incomplete, they complained. It won't integrate with our systems, they complained. We'll keep getting stupid enquiries from Mickey Mouse, they complained.

The manager decided to give it a try.

In the first week they got 180 enquiries. And yes they did get stupid enquiries from Mickey Mouse and the likes. But in the first three months with the simple form they did 20 times more revenue than in the previous three months with the older, more complex form.

Making life easier for the customer makes life more complex for the organization. Staff who are customer-centric are often seen as troublesome by their colleagues because they are always putting the customers' needs first. There is a very strong internal force to make life as easy, as smooth, as possible.

Many organizations find it very hard to measure outcomes. It's a much simpler job to measure whether you have a payment system than to measure how easy it is to use your payment system.

I see the same organization-centric thinking around content. The focus becomes on producing the content itself because that's a relatively easy thing to do. To focus on what the content helps the customer to do is much harder. But that's where the value lies.

Measuring the content or the app is the old model. Because of the Web we can now measure much better how things are used. Let's focus less on what we produce and more on the use.

About the Author

Gerry McGovern, a content management author and consultant, has spoken, written and consulted extensively on writing for the web and web content management issues since 1994. His latest book is titled The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Twitter Gives Stamp of Approval With New Certified Products Program

Twitter is rolling out a Certified Products Program that offers Twitter-based products and services from third-party developers and partners to businesses. The program is launching with three verticals — engagement products, analytics products and data reseller products.

Twitter Seeks Engagement, Analytics, Data Resale

Twitter is aligning its three initial certified products verticals as follows:

• Engagement Products — Helping brands keep in touch with their customers. This includes activities such as providing workflow or advanced sorting, delegation and assignment of replies, as well as alerting users to high-priority events or tweets requiring immediate action. Developers must make Twitter and Twitter account management and network engagement part of the core product experience and offering.

• Analytics Products — Helping businesses learn from their customers on Twitter. Examples include historical analytics of how previous campaigns unfolded on Twitter and industry-specific analytics that tie activity on Twitter to success metrics. Developers are required to encourage further engagement with Twitter, clearly attribute Twitter as a data source and make Twitter a core part of the product experience.

• Data Reseller Products — Platforms for innovation on top of large numbers of tweets. These include APIs that allow analytics companies to study past conversations and with customers' private data to tie activity on Twitter to proprietary business processes. Developers need to offer API features that are significantly differentiated from Twitter's own, actively encourage customers to build products which drive engagement with Twitter and staff a sales and support organization to meet enterprise customer service expectations.

Twitter Incentivizes API Development

As reported by CMSWire, earlier this month Twitter publicized plans to release version 1.1 of the Twitter API in the coming weeks, and it involves a number of new user restrictions. Changes will include required authentication on every API endpoint, a new per-endpoint rate-limiting methodology, and tighter “Developer Rules of the Road,” especially around applications that are traditional Twitter clients. 

Twitter said these restrictions and requirements are intended to prevent “malicious” use of the Twitter API and to gain an understanding of what types of applications are accessing the API. However, many observers have been skeptical about how altruistic Twitter’s intentions really are. According to VentureBeat, the Certified Products Program is a good start to Twitter’s new API policies.

“For some time now, in private meeting rooms and on public stages, Twitter has urged developers to make these kinds of products — noncompetitive products that would give their makers a real business opportunity,” stated a VentureBeat posting. The article went on to say it is “somewhat encouraging to see Twitter creating incentives for building the right kind of Twitter apps, not just punishments for building the wrong kind.”

Twitter is launching the Certified Products Program with 12 initial partners: Attensity, Crimson Hexagon, Dataminr, DataSift, ExactTarget, Grip, HootSuite, Mass Relevance, Radian6, Sprinklr, Social Flow and Topsy.   

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Interview: NewsGator's J.B. Holston on Being a SharePoint Partner, Future of Collaboration

When you think about Microsoft partners, one of the first that comes to mind is NewsGator. A successful third party integrator to Microsoft SharePoint, NewsGator Social Sites has over 4 million paid seats and is Microsoft's premier partner for social software integration. And while this last little while has seen a number of interesting events happen for NewsGator: Microsoft's acquisition of Yammer, a new version of Social Sites, a new version of SharePoint and a new CEO, it only spells good news for the social software company. Here we offer some of J.B. Holston's (now the former CEO of NewsGator) views on these topics.

CMSWire: NewsGator started as a company that supported RSS. What was the driving force that shifted the focus to social and SharePoint?

JB Holston: In 2005 we released an aggregation server based on RSS whose job was to allow organizations to securely and scalably manage subscriptions to unlimited sources, then intelligently redistribute those feeds. We called the product the “NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES)” (We weren’t great at naming…). One of our first customers was Lockheed, Martin, which took NGES and combined it with SharePoint, which was already their base collaboration layer for employees; Google Search; and some custom wiki work and combined it into one of the first ‘facebook for the enterprise’ applications, which they called Unity. Unity’s business problem was tactic knowledge capture; about 25% of LM’s employees leave every five years and a large proportion of those were the folks with the deepest historical and topical knowledge. LM felt that a more social and easier means to share knowledge would help address that issue.

Soon thereafter the SharePoint team at Microsoft approached us — MOSS (SharePoint Server 2007) was out and while it was being marketed for ‘social’ use cases, the product team recognized the deficiencies. They suggested we more closely tie NGES to SharePoint to provide an out-of-box social solution. We were smart enough to draw a line between the Lockheed Martin and Microsoft data points, and that led to the first version of Social Sites, which we launched with Microsoft at the Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston in the summer of 2007.

CMSWire: What made you decide to tightly integrate Social Sites with SharePoint and not build it as a standalone solution?

JBH: We felt from the start that the value of enterprise social computing would increase directly as a function of the number of individuals accessing the network. We realized that that meant the system needed to act as a scaled, secure, searchable enterprise application, or it would buckle or become prohibitively expensive as organizations sought to provide and support the network for everyone. SharePoint had taken off — in no small part due to Microsoft’s sales and marketing strengths — to become a ubiquitous available platform within organizations. We felt that leveraging its paid-for presence and technical capabilities — and Microsoft’s commitment to it as their fastest-growing server product — would mean we could provide a best-in-class solution at the lowest total cost of ownership to the broadest market.

CMSWire: What do you think makes NewsGator a successful SharePoint partner?

JBH: We’ve invested tremendously in the art and science of Microsoft partnering. Microsoft is a complicated organization that requires careful handling across different field geographies in parallel to close work with a multiplicity of highly-siloed product organizations. We invested the time and people to insure we understood all the different groups’ goals and objectives, and to do everything we could to be clearly and volubly positioned to leverage those goals and objectives. We were also always careful to over deliver on our commitments. And we learned to operate as Microsoft operates — if they stood up a new reporting system we’d use it, however painful; when new technologies became mission-critical to Microsoft, we’d adopt and embed them first.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Amazon Joins the Event Party, 6 September for Kindle Fire 2 and, Perhaps, A Smartphone

 It is officially party season for gadget lovers, as Amazon joins all the other major smartphone and tablet makers with an event to announce its latest wares, scheduled for early next month. 

Reorganize Your Diary

Add another date to your burgeoning diary for media phone or tablet events in the next few weeks. Amazon is inviting the press to a major launch on 6 September in Santa Monica, with the likely topic of discussion being the Kindle Fire 2 and, maybe, an Amazon smartphone. 

So, just to refresh your memory, the launch event line up is as follows:

29 August - Samsung Galaxy Note 2

5 September - Microsoft/Nokia Windows Phone 8

6 September - Amazon Kindle Fire 2, possibly a smartphone

12 September - Apple iPhone 5, possibly iPad Mini

Device Frenzy

With all these devices hitting the shelves shortly after their announcements, the stores will be packed with new product, review sites will be screaming the scores out, and the typical consumer might feel rather put upon by all the pressure to upgrade to a new phone. 

We also have HTC possibly launching a 5inch-screen One X model, then there's the Windows 8 tablet launch in October, making it a very busy selling period. What it does mean is that the older generations of devices will be being sold for great bargain prices come the Black Friday holiday sales, as stores try to clear old stock.  

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com