Alright. Tonight we are releasing a ‘Reports Dashboard’ for all consultants who toil to make it happen between the organizations and their customers. Why this consultant’s dashboard, you would ask? Well, according to us social web is not just a buzzword. Organizations fail to leverage the  ’social’ part, only because they aren’t so social really. And that is where the experts need to pitch in and help the companies to engage in a social yet profitable manner. We assist the consultants in doing that. The Reports Dashboard is all about consultants, and their needs w.r.t tracking the clients that they are engaged with.

Within the SMC (Soc  Med Consult) platform there is a reports tab, within which again there are links and indicators that reveal the performance data pertaining to an existing relationship. The page looks something like this:

There are several features within the reports dashboard, which we believe, are going to be of great use to the consultants in understanding the last mile challenges of companies in place. Consultants can use the data to help their clients (companies/agencies) tide over the issues and possibly perform better on the social web. In effect, we all go up the ladder, together.

Oh yeah, when we lasted consulted Octopus Paul he, like any soccer lover , predicted that some of the features in the Reporting Module are gonna stick into future while some would simply die away. So we are kind of open to hearing more from you i.e. the Consultants, to figure out what should be included in the final release of SMC platform and what not to be.

Keep shining.

Cheers,

BubbleIdeas Team

The hardest step for Organizations (or the Government) is to manage online social presence without being damned into “caveman’s idiot” category. The truth is that real people have real expectations, and they sometimes also have patience. And the key to managing social media properly is the ability to strike a balance between the two – patience and expectations. Umpteen number of brands failed to handle social media properly just because they did not have an understanding of how Internet works, or how to respond in the public domain.

To support the cause of Social Media i.e. of letting people and Organizations come together, we thought of developing a platform for the experts. The people who understand the worth of social media and know how to manage PR affairs and PR crises on the web. We have launched a global platform for the Social Media Consultants.

With this platform the Social Media Consultants can connect with Organizations, and possibly other utilities as well, and help them adopt social media properly and perpetually. The naysayers have always warned us against a social world, and about losing control many times before, but we believe in the power of Internet and think that this is the right way to let everyone adopt, try and gain from web 2.0/web 3.0. We are focused on long term benefits rather than on immediate results.

Here is how our Social Media Expert’s platform works:

Step – 1: The consultants can easily signup on behalf of their organizations or themselves and create their SME accounts (we are offering “Preview SME Access” at a throw-away price of USD 49/- per year only).

Step – 2: Upon validation and opening of account, our SME’s will get an access to a dashboard with following tabs:

Step – 3: SMEs can edit and fill the details about themselves, their business on the dashboard and on the Payment Settings tab, add/edit the banking information. We will consider that account to deliver the commission earned by the SME

Step-4: Like all other products, BubbleIdeas too has a use-case and a direction. In the “Sales Funda” tab the SME can learn the basics about the product. We will eventually provide all training materials and sales related fundamentals through this tab as we grow along with you.

Step-5: The “Create Customer” tabs is the most important one and SMEs need to be careful while handling actions inside this tab. The first rule is that before you sell BubbleIdeas to anyone, you must be “signed in” with your SME account. If you are in “signed in” state, BubbleIdeas will recognize your SME account and link the client with your profile automatically.

Secondly, not all customers i.e. companies or Governments are of same size. Their requirements can vary a lot. So apart from the regular online plans, we also provide our SME’s (only our SMEs!!) a custom plan where SMEs can decide the price upon negotiation with clients. Isn’t that amazing? Personally I believe that this requirement is a must for Social Media Experts out there if we are talking about clients with very specific requirements in countries of different flavors.

Last but not the least, we also have provision for Master Social Media Experts. Master SME’s are those who have great grasp on their local demography. They have the drive to build their own network of Social Media Experts/Sellers who in turn can go out there and help the clients with BubbleIdeas. If you are interested to become a master SME, and want to learn more about it then please write to arvind [at] bubbleideas [d0t]com.

World of Internet is amazing. With all the information dangling at a click’s distance, almost anything is possible. We sometimes get surprised ourselves by looking at how clean and economical our project BubbleIdeas has been using the power of internet. Our server hosting is out of America, where it is dirt cheap and of good quality. Our development out of India, where coding talent is cheap, and almost a commodity and our business processes are out of Singapore, which is a known haven for businesses globally.

How did we thread such an enterprise? Internet. Internet is the key.

Something similar is likely to apply over the network of Governance as well. Directly or indirectly, some of the cheapest and most optimum resources are likely to knit the “platform called Government 2.0″ in the future. A similar paradigm applies on the regular industry as well. BubbleIdeas, in one of the first major International Strategic Alliances in the Gov 2.0 / Gov 3.0 space announces a strategic partnership with Silberberg Innovations of California.

We are extremely excited about this collaboration and both companies, we believe, will see tremendous leverage arising out of the alliance.

Government 2.0 is taking the world by a storm. Citizen driven campaigns, open-source projects, large companies, smaller start-ups and even individuals are flocking around Gov 2.0, each tackling different set of problems and solving them with innovative little solutions. The eco-system is all set to push out a very new and unique format of Governance. The very approach brings us into thinking the future of the web: Semantic – where websites are dynamic applications that talk to each other, data is meaningfully connected and the aggregate of services offered over the web react optimally to actions from one platform to another. BubbleIdeas (in beta) – the World’s first Semantic Collaboration Tool is one such step.

At this stage, BubbleIdeas offers customizable HTML5 layouts with access to CSS and dashboard for more creativity by designers around the world. It boasts of features such as ‘protection of minority interest’, ‘multiple sortings’ and best of all – a simple straightforward ‘signup-less’ process to converse which ensures that no human is demotivated from participating. We’ve also opened an online partnership platform for the social media enthusiasts around the world.

Silberberg Innovations is a perfect entity with kick-ass board of Advisors who have the right experience in building an ecosystem for enterprise and Government around social web. We believe this relationship is the right step for our company towards our commitment to provide excellence in crucial services for Gov 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

Wish us all luck!

Cheers,

Team, BubbleIdeas

Social media is as real as it can be. And just like the search problem, it is still young and yet to manifest itself completely over the facet of our society. There are numerous challenges, unsolved problems  and inefficiencies out there around the world, which IMHO social media can definitely help us transcend. Then why despite the supply-demand gap, and with all the urge within people & organizations to connect, do the enterprise or Government fail while adopting social media? Or at least end up doing it very inefficiently?

Does not such failures affect the faith of the industry on social media? I believe yes, it does affect the outlook of industry and therefore, it is very important for all of us to not only help people adopt social media but also help them do it with great focus and the right attitude.

So what is important for industry/Government before it joins the social media band-wagon? The answer is ‘understanding of web‘, ‘understanding of two-way transparent communication‘ etc., right? Well yes, but not quite. Check out this article called why enterprise software sucks by 37signals.com which talks about poor user interface of most enterprise software which, inevitably, is a result of separation of procurement/power centers from the working level – i.e. actual users of the system. In large companies (it applies to Government also) the decision makers are NOT the actual users of the systems and therefore, very little emphasis on quality of user interface.

A similar philosophy applies to use-case of social media where large corporates try to adopt it. The power center, which more often than not is composed of the older generation, is not able to understand or think the way a web-based social channel calls for. Their knowledge or sometimes attitude is inadequate to adopt social media successfully. So how can we support and help industry tide over such a knowledge gap?

The answer is: Guidance.The Social Media Experts need to guide the corporates and the Government for a smooth landing on social media. Opening a Twitter page or Facebook community is NOT the end to it, rather more consulting is required enroute the journey to help the companies understand the worth of talking & listening and solving the problems.

Traditional companies and infrastructure requires guidance to migrate from the traditional thinking to a modern one. The one & only reason why organizations end up in a mess around social media is that they don’t understand how it works. Or how important it is to engage and listen to real people sitting away in their homes and exploring specific services and products and their alternatives offered elsewhere.

There are few examples of large companies like Jet Blue, Dell Computers who have benefited from social media a lot, but that’s because they understood how to respond to people and take actions based on the thoughts & ideas sent by their customers. Social media without actions & decisions is a major failure.

Don’t you think so?

We released two bare essential features for Terminals on BubbleIdeas today.

Notifications & Live Feed.

Notifications, are a great way to bring people sitting on two geographically distant locations at one place and mull over topics and conversations of common interest. Starting today, our clients will be able to utilize email notifications to help their community engage with each other better and more closely.

In effect commentaries from end-users will trigger more notifications to the users who participated on a thread earlier, something like a chain reaction, to keep the discussion going with more and more people getting involved and aware about the topic in question.

Of course, the user has a choice to unsubscribe from such email notifications at any time by just one step of un-checking on their profile also!

Secondly, Live feed is made available to users on the ‘Bubble Sort’ page where the user can see the activity and meta-data pertaining to the activity reflecting on the feed. This is particularly useful for people who proactively choose not to receive email notifications from the terminal but want to stay connected with the community.

We believe that there is a significant correlation between “warm feelings” and “enthusiasm” of end-users with the real time activity of people on a forum. Both email notifications and live feed help the users grab attention of activity on a terminal and encourages them to stay connected. Hope you like the features and so do your end-users.

Keep it warm and appealing to your customers/citizens – that is the mantra.

Team, BubbleIdeas

Okay. So your customers want to talk to you. But you have a ‘signup or leave‘ condition placed on your forum and that is almost like a stalemate between you and your users. Believe it or not, forcing users to signup is very very discouraging to human beings who simply want to talk to you. They want to collaborate, interact and reach you so that you can help them with better products or better services.

Sadly, most of the Enterprise 2.0 or Government 2.0 solutions out there ask your users to sign up or get lost. At best they give a support integration with Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook which leaves a lot to ask for. Especially, when one wants to track, reward or simply keep in touch with the person who cared to spare one’s precious time while interacting with you.

More often than not, such a social face of an organization thwarts away a majority of people, simply because either the interface becomes too boring (challenging to use) or there were too many obstacles before one could start actions. Now we humans are simply too lazy to spend time to register for yet another website. Or may be it is under-motivating not-trustworthy to jump over the obstacles and yet sign up!

BubbleIdeas solves these issues seamlessly.

Well here is the deal: Let your customers not worry about signup, and a lot of other things. Especially, when they want to talk to you. Let them just write their message to you, exactly the way they feel while there are no user names, no passwords, no random obligations to remember. Nothing. BubbleIdeas allows them to post anonymously, simply with an email id. Just like one would comment on a wordpress blog out there.

This is how a typical screen looks like to an online user while posting:

Forums on BubbleIdeas retain the emails of your users and keeps it a secret all the time. It doesn’t even attribute an authenticated profile (real-estate) to the anonymous user! Until and unless the actual user sometime in future decides to verify the account (through an email sent to his id) and claim his conversations. Now that’s the most frictionless way of conversing with your customers

Reserved actions like Voting, profile building etc. is limited to those who register as authenticated users on the portal. Doesn’t that sound sweet?

The advantage of such a system, is that if you (say you are the customer) want to talk to a company about something which is relevant for thousands of other customers, you just have to type the message and hit the submit button with your current email id. That’s all. And if that idea does well on the platform, it rises to the top and the management decides to act upon it, or reward its originator, you still have a chance to claim the conversation in future by simply authenticating the email id that you used to deposit the idea.

It’s that simple. So go ahead, give it shot, and invite your friends & customers into talking. Collaborate.

Team, BubbleIdeas.

Starting 15th July 2010, we have begun rolling out our product, in its pure awesomeness. Some of the major work we’ve brought out this week is:

1. Fresh home website,
2. High quality interactive interface for forums – aka Terminals,
3. Better algorithms for sorting out popular conversations,
4. Anonymous-Easy-Signup for customers of our customers, and
5. Tania – Text Analysis for Natural Language using Intelligent Algorithms.

Phew. Quite a list, isn’t it?

Now let me describe the tiny little things that BubbleIdeas can do right now. Starting off on a journey of intelligence, BubbleIdeas is joined by TANiA – Text Analysis of Natural language using Intelligent Algorithms – which tries to understand the sentiment of our conversations. TANiA is a baby right now. She is learning whatever you are talking to our clients, and each other. She takes a note of your emotions and thoughts and encourages the system to give your voice a priority. Of course, she has a lot to learn but all that through a separate post.

Let’s delve into the regular stuff first:

1.  Fresh Home Page & Layout for our Website. Yeah one of the major milestones for us was to have an attractive home website that pleases the eye. And with the little resources (of a startup) that we have, we have finally released a refreshing look:

Do let us know if it looks Good, Bad or Ugly to you?

The most satisfying story alongside the work is the support and guidance we received particularly from Ben Tremblay, Edmonton Canada, Elkee Boezeman, Sweden, Jason L. Baptiste, San Francisco and the many friends from Singapore, India and South Africa. We couldn’t have done it without you guys. Thanks a million. On our home website, now we have a conspicuous button called ‘Create Terminal‘ instead of those buttons with standard text like ‘Open Account’.

We just didn’t feel like using that hackneyed phrase.

2. High quality interactive interface for The Terminal. Once you open a terminal – if I may use the term simply – you will note that it has a lot of charm to attract people into talking to you. Please note that everything over BubbleIdeas is HTML 5! We provide all our customers access to CSS that one can use to redesign the portal according to custom needs. Despite adoption to HTML5, we have deliberately avoided using some tags which are yet not recognized by widespread browsers – such as the Internet Explorer.However, the enthusiasts can use the permissions and controls on BubbleIdeas to customize the app according to one’s situation.

As usual, depending on your business goals you can divide the terminal into categories that act like specific point of contact. Your customers/crowds can come in and drop their ideas, or talk to each other and give your their two (may be three) cents. You can also give a face to your terminal by bringing in a team of employees or people from your community to respond to people in real time and help you play.

2. Better Algorithms for Sorting out popular conversations: Yes, we have improved our algorithm to calculate the relevance of a given idea. TANiA helps us in doing that. Did you know that BubbleIdeas can help protect ideas & thoughts of minority groups in a forum which might be driven by an opinionated majority? Not yet? Well then try suppressing an idea that you don’t like and see what happens! There are a lot of instances where community driven discussions have led to newer thoughts and approaches that helped man to figure out the right direction. BubbleIdeas will continue to adapt to such newer scenarios as we – humble humans behind the app – turn the stones on our way.

3. Anonymous-easy-Signup for customers of our customers: Terminals on BubbleIdeas allow anonymous posting, in order to lower the barriers of engagement for your customers. Just like people comment on popular blogs, your customers can now give you their 2 cents without having to go through the pain of signing-up and approval. Of course, you can incentivize authentic signup by giving out rewards for best of ideas from people and get more out of your community.

Do give the BubbleIdeas a spin, and try it for large numbers for sure.

Cheers,

Team, BubbleIdeas

Hi Guys, wish you all a Very Happy 4th of July!                                         Team, BubbleIdeas

Recap the last decade. What were the entrepreneurs thinking then?

“What next man? What do we do now? Hotmail is done. Gmail I cannot replace, Yahoo is done, Social Networks are way too many, Search is a big boy’s game. What do I build next?

Hey let’s look at the demand. What do people want? Let’s do something for the enterprise customers. They want to engage and be a part of the social phenomena. And people? People want to engage with their favorite brands. Besides it’s a pretty low hanging fruit when it comes to monetizing a startup, isn’t it?”

Yeah, why not! And what would the entrepreneurs build?

Well they would go on and build awesome viral applications for clients on Facebook. They’d create customer-centric social networks for organizations – like Ning. They’d consult clients to join Twitter to grab more followers, create SAAS CRMs -  Salesforce, create tools to consolidate leads – 37 Signals, create hosted office suites – Zoho, LMS, CMS and you just name it.

Eventually the world would go Enterprise 2.0!

Demand would push humanity from web 1.0 over to web 2.0 with a huge monetary turn around for techies who hold the capability to build web 2.0 products. Perhaps in quickest of times mankind would see a new race of products that suit the interest of businesses. Businesses that are the capitalist entities whose single point agenda is to get close to a client and then get closer to money. That’s how web got here. Organizations, venture funds, entrepreneurs and pretty much everyone else had a reason to let web evolve by enabling enterprise 2.0. That’s how industry 1.0 formed the axis of evolution for web 2.0.

But what is next? What do people want now?

For that let us look at an obscure unrelated example. Rewind 50 years back and look at what India did to uproot a colonial power off its land without a weapon in hand. Guess how the team of 300 million poorest of the poor led by the Great Mahatma Gandhi seized freedom from the hands of the powerful Brits? That is the power of the people, we are talking about. Can a similar force apply on social web against the slow, aging, deep-rooted incumbent architecture of Governance?

Well, the truth is out there. Already.

Ever since William D. Eggers coined the term Government 2.0, there is a constant hum going on around the world that talks about ‘civic action in a participatory manner’. What do people want from Government after all? Better management, better services, better infrastructure and transparency? Is that all? No. People want to trust the Government. Just like they want to trust the brands. How can the citizen’s trust be built stronger in ways that were applied in creation of applications for brand engagement and trust reinforcement on consumer products? Or is there a difference between the two paradigms – enterprise 2.0 or Government 2.0?

And what are the entrepreneurs going to do about it? What would this phenomenon eventually lead mankind to building next?

The semantic web! Not everything w.r.t Governance is the same as that for enterprise factions. Governments are super-sets in everything that they do. A scale of power & engagement that is very different from what consumer businesses are all about. Perhaps one may want to read the thermodynamics of Government 2.0 to make a “guesstimate” of the scale that we are talking about here.

Government 2.0 is going to be the axis of semantic web i.e. web 3.0.

That’s exactly the reason why Sir Tim Berners Lee, father of Internet, is involved with Gov20 initiatives. The challenges faced by officials to govern a country are nothing less than predictions on weather or sometimes even more complicated. The very fact that interpretations, language barriers and cultural disparities form a significant part of Government functioning, makes it a perfect challenge (and use-case) for development of applications based on Intelligence & Neural programming. The requirements of Government 2.0 would give rise to semantic applications that would bring down the constant nag of problems like rigging the processes, losing the control, electing the wrong guy or being left ignored etc. Government 2.0 will accelerate the race of technology to a level where mankind would hit the doorbell of intelligence sooner than expected.

Industry had not as much interest in pushing the technology beyond the point of monetization. Government 2.0 has different appeal to a common man. It will change the landscape of web in future.

We did our first exhibition at Singapore last week. Our product was received with warmth & appreciation from a little over 1000 delegates who visited the conference. Here are some snippets of the conference:

That’s Dave Mcclure, giving great insights to blind up-climb that startups have to do.

That’s the kind of enthusiasm Asians startups had in Singapore.

Talking about BubbleIdeas for Government 2.0 here.

That’s Andy & Arun on their interesting startup – Gameplan. I surely felt that every exhibiting startup/booth could have been captured on camera and made available to the attendees. That’s a feedback for Echelon guys! You did a splendid job in bringing together such an international exhibition & talent together. Congratulations.

I like “BubbleIdeas for its clean and focused look & feel.” - one of the most senior delegate complimented.

We thank you all who came to our booth and spared their valuable time.

Team BubbleIdeas