BunchBall – Great demo by Kevin Spier, Director of Sales. Bunchball has a mature toolset and has been around since 2005. They have  many well known clients such as Comcast, Victoria’s Secret, and NBC. I was quite impressed by their capabilities and analytics.  It’s rare that service providers surpass my expectations but BunchBall did. BunchBall is backed by Granite Ventures and Adobe Systems Incorporated. The downside is that their current pricing model reflects their targeted clientele. Bunchball has a set pricing model in the mid 4 figures per month for up to 1MM unique vistors. All in all, a great value for established customers who have the budget to drive traffic to their site in a meaningful way – because let’s face it, gamification works if properly implemented. Kevin was quite helpful and introduced me to several of his connections who are interested in the space of my new venture.

BigDoor – Good demo by Keith Smith, CEO of BigDoor. BigDoor recently scored a $5MM venture round led by the Foundry Group, so they are playing catch up in some ways to the more established BunchBall. They have a toolset that will be able to get me the gamification features I desire, albeit with more massaging from my own development team than BunchBall. One plus about this is that BigDoor provides their technology more like an open source library so I can customize the features to fit my needs.  Keith also has been quite helpful and BigDoor has a huge advantage for two reasons: First, I, too, am a Seattle based startup CEO, so I am biased towards supporting local businesses and startups and Second, their pricing model, while based on API calls, scales with my business. This is an almost unarguable advantage for a cash-strapped startup and ultimately led towards our choice to go with BigDoor.

Do yourself a favor if you need to drive traffic and participation to your site and check out these two Companies, both offer superior value-added services.

Dan Hall

Dan Hall

Sourcing Seattle

Stay tuned to hear about my journey in the Seattle startup space and the interesting people and companies I meet.

Dan Hall

I am always intrigued with companies using technology to improve processes so I decided to take a deeper look at Qworky’s website to see if they had a demo or more information about how they actually plan on help me have better meetings. Here’s what I found out:

1. “Easy to access agendas ensures your meeting tells for years to come. ” Mmm. Okay.

2. “A shared central location for meeting information means Qworky reduces email overhead, all while integrating email for clients and colleagues who live and breathe their inbox. ” Gotcha, central meeting location online.

3. “By incorporating positive cues proven to increase collaborative participation, Qworky Meetings is your ultimate brainstorm companion. Bring Qworky to the Table and the Ideas will follow.”  Apparently, you haven’t met some of the people I sit with in meetings.

And that’s all they’re sharing. Fortunately, the meeting preview they used at NWEN is still available here. You can also go to their preview site and register to set up your own test meeting. It was pretty straight forward. Below is the end result.

So, here the problem. You are asking me to use another artificial process (Qworky) to better another artificial process (the meeting). I assume, eventually, you will even ask me to pay for it. It looks much like a B2C play which is a difficult play when tackling processes within organizations. You may get some adopters here or there but more than likely there will be significant obstacles for widespread use.

I like startups, I like them a lot. I also like to see them tackling cool issues like making meetings better. For that, I wish Qworky luck.

Dan Hall

I am finding the ratio of time I spend reading content, tweeting, and interacting on the web shifting dramatically from my laptop towards my iPhone. This shift will only become more pronounced in the future as more and more people adopt smart phones with unlimited data plans.

I find is amazing that there are still Fortune 500 companies that don’t have mobile web compatabile sites. I am surprised when popular blogs use flash a video platform.

In this digital age and economy, every percent of market share and every hit on your website count. Don’t you want my business / click through / repeat visit? Build a mobile browser friendly website already.

Dan Hall
Posted via the WordPress App on his iPhone 3GS

“Management-side lawyers are warning employers about the hidden dangers of LinkedIn, the popular business networking site that posts recommendations for job candidates. Specifically, attorneys are advising employers to be wary of giving glowing remarks about employees on the site because the employers risk having the recommendations used against them in a discrimination or harassment suit. ”

Read the full article here.

I have noticed a growing number of reciprocal recommendations between current and former employees of companies, which is to be expected to some extent. However, the danger lies in supervisors giving glowing reviews of former employees. eDiscovery is all too easy and becoming the norm rather than the exception. Twitter accounts, cell phone data, and social media profiles are now fair game in the legal arena. More and more companies are collecting this data and providing data streams to clients as a service. Lawyers are doing this same research.

Pretty soon we will see articles depicting the impact of a single LinkedIn recommendation on the outcome of a case (or maybe not, if the Company had decent counsel, they would settle out of court with a non-disclosure agreement).

Dan Hall

I don’t use the word hate lightly, hate is one of those strong words like love too lightly used. Hate in this instance entailed a strong aversion coupled with desire that evil should befall Thug Manager.  All of Thug Manager’s subordinates wished evil upon him.

An example of his thuglike nature was how he would interact with groups of subordinates. First, the military has a very hierarchical rank system, one that is extremely transparent as rank is worn on the uniform. You know immediately if the person you are talking to you is higher, of equal, or lower ranking than you. There are rules of conduct for how to stand, talk, greet, and address people of different ranks. These rules of conduct are punishable by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which interesting enough in a combat zone include punishments up to death for most infractions, insubordination being one of these.

Now, I never felt compelled in the military to remind a subordinate of my rank or position, that is readily apparent.  If you are in charge, you are in charge and act like it. I never raised my voice or demeaned a subordinate, it was unecessary for the reasons listed above. I was secure enough as a leader, unlike Thug Manager.

Thug Manager would enter a room, single out a subordinate, invade their personal space, put them at the position of attention (imagine standing in one place with your hands at your side), and start a series of retorical questions that included:

“What rank am I?”

“Do you understand English”

“What part of what I am saying don’t you understand?”

“What have you done wrong that you aren’t telling me?”

“Are you stupid or just insubordinate?” ( I always liked that one myself)

This would include forcing all subordinates to do push-ups all the while his face turning deeper shades of purple with vein popping and spittle included.

The problem with Thug Management besides the extremely dehumanizing and demoralizing behavior is that high performing subordinates with any sense of self esteem rebel. Not an outright rebellion but a rebellion none the less. They push back. They do only what was specifically told and nothing more. They do whatever it takes to shut Thug Manager up or make them go away. They create their own priorities of work to procrastinate. They wish Thug Manager dead and spent a lot of time fantasizing about such acts. 

I used to walk around our office with five excuses for everything I was doing, not doing, or was worried about doing or not doing. I learned quickly to not divulge any extra information but to answer as succinctly as possible. No one volunteered for anything. Subordinates would band together and provide alibis for each other. There were many times where I would purposefully set the Thug Manager off, knowing it would send him into an apoplectic fit. That was the only method of fighting back I had.

Threats of punishment? Nope, threats get old after awhile. Once you are threatened and there is no follow through, it becomes an idle threat.

Threat of firing me? Please, I am begging you to fire me.

Unfortuntely, I couldn’t quit, it being the military and all. If I was in an at-will employment position, I would have quit after about two weeks. That’s the problem, high performers know they are exactly that and usually are quite marketable. Once all the people with self esteem are gone, what are you left with?    

The only thing that a Thug Manager has is being a thug. Subordinates quickly learn that their behavior  and performance has no impact on how they will be treated in the present or future. 

The worst part about the whole situation was that Thug Manager’s boss knew he was a thug and allowed the behavior to continue because our team met our performance goals. 

Dan Hall

LinkedIn allowed me as a recruiter to directly source senior level executive candidates for Visible Technologies. This  enabled the company to recruit for very senior positions without resorting to the use of a very expensive executive search agency. That is a very valuable resource.

That being said, I recently purchased an iPhone 3GS and downloaded the LinkedIn iPhone App. There are plenty of product reviews floating around on the web, so I won’t go into the actual product specs in great detail. However, I was surprised in doing a quick Google search on “LinkedIn iPhone App”, how positive the reviews were.  See the reviews at AppSafari or  SocialTimes; both of which are in the Top 5 Google search results. I think LinkedIn fundamentally missed the mark on their iPhone app.

First, whenever you launch an add-on product or service, you need to design it in context of your core product or service strengths and value. LinkedIn is not a communication platform whose value relies on connection or status updates, yet half of their iPhone App is dedicated to this. Having even a couple Open Networkers (see my previous posts on Open Networking), removes any desire I have to follow my LinkedIn contact connection updates. Of the current network updates I have in my LinkedIn iPhone App, 49 of the 50 updates are connection updates. Connection Updates are arguably the least interesting type of update on LinkedIn (vs. status updates, question / answer updates, or profile updates). Of those 49 connection updates, Open Networkers comprise of 45 of those updates.

Yes, 90% of my LinkedIn iPhone App updates consist of Open Networker connection updates, which has the same value to me as the phone company informing me that the White Pages just got updated. Even worse, every connection update is listed out individually. Why not incorporate the same feature as in the LinkedIn weekly emails updates where connection updates are aggregated by person? That way I don’t see every new connection that an Open Networker, who 35 new connections in one day, has, I only see they have 35 new connections with the option to drill down further.   

LinkedIn is not the place I go to understand what people in my Social Network are currently up to. I don’t feel a compelling need to check LinkedIn everyday and certainly not with their iPhone App. Twitter and Facebook have a stranglehold on that space. I have a healthy number of LinkedIn connections (238, I am selective in whom I connect with), and of my connections three, yes 3, have updated their status on LinkedIn within the last 48 hours.

LinkedIn’s iPhone App is a useful tool with its connection and search capabilities, a tool to be used in specific circumstances. That is the area that LinkedIn is strong, being a great tool for specific uses, i.e. Recruiting, Finding a Job, Professional Networking, and Researching People and Organizations. Monetize what you do well, don’t create products that service the areas you don’t. 

Dan Hall

Sourcing Seattle

“This is a test & only a test”

“This is a test & only a test” (edit with Worpress iPhone App). I am also quite interested in reviewing the meta tags created using the All in One SEO Pack plug-in.

Dan Hall