Spoken Word

Win an iPod or iPad on Spoke -- ONE WEEK ONLY

2012-02-08T12:39:00.000-08:00

Announcing the first-ever SPOKE-A-THON: a challenge to our already-stellar users to push the limits of creativity (oh, and the winners get Apple products!) by creating the best new pages on Spoke.com and submitting them for entry. We select the 5 best pages, whose authors will win an iPod Shuffle! And if you submit 3 winning entries …. you'll get an iPad 2! That's right, an I-P-A-D 2!! Even more important, we will promote the winners (and any winning topics pages) on our homepage, where we get 100,000+ views per month -- that's some serious exposure!

The Rules are simple: Create a new person, company, or topic page on Spoke.com (hint to those of you reading closely -- we really like topics, though any well-done page stands a good chance). Start by going to Spoke.com and clicking "Add a New ____". Create a page on anything you like, and submit it using our online form here.

Entries will be judged on 3 criteria:

Completeness: Use the flexibility of the page. Fill as many fields as you can to build a better page and improve your chances -- this means adding videos, links, great descriptions, and more (depending on page type).

Usefulness: Will your page be informative to the rest of the Spoke audience? Does it contain boring everyday information; or is there unique and actionable insight that isn't common to most people.

Creativity: Of course, a contest like this wouldn't be complete without a little flair -- so feel free to post the unexpected -- links that give unique context, videos that tell a cool story -- it can only help your entry!

The contest window is only 1 week long so don't wait to get going. You may submit multiple entries. And I know what you're thinking -- "didn't Spoke just launch last month, and so wouldn't the competitive pool be pretty small?"

Yep. Probably. Maybe you can run the numbers on your iPad.

Again, there are a few requirements, so read the Official Entry form here. Some examples to get your wheels turning (don't worry, these aren't eligible):

1) Utility Grade Solar
2) Steve Jobs
3) AtHomeNet
4) Job Search Over 40

Click here to get started

Best of Luck!

Time to reflect and notable links

2012-02-02T22:59:00.000-08:00

Since January 6th 2012, when we launched our new site, we have seen just shy of 30,000 edits (about 10,000 edits per week) and about 1,000 new pages (new persons, new companies or new topics). Needless to say that all those edits went through our moderation system and we have been able to fairly quickly understand what people do and don’t do on the site. With three weeks gone by, it is time to start drawing some early conclusions. We have some good news and, of course, we still have things we need to work on.

On the good news side, we are getting more edits than we thought we would get. Even in our wildest dreams, we didn’t think we would have that much to start with.

Our moderation system is handling the load very well with less than 3 hours per day spent on it. About 2/3 of anonymous edits and 90% of the one contributed by registered users are being accepted. This is higher than what we expected and spam is reasonable even though we are seeing it on the rise. We have let few issues pass by but those were caught very quickly by the community and we were able to correct the mistakes very quickly so the feedback loop is also working very well. We have now a lot of great ideas on how to make the moderation system even more efficient and we will let you know about those ideas as we are implementing them.

On what we need to work on, even though people get it, we still have more work to do to get to the 95% accuracy that we want to have for both anonymous and registered users’ contributions:

1) We are going to provide guidelines on each page to let you know what you should or shouldn’t do at each page.

2) We are also going to make enhancements to the UI to make things even more intuitive than they are now.

As part of this blog, I want to reemphasize the notable links/achievement/milestone feature. I really enjoyed this feature when we built it because it enables to create free space for people to come up with creative ideas. So let me answer very quickly few questions about notable links:

What are notable links? Notable links are links that you deem relevant to a profile and you feel are going to enrich user understanding of the profile he is viewing. For a sales person, it could be a deal that has been closed, for an investment banker, it could be a press announcement on a deal he has worked on. For a real estate agent, a listing that he is currently working on, for a recruiter, a press announcement on a successful search or a search he is working on.

What is the difference between notable links and milestones/achievements? At the base level, these are sections that allow you to add a link that points to something else on the internet. To add a level of specificity, Milestones/activities are links that point to a news article about a major event in the history of a company. For example, if a company partners with another company and this comprises significant milestone for the company, a member would want to point to an article that talks about the partnership, and use the drop-down box to note that this is a 'Partnership' Milestone.
In contrast, a Notable Link is more flexible. It can be a news article link that provides interesting context to the profile page, but it could also be something other than a news link, for example a profile on another site, or another website altogether,….

Why are there already links on the page which are not accurate? The links that show on a page you are editing may not be accurate. They are in fact the results of a search made using Microsoft Bing on the title of the page so some links may be correct but others won’t be as is the case for results of a regular search. Within Spoke, you can remove the links that are not yours and keep the ones that are yours so that you show only the curated results for a specific page. You can also add links with the link finder or copy paste links that you found on the Internet.

Social profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Wikipedia by extension) should not be part of notable links as they have their own place in the general info section. YouTube, Quora, Google+ etc.. are all acceptable.

What should I do if the page is not the main subject of the link or press release but I do deem the link relevant to the page? Should I still link to the profile? Yes, you can… I can link Matt Maurer (our community manager)’s page to his favorite rock band but, if I do that, I need to give some context in the title and let people know why I added this link. When you attach a link, Spoke is going to automatically prefill the header with the description of the URL and you can edit the title to tailor to the page you are editing. So in our prior example, the link title would be “Matt’s favorite rock band” posted by “Philippe Cases”. See on my profile how I customize the links on achievement and recognition or notable links (http://www.spoke.com/people/philippe-cases-4db630fd91a343625900000b).

What should I do if I don’t have any notable links about the page I am editing? This sometimes happens especially for small companies or people with a smaller web presence but it should not deter you to find interesting content related to the page you are writing about: a product that the company is working, a technology that they have worked on and, if it is a person, some information about his hobbies…..

Why should I bother? Adding links is important because it enables you to customize the page, this is really where you can make your pages shine and show narratives for the pages you are working on. The richer the links, the more information people will get from the page. Our best pages have time spent on page above 5 minutes so the more quality content you provide, the more people will spend time on your pages.

Adding a link to a page is also important because it is an easy place where you can store and organize all the links about a topic and keep coming back to find the links that were meaningful to you.

If you need more help, please check our video: http://vimeo.com/26678988 or contact us at http://getsatisfaction.com/spoke

Philippe Cases, CEO

Behind the Scenes: The Technology of the New Spoke

2012-01-30T16:27:00.000-08:00

As you know, Spoke recently re-launched as a moderated wiki of business information, and it is quite different from our previous service. We still have many of the same company and person profiles, but how you interact with the information is brand new. We now allow you, the community, to update and edit the information, either as a registered user or anonymously. When we began this project, a little over one year ago, we knew that the end product would be different enough that we would have to build this project from scratch. This posed an important question to be answered: on what technologies do we build the new Spoke web application?

The infrastructure for the previous version of Spoke can be summed quickly as Java, Struts 1.x, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and a home-grown service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure. We also had a codebase that was almost 9 years old. Since the new application had to be built from scratch, we had the opportunity to choose a new platform for development.

Our first decision was to choose a new web framework. We explored a few frameworks such as Scala on Lift, Python on Django, Java on Spring MVC, and Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails, in the end, was the clear choice for our team. Despite not having experience with Ruby development, we felt that the framework had the focus on rapid development that we desired. Furthermore, both Ruby and Rails have great online documentation, several books, numerous blogs , and a large, active community.

Coming from a Java background, it took us a little while to get used to developing with the Ruby programming language and the Rails framework. However, after a few weeks we started to reap the benefits of Ruby on Rails and appreciated the ease of development over using Java frameworks like Struts and Hibernate.

There is no arguing that the Java development community is expansive, has plenty of books, good documentation, and several web frameworks. Although we could have chosen Java again, Rails has proven to be excellent for rapid web development while Java has lagged behind in this regard. There are other things that are just easier with Ruby as well. Java has tools such as Maven to help manage dependencies and pull in new libraries, but it does not compare to the ease of using the Ruby gems system. Furthermore, there seems to be a gem (i.e., a Ruby library) for just about everything. Need authentication and login for your website?, There's a gem for that: devise. Authorization? There's a gem for that: cancan. Without such a plethora of Ruby gem libraries, we would not have been able to complete this project as quickly as we did.

After we decided upon a web framework, the next key decision our team had to make was what database to use. We needed a database that is web scalable, easy to maintain, and suited to our read heavy access pattern. For the previous version of Spoke, we were primarily using MS SQL Server and MySQL. We did, however, deploy one feature on the previous Spoke site using MongoDB in order to get a feel for using it in production. The test was a success and drove our decision to deploy the new Spoke site using MongoDB. Other factors in the decision included the built in ability to shard the database (as needed), replication, schema-free database flexibility, support for Ruby on Rails 3 via . Features aside, the fact that many high traffic internet startups, such as IGN and Foursquare are using Mongo DB eased any concerns we had about deploying this NoSQL database in production.

Our next decision was where to host the new site. We're a small team, and the previous incarnation of Spoke is still hosted in a co-location facility on hardware, which we own. When a server goes down, with travel time, it can take several hours to get it back up and running. To scale up, it required a lot of lead-time to order new servers, get them provisioned, and deployed into production. In order to alleviate these issues and to supplement our colo servers on the old Spoke site, we were already using Amazon Web Services EC2 and S3 in order to launch new infrastructure and features. When it came time to decide where and how to host the new Spoke web service, the decision was easy: launch the new site 100% on Amazon Web Services.

Our final decision was how to deal with searching the profiles in our system. The old Spoke search was built upon a very old version of the Lucene library as well as home-grown code to manage indexing, searching, swapping indexes, and more. We looked at open source projects such as Solr and Elastic Search, but as a small team we would rather not have to manage yet another large piece of infrastructure. That is when we found IndexTank, which provides search infrastructure as a service. All we had to do was write code to use their APIs for indexing documents and executing searches , and they handled the infrastructure and scaling. The end result is very fast and very good search in the new Spoke system.

As a result of carefully choosing our technology platform, the launch of the new Spoke web application has been successful. The infrastructure and frameworks that we have chosen have been able to scale and handle the same levels of traffic as the previous Spoke application. We fully expect that the combination of Ruby on Rails and MongoDB hosted on Amazon EC2 will further scale to handle our growth throughout the year and beyond.

I hope you have enjoyed this small peek into our new technology infrastructure. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have about it in the comments section below.

Claim your profile is live

2012-01-23T16:59:00.000-08:00

I am proud to announce a new feature on the site: the ability to claim your profile. As people are contributing to the site, this new feature enables them to link their edits to their own Spoke person pages. In the specific case below, Matt will get two links to its own personal page enabling people interested in his contributions to click on his name and access his personal spoke page.

At this point, the ability to link your page to a page you edited by claiming your profile is only possible when:

1) You create or edit a page. Right now, in the upper right side of the page, we feature who created the page as well as who edited the page last, giving people incentive to add more content;

2) You add a video, or a link to the timeline, notable links, or achievements and recognition section.

We tried to make "Claiming your profile" as simple as "following a profile". You get on your profile page and click on "this is me" on the right side. If you want to unlink, you just hover over the same button and click, and it's done.

Personally, I like this feature a lot because it kills two birds with one stone. It reinforces the quality of the links contributed by providing information about who is making the contribution and this also helps contributors to build their reputation on the site. This is our first foray into enabling our contributors to benefit from the pages they are creating. Their personal page becomes the page where they can promote themselves while the pages they are updating with information remain as objective as possible. Claiming your profile is all about the person making the edits, so that others understands who the person is and learn to trust that person’s edits over time.

In order to make this approach a reality, we made several design decisions that you should be aware of:

1) You cannot claim your profile unless you have registered using either your Linkedin profile or your Facebook profile. If you have already registered, go on the “edit account” page, and link your user account to your social profile(s) from there. This is a safety mechanism that we are using to make sure that people who are claiming a profile are real and representative of who they say they are on the site;

2) You can only claim one profile. This was a big subject of discussion in the company and this may evolve over time; but we wanted to make sure that you only claim something of value to you and preferably your own profile. We will particularly pay attention of who claims what and we reserve the right to “unclaim” a profile if the profile was claimed inappropriately;

3) Lastly, you cannot claim a company or a topic. At this point, claiming is all about creating and adding links, and enabling people to understand who is performing these actions. As we develop the site, we will come up with many ways to associate companies and topics to other objects within the site.

Hopefully, you will appreciate this feature and will learn to benefit from it.

As usual, please do not hesitate to give feedback at getsatisfaction.com/spoke

Philippe Cases

Guidelines for editing information on the site

2012-01-09T15:49:00.000-08:00

As we have talked about over the last month now, the new Spoke is now live and really shining. I want to thank the team for all the work they have done and also give you some guidelines on how to edit information on this new site.

We are a business information site, our mission is to inform and not to promote. So we are not a marketing directory or a supplement to your web site and we reserve the rights to remove any content that we deem too marketing oriented and not rich enough in information. For instance, we saw one company that added more than 100 tags. This may be good for the SEO of the page but we believe that it is not in the interest of a user interested in business information. We want you to describe the person or the business in the summary and use tags so that a person interested in the profile you are editing gets a sense of what this company is all about.

In term of tone as well as content, the Spoke pages are places for conversations and we want those conversations to be cordial as if we were having them during a business dinner. Some comments would not be allowed and some people would be asked to leave the table if they were too harsh or disrespectful. We will apply the same type of conduct at Spoke: you may say things that are provocative and controversial but we aim to keep the conversation objective and within the boundary of decency and respect. If somebody doesn't respect this code of conduct, we will ban them from editing on this site.

In the summary or in the tags, we don't want information that could be considered as defamatory or slandering such "this person lost 10% of revenue during his tenure", "so and so is having an affair with XYZ", "this person cooked the books". This type of information could be eventually added to the notable links section as long as there is an article on the Internet from a reputable source to back it up.

Right now, we cannot accept any information from another language. Our spam engine only works in English so we would not be able to decipher whether the content added is appropriate or relevant. We will let you know as soon as we add other languages.

Signing in LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter or even registering gives you of course more privileges as we are able to validate who you are. It doesn’t mean that all of your edits will be accepted but you would get a great level of trust

We want our users to either update a profile to increase its accuracy or to request remove its profile. This is the role of our moderation team to enforce this policy:

· So if you replace a correct name by a “:” or a set of random characters, your edits will be rejected by our moderation team.

· If you want a profile to be removed, you should click on the following link page for removal that you can find at the bottom of any profile person page. If you decide to delete all the information on the profile, you will first do far more work than you should and our moderation team will reject it. Instead use the request for removal button at the end of the page.

· You can remove information from a profile if you want to. We, in fact, make it very easy to do so. However, if you are anonymous editors, the best practice is to first add some level of correct information and then remove existing information. If you don't do that then the moderation team doesn't have any way to gauge the seriousness of your stream of edits and may reject all your edits because they can't validate them.

· If a job is not current anymore, use the past association to express that the job is not current anymore rather than delete the information; this information was correct in the first place so why delete it.

· If a job is not accurate, just delete it and add another one that is current. If you don't want to add another job, do not delete it as it may be rejected by our moderation team. You should just indicate that the information is not correct by adding the term inaccurate to the job title in question and our moderation team will take it from there.

Is hub.spoke.com, soon to be www.spoke.com, a social network?

2012-01-04T23:43:00.000-08:00

I received yesterday from Elmer Shore the following comment on getsatisfaction:

"If i'm seeing & understanding this site correctly, Spoke would basically be another online profile page to an already many existing social media's out there, to which, i'm still trying to unplug from & no longer be found no more, yet here it is again, don't wanna mispoke about you guys or anything, but im sure your intention is well founded to other competitors. Best of luck & success to you."

I want to thank Elmer for his comment and we are always happy to receive comments whether they are praises, criticisms or like this one requirements for clarification. The easy part of the clarification is that if you are an individual, you can remove yourself from the site by clicking on the request removal at the end of the page.

The second comment is about the nature of hub.spoke.com (soon www.spoke.com) and let me clarify this right away: we are not a social network. We are a platform for you to share knowledge on a company, person or a topic of interest to you the same way you contribute content to Wikipedia. The difference with Wikipedia is that your contributions can be assigned to you publicly and if you contribute, you will be able to promote yourself on the site by claiming your profile which will be linked to your edits. However, it is not mandatory to have a profile in order to participate.

Our aim is to be the authoritative source for business information and to help knowledgeable people get recognized for the quality of their content they provide to the platform. Obviously, we are far from our first goal now but we have a good start and with your help, we are committed to get there in a reasonable amount of time.

Migration is for this week end

2012-01-04T23:21:00.001-08:00

Over the past few months, you’ve likely heard about the upcoming release of a brand new spoke.com. We’re ecstatic to announce that the release is close at hand, as we are planning to release the new site live on www.spoke.com this weekend!

To assure that you don’t lose access to a single feature, we will continue to host the current version of www.spoke.com at its new home on center.spoke.com. In fact we have already set this up, you can go there right now and use the site in its entirety. Furthermore, your login email address and password will work exactly the same on center.spoke.com. We strongly encourage you to go there now and bookmark center.spoke.com in order to find it as handy as ever.

As soon as the release occurs, www.spoke.com will host our newly redesigned site, (which you can see now on hub.spoke.com). Note that your current email address and password will no longer work on the new www.spoke.com, and you can get ahead of the game by going to hub.spoke.com now and registering (which can be done in a matter of seconds using your Facebook, Twitter, or LInkedIn credentials if you prefer).

Please note that during the migration process, both sites may experience brief periods of inaccessibility. It’s unlikely, but please be patient and wait a minute if you notice this.

We could not be more excited about the pending release. Keep an eye out for more updates -- we will do everything we can to make the transition as smooth as possible.

As always, we love hearing from you. If you have questions or feedback on the current www.spoke.com, please visit our uservoice site; and if you have questions or feedback on the new platform, hub.spoke.com, please visit our GetSatisfaction site!

Thank you again for all your support.

Migration of www.spoke to center.spoke.com

2012-01-02T22:36:00.000-08:00

As we are moving forward on our migration path, we wanted to alert you that we have now set up center.spoke.com now for your use. http://center.spoke.com is the exact replica of www.spoke.com. It has all the features that you have available now on www.spoke.com. Your login credentials will work exactly the same for this site.

We strongly encourage you to bookmark the page center.spoke.com in order to find it handily as fairly soon, www.spoke.com will be the home of our new redesigned site, which you can find now on hub.spoke.com.

Please note also that when hub.spoke.com will have migrated to www.spoke.com, you will to have to register on www.spoke.com as the two sites are not backward compatible. We will work over time to integrate the features of the two sites.

If you need any help, just let us know through the regular support mechanism on center.spoke.com or leave us a message on our feedback page http://spoke.uservoice.com/forums/5745-general.

Big Bang is coming

2011-12-19T09:09:00.001-08:00

As you know, we have a proof-of-concept site on hub.spoke.com that has been in beta for 3 months. The feedback we have received during our pilot phase has been immensely valuable, and we've turned them into improvements to the site. As a result, the level of engagement is far superior to what we see on the existing Spoke site. By the metrics, the number of page views per visit is up by a factor 4, and visitors spend more than 5x the amount of time on the site. Clearly, people like what they see when they visit.

In fact, we feel we have made enough progress that we are ready to make the beta site the new public face for www.spoke.com. This doesn’t mean that the existing features you enjoy on the current site as member or anonymously are going to disappear but they will be accessible on a different site. Stay tuned for the exact date for the transition as well as all the information you will need to navigate through this transition.

This release is major and has been in the works for the last year and a half. It originated as a request from a growing portion of our users who wanted to make simple edits to the site without registering. The first six months were all about design and planning, the following nine months were spent developing and the last three months testing as well as upgrading the site to make it ready. Our goal was to make the site as easy as possible to update and we got it done. With hub.spoke.com, you can now update a page in a matter of seconds and create a complete company or a person page in a matter of minutes.

As we continue to enhance the site, our focus is evolving, though our mission is still the same: to publish information about industries, companies and people. We want Spoke to be recognized as the authoritative site for business information on the Internet, the place you come to first to find the information you need to conduct your business. The content is professional and business focused, organized so that you can consume it easily.

The major change is that we now want also to be a medium for the best voices the Industry and let them publish and moderate the business information available on the site for their respective industries. On our site, our community is publishing information about other people, companies and as the standard for blogging and journalism evolves over time, we expect our community to abide by them and provide only business facts and not disparaging comments or any speculations. We have put a moderation system in place to guarantee that this is not happening but we will also rely on our community to self discipline itself in a transparent way.

This is a very different business model than a traditional social networking model where people are in control of their information. In the past, people may have been unhappy about the information they found about themselves on Spoke and found it very difficult to correct it. We now allow them to correct it quickly or remove it altogether in the case of a person profile.

Overall, we feel that we’ve struck the right balance between content contributors (i.e., the community) and the subjects of the profiles (i.e., people and companies). Of course, we expect a healthy conversation and we plan to adjust based on your feedbacks as content producer and profile subjects.

Our beta hub.spoke.com is already available so if you have not seen it yet, just go and play with the site so that you get familiarized and update or add any information you feel is needed on any profiles.

Monitor your key accounts on hub.spoke.com

2011-12-01T09:43:00.001-08:00

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce that our registered members can now follow company and people profiles directly in an individual activity stream on hub.spoke.com so, if you decide to use this feature, you don't need to go from one profile to another to see what is going on but just go to your activity stream. And it is very easy to set up, you just have to follow on the profiles you are interested in and any changes to the profile from that page will appear in your individual activity stream that you can find in the user drop-down menu.

By following profiles, you benefit from the intelligence gathering of our community in real time. Since hub.spoke.com is fully editable, the thousands of visitors looking for intelligence about companies and people can also share their insights with the rest of the community. If you follow a profile, you'll be notified as those new insights are added.

And there is more: because we are now integrated with the major press release providers, we can alert you about developments at companies that could create either job openings or business development opportunities.

Following a page will help you be among the first to learn about developments at companies like SAP, find job openings at Tesla Motors, or find business development opportunities at Netflix. This new feature lets you tap into key goings-on at nearly 1 million companies and 4 million people that already have profiles on hub.spoke.com -- and more are being created every day.

Philippe Cases

Happy Thanksgiving and new feature

2011-11-24T09:35:00.000-08:00

Today, I am very proud to announce the first of a long series of new features on our way to achieving the full vision of our platform.

You have now the ability to see press releases directly in a company profile (see IBM Corporation and Blue Shield California). Today, you can see press releases very readily for public company profiles but it is quite rare to see the same for private companies and that is what we are doing for free!!! With this new release, you are now able to follow more targets and get information in real time about what is happening with your partners, competitors, customers or suppliers independently of whether the company is public. If you are a job seeker, you will find these news releases interesting as you are getting ready for an interview.

As we are receiving press releases from our content partners and matching those press releases directly into our company profiles on a daily basis, our database is now updated more than a thousand time every day making it more fresh and updated.

If you are looking for a press release on the site, there are few cases for which we may not have it and for which you can help:

1) The company doesn’t exist yet in our database. In this case, you should just create the profile and add as much information as possible to enable better matching. We are doing well with company name, web site, stock ticker and addresses but the more information, the better;

2) We may not have enough data to do an accurate matching. Again in this case, just make sure we have at least company name, web site, stock ticker and addresses and the more information you can add in addition to this, the better;

3) Lastly, we may not have agreements with a newswire that push press releases for that specific companies, in this case, just post a request with the name of the wire provider in our user forum and we will contact them to add them to our roster.

This feature is only available for the time being on our beta site hub.spoke.com. When we will migrate hub.spoke.com to www.spoke.com, the feature will be available on this site as well.

By providing the ability to follow private companies for free, we want to thank our community for all the support they have been providing us and for such a long time. In this Thanksgiving Day, I feel blessed to be part of such a supportive community. Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.

Philippe Cases

Publishing hub.spoke.com profiles

2011-10-23T22:51:00.000-07:00

We have been publishing on our Facebook page a series of hub.spoke.com profiles. We will start publishing them on the blog as well. For the one who missed the prior ones, here is a selection. We will publish all of them over time on this blog but if you want to see them all of them now, visit our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/spokesoftware.

Profile of the day serie: everyday, we are sharing one profile that has been created that day. Today is the profile of Trula Lacalle. Trula is a renowned psychologist focused on repressed memories and is now dedicating her life to aging. If you want to honor one of your mentors, friends from your business life. Go create a profile on hub.spoke.com for that person and publish it here.

Trula Lacalle, Managing Partner, LaCalle Professional Services

On Wenesday, Steve Jobs died. I was on a company meeting and suddenly everything stopped and we talked about Steve. Nobody around the table knew him. Some were too young and others didn't have the chance. Here is the profile that came out of it. If you want to share your own links, videos, testimony,... go on the profile by clicking on the link and start adding.

Steve Jobs, Founder, Former Chairman & CEO, Apple

hub.spoke.com

Profile on hub.spoke.com for Steve Jobs, Founder, Former Chairman & CEO, Apple

Profile of the day: Ushahidi is changing the world as it helps to report in real time what is happening in the world enabling people to react quicker and save lives as well as enforcing democracy. Ushahidi is an Open Source Project out of Nairobi Africa which lets users submit reports by text messages, emails, tweets or web postings. This software was used to expose Kenyan Election Killings or res...See More

Ushahidi, Nairobi

hub.spoke.com

Company profile on hub.spoke.com for Ushahidi, Nairob

Spoke Software
Profile of the day: Dave McAvoy Dave is on a journey to drink one beer every day. And the good news is that he reports on it so if you like beer...

Dave McAvoy

hub.spoke.com

Profile on hub.spoke.com for Dave McAvoy

The new site is live.

2011-09-05T23:53:00.000-07:00

We are three months late but the first release of our new site is now live on http://hub.spoke.com. We have released this first version of hub to members last week and we are now preparing ourselves to open it to the public towards the end of next week. You can find some great member-profile examples that we caught on Twitter here: http://storify.com/philippe_cases/spoke-launch.

Hub.spoke has the one feature you have been asking for for a long time--the ability to update information directly on site without registering. Since we released the site to our members last week, we’ve had thousands of unique visitors and the average number of edits per visit was 7.7 edits. The average time spent on site was close to 7 minutes and the bounce rate was 25%. 62% of the edits were on people and 38% were on companies. 20% of those visits were made by people who came at least three times. Those statistics are promising in terms of engagement and we look forward to seeing how these metrics evolve when the site is truly public.

Right now, anybody can edit any profile and edits go live after moderation. We have monitored the quality of edits during this initial test with our members and the results were outstanding as we didn’t have one piece of spam or wrong information. As we are opening our site to the public and we are looking to have only good quality information on the site, we will be very cautious on moderation and the jury is still be out to decide whether we will require some level of authentication (such as registering with a real account on Facebook) or if we keep editing open for anonymous users.

This new release is full of features but the one other feature that I am most excited about is the ability to organize links available about a topic on the web. Think of it as your dream Google search results on a person or a company you are searching. All the relevant links are there and organized in a coherent way that makes sense. We are providing two different frameworks to organize links: one is a timeline called milestones for companies or achievements for people where you can select links to create a historic view about yourself and your friends and their companies, and the other is notable links if the link is important enough to help understand the company. Here are few examples of companies with great milestones and notable links: Tesla Motors and Shoedazzle ; and here are some great examples for people, Ben Smith and Indra Nooyi.

One more thing: if you are an expert, consultant, or blogger looking for a job, or an active participant in an industry, and you are looking for ways to reach more people beyond your traditional network, create or edit profile pages on companies, or important people in your industries on Spoke. Any links will be credited to you on the profile page so your name will be viewed thousands of times by people who are searching for those profiles. Of course this feature is available only if you are registered. As we are moving forward, we will keep all this information so that we can promote you even more in the coming months, if you are an active participant on Spoke. You could even become an editor if you consistently provide good links. So do no wait to engage and get known in your industry.

PS: For those of you who wonders what is gonna with Spoke.com, www.spoke.com and hub.spoke.com are going to stay separate until hub.spoke.com has caught up in terms of functionality with spoke.com and then we will switch.

Information overflow?

2011-06-22T17:36:00.000-07:00

Between Frederic Fillioux, with his Monday Note proclaiming the demise
of traditional news organizations and the advent of Churnalism with its
low standard of journalistic rigor, and Jeff Jarvis, who embraces the
use of Twitter as a tool to break and verify stories, there's a war
raging over whether Twitter will be the savior or executioner of the
news industry. As always, when positions are polarized this way, there
is truth on both sides of the argument.

MG Siegler, frustrated by Facebook's PR machine, pointed me to some very
interesting statistics from John Sullivan at Propublica (PR industry
fills vacuum left by shrinking newsrooms http://bit.ly/mFM9xV ) that may
highlight what the problem is and what the outcome could be. In the
1980s, there were 0.36 journalists and 0.45 person working in the PR
industry per 100,000 people. In 2008, the rates shifted to 0.25
journalists and 0.90 PR persons per 100,000 people. Thus the ratio of
PR/journalist has nearly tripled in less than 30 years. I will leave the
rest of this article to you, the reader, because it is an interesting
point of view on how PR is taking over the conversation.

My point is a little bit different. In March 2011, Business Insiders ( http://read.bi/kvUNg3 ) observed that 15 million users were following 50 or more people on Twitter, and were, therefore, very active. If 1/3 of them are in the USA, then 1,630 users per 100,000 are now broadcasting information on Twitter, 2,000 times
more than PR persons and 8,000 times more than journalists. These numbers are probably far higher on Facebook.

As if it weren't already challenge enough for the news industry to keep
up with the PR industry, the emergence of Twitter and Facebook poses a
far more overwhelming challenge for journalists, both in terms of
opportunities as well as the possibility of getting lost. I daresay that
the challenge is even bigger for the PR industry, as they now have to
control far more conversations than they had to in the past, and they
are probably understaffed for the task at hand. If journalists and PR
persons face a big problem, what about you and me? We rely on those
experts to provide us with news that is highly relevant, yet we, as well
as they, are now confronted with an enormous information fire hose right
on the computer. As Laurent Haug points out, “from a world where the
problem was to add information, we now enter into a world where the
problem is to find which one can be ignored, hidden or deleted.” If the
early days of Web 2.0 were all about blogging and creating new and
interesting content, we are moving now in a world of curation.

The problem is the same in the data industry.
If you consider how you would gather information on a company or a
people today, you have three options:
1. websites or social networks managed by PR persons whose goals is to
manage the conversation for a specific outcome, such as recruiting,
increasing sales, and managing perceptions, rather than providing
information
2. commercial information providers, who may be hard to find or very
expensive
3. search engines and social networks to find an ocean of information,
but you don’t really know which information can be ignored, hidden or
deleted.
And the problem is getting worse by the day as we are creating as much information in two days than we did up to 2003 according to Eric Schmidt.

There have been several attempts to create databases for specific
vertical industries. Some have been very successful, but none has
attempted to specifically address the problem of searching for
information about companies and people over the internet. Spoke wants to
be the one stop shop to find 90% of the information you need. We are
hoping to leverage this huge community of participants the same way
journalists are using them to validate information they receive. We will
be relying on you to provide us with information as you are searching
for your own information. It is going to be a give and take, and some of
you will be creating profiles that others will be able to use.

Turning your most aggressive detractors into your biggest advocates

2011-06-13T21:28:00.000-07:00

One of the good things about working for a company like Spoke (which hasn't always had the best rep on the internet -- but don’t tell anybody) is that when a user isn't satisfied, they're usually pretty vocal about it -- and will usually stay in our face until their concerns are resolved. It sounds like a headache but we've actually grown to love it, realizing more and more that underneath emotion there is often valuable user-insight. And being receptive to this has not only helped us to turn a significant corner in consumer-perception, but we were able to leverage that same passionate displeasure when designing the strategy that is ultimately shaping our new site.

In the past months, not only did I talk to supporters, but made it a point to engage with dozens upon dozens of our most dissatisfied users:

-"I need this profile removed immediately"
-"Someone hacked my social media accounts and defaced my pages"
-"All I'm trying to do is make sure the proper information is being displayed"
-"If I need to draft a Cease & Desist letter I will"

At the beginning, these conversations were relatively one-way streets, with users sharing a grievance about our service. But in peeling back layers of frustration, we began to sense a common theme: people wanted more control. They wanted the ability to click and edit information without a long process to get there, and as the new site began to take shape, we were able to give more and more back to our users during this dialog -- describing what we were building and how their pain-point was, quite literally, about to become nonexistent.

Even better, we reached the point where we could give demo's and show screenshots:

It turns out people get pretty responsive when a company actively seeks out an unsatisfied user-base and says "you know you're right, that could be better -- and we've actually been working on it for months now".

We started to get feedback like:

-"Everything's resolved. I will definitely watch for the new webpage"
-"You guys were instrumental in building my business, excited to play with the new-site"

Over the course of a 15 minute conversation, a representative from an electronics manufacturer went from "delete all my information and my company's information now!" to "eager to play with the full site, keep me posted", and more than one person in a sales role described a unique application of the new site that I didn't even see at the beginning.

Moreover, the goodwill impact stretches beyond just the new product. Users who previously had a below-average impression started to respond to the entire company with positive comments, praising both our responsiveness and new direction. Just a couple weeks ago, a prominent investor who was trying to remove his entire online identity (and thus had approached us rather upset) encouraged me in a final email that he sees the benefit in what we're building and expects that giving our users this much control will not only satisfy them, but empower them.

Obviously, user-feedback is essential to any growing company. But depending on the trajectory of that growth, it can be useful to understand when certain types of feedback may bring more value. A supporter is very helpful to improving on a product that they already like -- assisting with incremental innovation; however for those major changes (the kind Spoke.com will soon be unveiling) sometimes it's necessary to give an extra ear to those who don't love what you're currently doing. By engaging these users and building on top of those strong feelings, they will not only help you make the biggest inroads, but who knows -- they may even become your biggest allies!

The last building block?

2011-04-20T09:55:00.000-07:00

We have been talking about it for a while now, and people are exasperated waiting for it, but our new version of the site is about to be released. Our target for release is May 9th.

This release aims at two primary goals:
1) To resolve, once and for all, our last complaints. Over the course of the last year we revamped our business processes such that we are now A+ at BBB and we receive fewer than one Truste request per week on average. Still, we receive complaints that business processes alone can't address. If you are interested, you can find them on Uservoice. The top three complaints pertain to the inability for members and interested parties to:
• correct errors in company and person profiles
• easily correct misinformation
• remove fake employees.
This release will resolve these and more – the top ten complaints from our users.
2) Fulfill one of the initial premises for Spoke: to provide a 360 degree view of a company, along with its people, drawing from all the information available on the Internet. Ultimately such a view across many companies enables business users to derive insights and drive business around an industry, a trend, a company and people. By the power of aggregation, we also believe that we can create a lively environment around industries that many in the tech industry believe are “obscure”.

This said, and to be completely transparent, we believe that information on the Internet shouldn’t be confined to what people publish about themselves. There are plenty of places to do so, and we believe that promotes a one-sided, biased point of view. It is also a very limited means for managing reputation. We believe that there should be places where a community can respectfully interact around companies and people outside the control of said companies and people. Further, we hope that Spoke will become the premier site for this kind of vibrant community. Sure, we expect to get a fair amount of grief over this – even very respectable sites catering to self-promotion are not immune – but the community as a whole benefits greatly.

Of course, we don’t want this place to become a magnet for creating controversies. I’ll write a blog on this soon, but to summarize: our goal is to make it the place where business users come for inside information about a business or a person. We have worked very hard to deliver on this premise. From the get-go:
1) We are delivering a completely updated site based on proven, cutting-edge technologies (Ruby on Rails, MongoDB….).
2) We are giving to the community at large the power to update profiles and provide insights. This means that anybody will be able to update profiles as discussed.
3) At the same time, we have created a moderation platform to provide enough oversight to ensure that community-provided content is appropriate. As we discussed, our focus is business information, so this will not be the venue for airing your customer support issue or maligning someone's reputation; there are plenty of sites for that already and we don’t want to be one of those.

Moving forward, we are building:
1) A set of Open APIs so people and organizations can create and update profiles from their existing information, and can integrate the Spoke data into their own application.
2) A way for news providers to directly their news into our profiles;
3) A platform for bloggers to contribute content and insights while retaining full control of their content to maximize page views. Spoke could be a valuable channel for building readership and reputation. Additionally, Spoke can drive revenue through sales of reports or consulting directly on the site.
Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more blog posts about what we're up to!

Philippe Cases

Interesting new search engine

2010-09-06T23:14:00.000-07:00

Over the week-end, I played with Blekko a new search engine currently in beta. The company has opened the kimono last week to John Battelle (http://bit.ly/98KqqO) and TechCrunch (http://tcrn.ch/a540jx) so I feel like it is ok to describe what I saw. The company has also received significant funding from USVP and CMEA (http://bit.ly/bsTRUi) as VentureBeat mentioned.

The site is still in its early stage but the idea behind Blekko is very original and makes perfect sense: limit your search to a number of predefined websites that you are interested in and trust. For instance, you are a start-up looking for funding and you could be interested to understand what the Venture Industry thinks specifically about your industry and which General Partner, within the Venture Industry, is following your specific industry. Right now, you would have to go through 10s of Google Pages to get all the VC and angel’s interesting blogs. Blekko does the job for you, they have identified 146 VC blogs and created a slashtag (/Blekko/VC) that you can now use to do your search and only see the results from those 146 blogs. There are probably more than 146 VC blogs but the most important ones are there.

For instance, if you type social CRM /Blekko/VC, you will get 9 results from 4 VC Blogs: Eldorado Ventures, Jeff Nolan who is not a VC any longer but was General Partner at SAP Ventures, Fred Wilson at Union Square (interesting blog on family CRM), Dave McClure (mentioning an article from Jeremiah Owyang). This would lead me to believe that the trend has not caught up yet with the VC industry. Note also that Blekko is an early search engine so there may be more results coming.

Another interesting feature from Blekko is to be able to share slashtags. I have created three of them (pcases3/philippetechblog, pcases3/socialcrm, pcases3/vcblog) that you can search for and use as you want. I started with all the industry pundits for each category and added blekko’s own slashtag for techblog and VC blog. You can search for them and use one of my slashtags to do a search or more interestingly, you could build your own slashtag, embed mine into yours and get more results for your searches.

To use Blekko, you can request an invite on the site (www.blekko.com) or ask me as I have ten invites that I could use.

In addition to the fact that I find this company interesting with a lot of potential usage for power search users as well as more general searches down the road once the more general slashtags are established, the concepts that the company is using leveraging crowd sourcing for keyword search are very close to the concepts we are using to build our own service to manage contacts so stay tune when we will release our beta product.

A week in Provence

2010-08-26T16:11:00.000-07:00

As most of you know by now, I am French and I have to admit, it feels good especially when I am coming back from a week of vacation in my beloved Provence having spent my time talking about what we are going to do for dinner, cooking dinner and then eating dinner with the extended Family. The great piece of news was my Dad with whom I was demonstrating Spoke’s new product decided to install it.

I have taken the liberty to attach a picture of my parent’s place and you could have seen me playing with my IPad in one of those armchairs close the swimming pool if I had not taken the picture.

During this vacation, I got visited by a friend who asked me a very peculiar but also very French question: what do you think the American Entrepreneurs could learn from us European Entrepreneurs? I was a bit taken aback as I spent my time over the years explaining to European Entrepreneurs the best practices we had in the Silicon Valley and was tempted to say that we know it all having witnessed during my tenure in Silicon Valley the emergence of Google, EBay, Facebook and Yahoo… but I also felt it was a very fair question that needed some thinking before moving to something else.

One first thought is that Entrepreneurs in Europe are winning against all odds. The regulatory environment is not conducive and companies have little access to funds at each step of the way from early investment such as Angel Investing and Venture Capital to strong and healthy Financial Markets for technology companies.

A second thought is that for a technology company to be successful in Europe, it has to think international right from the beginning. Companies like Talend, MySQL, TrollTech have been successful because they were international at heart and Entrepreneurs such as Bertrand Diard or Bernard Liautaud were not worried to travel extensively and then even made the decision to move to the US.

One last thought is that Entrepreneurs in Europe recognize how important government and local authorities are for the initial success of their companies and have learned how to leverage them successfully. The initial strategic choice of Clean Technology by Germany and Denmark created innovation and successful ventures in the Wind and Solar Industry. Government, local authorities encourage innovation and enable job creation by providing funding to companies. From Grants and loans to equity investment, Local governments use the entire palette of funding possibilities, an example being OpenBravo, a leader in the Open Source ERP space, which was originally seeded by the Government of Navarre in Spain with significant amount of funding before getting funded by more traditional Venture Capitalists.

Random Spoke profile: Dana TraBue

I'm a Girl Geek

2010-08-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

I don't often think about the fact that I am the sole women in our development group. As a girl geek, I'm just accustomed to spending my days whiteboarding about Hadoop and Elastic Search with a team of guys. Over my entire career, that has pretty much been the case. It wasn't until I attended the Yahoo! Girl Geek Dinner that I recognized how isolating it is to be a woman in engineering and development. Prior to this dinner, I could not have named one other woman I knew who can jam out CSS and HTML or install Wordpress. Shocking.

The GGD was such a refreshing but also strangely odd event. I was so impressed to see demonstrations of YUI and YQL and many more of the rockin' developer tools from Yahoo!. Even Hadoop which is a central point of development here at Spoke right now was the focus in the "Innovation at Scale" presentation by SVP of Global Service Engineering for Yahoo!, Cheryl Ainoa. Every single presentation and demonstration was done by seasoned female technologists. Wow. Awe-struck is an understatement for how I reacted to this group of over 400 women who are all geeks like me.

So, the strangely odd feelings came when I started talking and asking questions of these women. It was an intangible feeling and one that I hadn't fully realized until I sat down to write this. It was odd to be talking to women. It was odd to have another woman explain a new technology to me. It was odd to NOT be the smarty-pants girl geek in the room. I was so accustomed to being the odd-woman out in these discussions that I had a strange feeling of not being so special anymore...

...whatever. That feeling wasn't as special as the girl-power feeling I had wearing my "Code Like a Girl" t-shirt into work the next day. Thanks to those impressive women, I was able to rap with much more knowledge on our latest undertaking with Hadoop.

Mmmm...Spicy

2010-08-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

Every Thursday myself, or another member of the engineering team, head over to the Curry Up Now truck to pick up some food for the office. (Maybe not every Thursday, we'll be there as long as Gazillion isn't having a company BBQ forcing us to go without our weekly tradition).

What is Curry Up Now, do you ask? It is food truck that travels around the San Francisco Bay Area serving up incredibly delicious, spicy, and creative Indian-fusion and Indian cuisine. They regularly serve both a deconstructed samosa (think a regular samosa turned inside out) and a tikka masala burrito with either chicken or paneer. Other items on the menu rotate on a regular basis. For instance, today I'm having the aloo parantha quesadilla, a potato stuffed flatbread filled with beef (or paneer or chicken), onions, cheese, and hot sauce.

Speaking of hot sauce, there is no hot sauce hotter than theirs. When we first starting going to Curry Up Now in April of this year, everybody wanted their chicken tikka masala burritos spicy. We were in for a surprise, it was en fuego! Slowly but surely the number of requests for spicy dwindled to just two of us, myself included. I really enjoy very spicy food when it is balanced well with other flavors and I think that Curry Up Now does a great job of this.

Enough of this blogging, time to eat!

Pest Control + UI (Who Knew?)

2010-08-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

Ok, we've finally updated our homepage. Sorry to Christine and the other bald guy who were always featured there, but it was time for you to go. Oh, and it's also time to say goodbye to the cityscape and the 4-fingered muppet-like characters littered throughout the site. It's not that we don't like you or appreciate your time on our site. It was just finally time for us to focus on what our product is really about - helping you manage your direct connections...

PS: Oh, and beware as we are still eradicating the 4-fingered muppet-ish guys from the nooks and crannies of our site. Shoot me a comment if you have a sighting.

Progress on privacy

2010-07-29T02:50:00.002-07:00

When I took on the role as Spoke’s CEO, I committed that Privacy would be front and center to everything we do. At the time, I received touching and sometimes angry messages from some of you who were disappointed by Spoke’s perceived attitude towards privacy and the previous responsiveness to users’ request. While we can’t change what has been done in the past, we are committed to do what’s right in the future.

Working with our Privacy advisors, we conducted, at the time, an audit of Spoke’s practices and zeroed in on four major enhancement:

People could not remove their public profile without registering;

People who had registered could not cancel their registration;

People had difficulty correcting their company profiles or personal profiles; and

More importantly, our customer support was overwhelmed and was dealing with massive amount of users’ requests asking us to perform actions manually.

I committed to fixing those issues, and I am glad to report that we have released features (to fix those problems) ahead of schedule and, since June 1st, the majority of our users are taking advantage of the automated features we released. Additionally, we are now processing all manual requests in less than 48 hours, and finally have caught up with our customer support backlog. TRUSTe is also very satisfied with our efforts, and BBB has upgraded our site from F to B. We’re thrilled with the validation of our improvements, and continue to work very hard to get our BBB rating further elevated to an A- or an A.

Obviously, we are constantly reviewing our methods for collection, processing and disseminating information to make them even better, and we have many other features that we intend to release in the next few months (for example, ability to claim multiple profiles, highlight non co-workers on a person profile, etc.), so stay tuned and do not hesitate to reach out if you sense that we are not addressing issues timely enough.

We will post our Privacy Product Roadmap on Uservoice so you can comment on the features we want to develop. We want to deliver the privacy features that are users want to see, so please let us know what’s most important to you.

The curious case of Spoke Software:

2010-07-22T03:08:00.003-07:00

Today, I was exchanging emails with a Friend Venture Capitalist for whom I have a lot of respect for and verbatim here is what he wrote: “I generally tend to avoid start-ups that are getting long in the tooth, but would be happy to take a look at the executive summary if things have changed under your astute leadership.” As I didn’t know the expression “long in the tooth”, I went to check it on the dictionary, and it is usually used in the case of a horse because unlike humans’, horses’ teeth continue to grow with age so that you can make an estimate of a horse’s age by examining them. Of course, long in the tooth means old or very old.

Born in 2002, Spoke is indeed old and its teeth have probably grown a lot in the day and age of the Internet and can appear passé but I also feel that these observations don’t give justice to my daily experience in the office and working with the Spoke team. The reason is that I see them experiencing with new things: for instance, we are now implementing the latest and greatest technologies available: implementing Hadoop to process data and evaluating tools like Cassandra for scalable data storage and Solr or ElasticSearch for search. I also see on the business side our self service support team crunching through a backlog of 16,000 support requests in less than two months and our marketing team working really hard to implement our new vision. Yet, if I except Sherry Willhoite and myself, all have been there for more than four years and could be tired but they are energetic, engaged and dedicated. All virtues usually associated with youth.

In fact, when I see them, I can’t stop but thinking about “the curious case of Benjamin Button”, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. For those who have not read the book or seen the movie, this is the story of Benjamin Button who was born old and lives his life starting old and dying being a baby. Linda Silverstein described Benjamin’s state of mind very well: “Born at the most scorned of all ages, Benjamin never developed the arrogance of beautiful youth. Never really expecting anything, he enjoys everything. Always willing to try, he experiences things when those less prejudiced let him in. Age and physical appearance are curiosities to him because he knows that they herald his end, not his beginning. Thus two central tenets of our lives are sent packing here — we are how we look and we are our age. Neither is true for Benjamin Button and they need not be the only truth in our lives either. On the ship, somebody tells him: “Age don’t matter here- only can you do the work”.

Last Monday, during our company meeting, somebody asked how we felt about ourselves, the answer was that they found themselves being a collaborative team dedicated to innovation and focused on building a great product that a lot of people are going to use. Yes, indeed, this is the “Curious case of Spoke Software” that is developing right now right in front of my eyes.

On Social Networks and Privacy

2010-05-13T03:09:00.003-07:00

At the end of the first day at SugarCon, I attended a very interesting panel led by Martin Schneider composed by very reputable expert in the social CRM field including Esteban Kolski and Jeremiah Owyang. The first question Martin asked was “who owns the data?” and there was different views at play here: Esteban was of the mind that the data belongs to the company who created a campaign whereas Jeremiah made the point that it was more of a contractual issue and that the data could belong also to the social network.

As I was thinking and listening, it became clear that the panel was talking about an interaction between a client/prospect and a merchant on a social network. For the panel the two contenders to own this data were either the merchant or the social network but nobody brought the point of view of the client. Jeremiah discarded the issue as being part of the term of service between the Social Network and the users of this social network. Alright, this makes sense but do I really have an understanding of what I am being asked when I am making this decision at the time of joining a site?

In order to put my mind around this subject, I imagined myself being in a mall with a friend shopping. The owner of the mall would be tracking what I am doing and the content of my discussion with my friend and sell this information to the merchant with a certain level of abstraction (I am not Philippe, xxx years old but I would be male, x, ….) An ad would then appear to me on a screen as I am passing by with deals targeted to me.

Now, the question is given the choice, would I go to this mall? Or to another mall that doesn’t monitor all my behaviors? I guess I would want to go the other mall and when I think about the discount from the stores in order to accept to be followed is in the 50% or more. Why is that? Well, the reason is simple, despite the fact that ads shown on screens would not be intrusive, I don’t want all my actions to be monitored while I am shopping and if I had the choice, I would probably go shopping somewhere else.

In the same vein, City, State and Federal could set up an infrastructure to monitor everything we do on the street or on public location and then sell our data to merchants. The results of the proceeds would be an income for those institutions and offset some of our taxes. Again, would I vote for a measure such as this one on a ballot, probably not!! I guess I would rather pay tax than have my privacy invaded.

So why am I accepting it on the Internet? And why am not asking some rewards? I think there are mainly three reasons:

1) In a real life, I would see the microphone and camera following me everywhere; this would be in my face all the time reminding me that I am followed. On the internet, I don’t see the thousand of computers making relevance of my clicks so I don’t think about it;

2) The ads on the sites or outside are part of the background so they attract me only if I am interested but are not really visible otherwise so it is not really an annoyance;

3) There is ultimate value in sharing information with friends and knowing how they felt about a restaurant or a group. Knowing it will enable me to have a better experience and will enable me to engage with my friends better and more frequently.

Because there is value, it is less annoying and it doesn’t affect me that much, I guess I should be OK with the business model and should let me be tracked in order to have access to the service. Even though this is a fair argument, I still don’t buy it. First, I don’t know the value of what I am giving away. In real life and faced with monitoring devices, it seems like a lot of value and I am not willing to trade it and, on the Internet, the same goods doesn’t appear to have the same value. So the way to gather the information would have an impact on the value of the information. This is not quite right. Second, I don’t have the option of not participating; All my friends are on social networks and if want to search the Internet, the only available option is using an advertising based search engine. Third, I am dependent on the institution that I have entrusted my data with. The more data and the more network effect, the more difficult it is going to be for me to switch if privacy policy changes.

At the end of the day, what I think would be fair is for companies like Google and Facebook to give us more transparency on their business model and should relinquish some control over the use of our data. I see four major venues that those institutions could leverage:

1) More visibility: Sites should help us understand at a more granular what they track. I would be very interested to see when Google tracks my email or myself which keywords I am assigned to. I would like to know the type of revenue an institution generate from that data; the obvious one is the ads I am seeing anytime I show up but there may be others;

2) More control: Sites could offer control in many ways. The most obvious is to let me remove information that I don’t want to be shared. Then, there could be an independent body from the core business that provides check and balance and is the ultimate decision maker on Privacy Policy;

3) More choice: I know this has been tried before and with not much success but Facebook and Google should offer paying version of their service so that if I don’t want to share my data anymore, I can switch to a different model and still leverage the service I contributed to create;

4) More insurance: if a security/privacy breach occurs with my data, the entity that is spreading my data should at the end bears the risk if one of the network partners fail to abide with the privacy policy embodied with my data.

As Mark Zuckerberg pointed out, we are witnessing the emergence of a new world, which is social by nature. In order to fully benefit from it, new rules needs to be established and the old paradigm such as complete opt-in may be old thinking and not adapted to this new world. Fortunately, if social networks enable one-to-one marketing, they should also help us to address more granularly our privacy needs and “a one size fits all” model like the one taken by Facebook now may also be part of the old thinking. So let's think creatively and come up with solutions that enable us to leverage the opportunity while recognizing that we are human being entitled to some rights including on Privacy.

Access direct contact information for millions of business people in Spoke

2010-05-13T02:53:00.003-07:00

Spoke is dedicated helping members initiate relationships with business people to form better alliances and strong businesses. One of the key elements of establishing new relationships is doing so within the confines of trust and ethics. That’s why Spoke has a well-defined privacy policy that guarantees that at no time will Spoke display, sell, or give away any direct contact information without a member’s consent.

Spoke does offer several ways to reach over 60 million businesspeople using features such as:
• Corporate contact information (such as a headquarters address and phone number)
• SpokeMails
• Outlook integration

We’ve heard time and again from you, our members, that you want direct contact information for people found in Spoke, but because of our privacy policy we were unable to supplement our rich profile data with direct contact information.

Today we are excited to announce a new feature that bridges the chasm between our privacy policy and our members’ requests. Now you can access direct contact information for anyone in Spoke using the Jigsaw integration.

Jigsaw is a directory of business contacts including direct contact information such as some one’s business email address, direct dial extension, business mailing address, and position within the company and you have direct access to get this information from Spoke.

To download this information, look just below a person’s profile for the words ‘Purchase Contact’. If you see this, then you can now download direct contact information from Spoke.

For more information on how this process works, visit the Jigsaw FAQs.

So what are you waiting for? Go download some direct contact information from Spoke and initiate the connections you need to grow your network!

Philippe Cases
President, CEO
Spoke

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Access direct contact information for millions of business people in Spoke

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