This is an important piece from John Robb's weblog that we can't lose.

Quote Below:

I recently read the ROI document produced by Plumtree Software for estimating the value portal software (you have to sign-in to get it, lower right). Let me sum it up quickly for you.

The document assumes a 5,000 person organization.

Portal costs:

Portal license: $2,000,0000 ($400 per desktop for the core package)
Hardware: $110,000
Collaboration and portlet development tools: $675,000
Operational costs: $1,250,000 (very expensive admin)
TCO over one year: $4,035,000 for 5,000 desktops or $807 a desktop

Portal benefits:

Lower cost of delivering web front ends to business apps: $1,200,000
Lower cost of adding a web front end to business apps: $1,050,000
Large document publishing via portal lowers costs of publishing via e-mail: $56,000
Lower extranet, directory, and Intranet management costs: $1,038,000
Lower training costs due to portal integration: $1,800,000
Efficient information delivery lowers compliance costs: $432,000
Collaboration improves project effectiveness: $300,000
Elimination of paper-based distribution of corporate media: $800,000
Employee self service: $182,000
Customer and partner self service: $80,000
Increased productivity via a single Web interface: $2,500,000
Net benefit: $9,342,000 or $1,886 per desktop.

Total ROI of a traditional Portal system: 240%

What is amazing to me is how many of these functions are available via a K-Log network at a small fraction of the price. Here is how I would construct the ROI document for a K-Log portal.

K-Log Costs (high end estimates):

K-Log portal software license: <$250,000 ($50 a desktop at the high end -- using a variety of vendors as models).
Hardware: <$60,000
Custom K-Log portal development: <$100,000
Operational costs: <$300,000
TCO of a K-Log system over one year: $710,000 for 5,000 desktops or $142 a desktop (a well run project could probably cut this to under $75 a desktop).

K-Log benefits:

Lower cost of delivering web front ends to business apps: $1,200,000 (100%, this can be done by personal K-Log systems by template control and self editing of navigation links).
Lower cost of adding a web front end to business apps: unknown (a portion of this could be accomplished by using the low cost CMS that the K-Log system is built on, but I will count this as a zero for sake of argument).
Large document publishing via portal lowers costs of publishing via e-mail: $56,000 (100%, self published files with human understandable version history is easy via a K-Log system)
Lower extranet, directory, and Intranet management costs: $1,038,000 (100%)
Lower training costs due to portal integration: $1,800,000 (100%, I would argue that a K-Log system is even easier to train an employee on than a portal package since this is a system that is in wide use on the Web).
Efficient information delivery lowers compliance costs: $432,000 (100%, through both RSS and K-Log publishing)
Collaboration improves project effectiveness: $300,000 (K-Log networks include discussions, comments, e-mail bulletins, trackback, RSS, and more for collaboration)
Elimination of paper-based distribution of corporate media: $800,000 (100%, RSS -- including enclosures -- and K-Log publishing)
Employee self service: $182,000 (100%, information and application access is even more under the control of the individual employee in a K-Log network, and therefore more able to radically enhance power users -- which typically are some of the most productive employees)
Customer and partner self service: $80,000 (100%)
Increased productivity via a single Web interface: $2,500,000 (100%, easily done through template control and integration of web front ends with employee weblog interfaces).
Net benefit of a K-Log system: $8,292,000 or $1,658 per desktop.

Total ROI of a K-Log system: 1,170%

Other benefits of K-Logs over Portals involve traditional KM goals that Portal software can't hope to match. In many ways with a K-Log network running on your Intranet you get the all the benefits of Portal software and the best KM system that has yet been envisioned.

http://jrobb.mindplex.org/stories/2003/07/29/roiCalculationsKlogsVsTraditionalIntranetPortals.html


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Social networking, a rising Internet trend most famously exemplified by Friendster, is about to meet another online trend--fees.

http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5147716.html

Tickle fully expects Friendster and other competition to jump on the fee bandwagon to benefit the industry as a whole, said Tickle Chief Executive James Currier.

"It's not that Tickle is the social networking company that's charging," Currier said in an interview. "It's for the enhanced features that we're drawing the line, and we're hopeful that the others come along with us. There needs to be a revenue stream for these companies to provide a good, strong service to consumers. We learned our lesson during the bubble that you can't sustain these services without some kind of payment relationship, and consumers are getting used to paying for things that they use and enjoy."

Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, who was not immediately available for comment, has said in the past that his service will remain free, though fees could be introduced for extra features.

Tickle has turned a profit for the last seven quarters through fees associated with its quizzes and dating services, Currier said.

Premium subscriptions to the Tickle social network, which boasts more than 1 million members, according to the company, will cost $19.95 for one month, $39.95 for three months, and $59.95 for six months




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More than 100,000 sites, including The Weather Channel and several CNET properties use the Internet Billing Company to process their reoccurring billing offers for content, downloads, and site access.

We interviewed Major Accounts Director Howard Goldberg to get some eagle's eye advice on what works and what doesn't work for selling online subscriptions. And, boy did he have some great advice:

First, make your home page trustworthy and enticing

Keep selling on your barrier and order pages

Tips on pricing and term

"$19.95 per month is a sweet price point," says Goldberg, who's also seen success at the $4.95 and $9.95 price points for consumer content and $29-39 for business-to-business.

How many payment options should you include?

While most tests have shown you want to keep your offer as simple as possible (asking buyers to choose between two or more different term or price options can greatly depress your conversion rates), Goldberg says you should give as many payment options as you can.

The full article is here.
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2602


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Opening an e-mail box, only to see hundreds and even thousands of e-mails, is a sight that scares off even the most e-mail loving person. Included in that batch of unread messages are many good informative newsletters. You may have specificially signed up just to receive them.

Unfortunately, they often get lost in the flood of spam e-mails you most certainly did not request.

Many times, installed "spam filters" will block out your fully authorized permission based newsletter entirely. Your message never reaches its intended audience. You may never know.

While fully permission based opt-in newsletters are still welcomed by most recipients, there is another alternative.

It's business blogging.

The great thing about maintaining a business blog is there is no need to worry about it being blocked by spam filters. Since a blog is not sent by e-mail, it can't be blocked.

A blog can't be accidently deleted along with unwanted spam sales pitches either. Newsletter recipients often set aside some requested e-mails for later, but instead wind up deleting them in the end. Unread, with dozens of other "saved" e-mails.

Barring a failure of your internet server, your business blog is available at all times. All it takes to read it is a click of a bookmark.
In many ways, a blog is more timely than a newsletter. The blog can be updated several times a day, while a newsletter is more likely to be sent every two weeks. Even a weekly newsletter can't be as immediate as a daily blog.

That is not to say that a fully opt-in, permission based newsletter is a bad idea. In fact, it is far from it. Properly used, a newsletter can provide great information and product offers to your subscribers right on their desktops. They still have a powerful place in your marketing and customer relations programs.
Properly used, an e-mail newsletter campaign can remain effective. You can reach your customers and maintain a steady relationship with them.

On the other hand, a business blog can be equally effective at communicating your message to your customers.


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Below is a link to a Dave Polard's blog with the same title. it is worth a read because it is a very good description of what we are trying to create with QuickDraft.

In a recent post I advocated almost a complete replacement of existing knowledge management systems and intranets with a three-tiered set of simple, intuitive tools consisting of:

1. Personal content management tools -- to help people organize their personal information (and other information they've aggregated) their way, and identify who they will permit to access it under what circumstances ('permissioning')

2. Metadata tools (invisible to the user) -- to automatically reorganize this personal content for effective, permitted use by others

3. Social networking applications -- to help people identify other people (inside and outside their organization) with particular expertise or shared interests, connect and collaborate with these people and with people in the individual's self-defined networks, via Simple Virtual Presence, browse and subscribe to others' permissioned personal content, and publish their own permissioned content.

Here is the full post.

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/02/18.html#a632


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Below is a quote from Dave Pollard, the former Chief Knowledge Officer form Ernst & Young. It is a great paragraph because is is truly representive of why enterprise knowledge managment solutions failed. He is talking about the fact that knowledge managment systems have to be personal content management systems first.

Quote:

I believe personal content management tools are the place to start, because since the earliest days of business, the principal way of sharing information has been peer-to-peer, the most valued 'repositories' of business information have been personal filing cabinets, and the principal schema for organizing work has been the personal desktop. It makes sense, therefore, that tools that facilitate and reflect these well-established 'knowledge processes', information sources and networks should be much more successful than the complex, centralized, hierarchical knowledge management tools and repositories that have been foisted on users for the past decade.

End Quote:

It is a great quote because how is it possible that anyone could believe that a centralied hierarchical tool could work when it was in no way related to how people did and have done knowledge work since the beginning.




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From Stewart Butterfield's quick links blog:

QUOTE:

Human beings cannot pay attention to their task and to system state at the same time. Mode errors are caused by the system responding differently to a particular user gesture when the system is in different internal states. Interface designers have known about and published papers about the difficulties caused by modes since at least the early 1970s. Nonetheless, they continue to design modes into interfaces and thus continue to ill-serve users. There is much more to be said about modes and why you can't solve the problem with mode indicators, but there is not room here to discuss the subject (I wrote about it in detail in my book, The Humane Interface, Addison-Wesley, 2000).

A very few systems avoid the entire issue by using a "move" command. You make a selection, which persists (and so remains visible and in its place) while you move the cursor to the target location. You then issue the move command (which requires no more effort than that required to issue the paste command) and the selection moves. Not only have we eliminated one command (before you had to issue both cut and paste commands; now you issue one move command), but the text you are moving never vanishes; and if you start a second move before completing the first, nothing is lost.

That such a simple solution exists, has been available for decades, yet is rarely used shows how interface designers have become slaves of fashion and how corralled they are by convention.

This is a great quote worth saving from Ross's blog.

"One of the great things about blogs is that it accelerated the the conversation on the web and increased the bandwith. Phone calls are even faster."

QuickDraft will provide value to its users because of its ability to handle a greater flow of information through its more effiecent handling of microcontent, tday's currency of the web and its rapid assembly publishing features.


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I've decided to post the full article on this topic from Internetnews.com because I think it is a interesting one for QuickDraft.

Social Networking has become a hot topic in Silicon Valley, but as the heading suggests the business model is still elusive. This may represent a tremendous opportunity for QuickDraft, as a way to connect with others in your social network sphere with more than simply contact information.

The commercial service that QuickDraft intends to provide is a vehicle to connect and exchange information and advice with people in the network on a fee for service basis. That is, social networkers would have to ability to conduct transactions with each other in a "knowlegde brokering" business context.

A social networking and eBay type of combination can be developed that could prove be very powerful. 

Here is the article:

Despite skepticism that the buzz around social networking tools is fueled by venture capital-created hype, executives at some of these start-ups insist there's money to be made from software that connects friends to friends of friends.

Services like Friendster, Tribe Networks, LinkedIn and Google's Orkut may be growing in popularity but, as Tribe founder Mark Pincus admits, revenues are non-existent and profitability is not even in the equation today.

So why are venture capitalists pumping money into social networking start-ups? "There's an intended business model in subscriptions, classifieds and even targeted advertising," Pincus said at a panel discussion in New York this week.

"This is the next generation of online classifieds. CraigsList has shown us there are revenue opportunities once we do this right," Pincus said, referring to Craig Newmark's no-frills Web site that serves as a marketplace for millions looking to buy and sell items, find dates and research job opportunities.

CraigsList charges a $75 fee to list job openings and has generated million of dollars in annual revenue. "We can emulate CraigsList," Pincus declared, pointing to an increase in the number of paying participants in the online classifieds market.

Pincus, a serial entrepreneur who founded and once served as CEO of SupportSoft (Quote, Chart), believes the interconnectivity of social networks will create lucrative online classified marketers, especially at the local levels.

Reid Hoffman, the former PayPal vice president who founded LinkedIn, sees a hybrid business model for his company. Once the service expands, Hoffman said money will be made in paid subscriptions from members and an advertising service resembling Google's content-matching AdWords service.

"Are you looking for a lawyer? Well, the advertisement can return a lawyer in the network that is linked to one of your friends," Hoffman said. "There are lots of business models that can come out of business people looking to connect with each other."

A subscription fee for premium membership is another option for LinkedIn, which launched late last year with $4.7 million in funding from Sequoia Capital. In the long term, Hoffman believes the social networks can tap into the lucrative online dating business now dominated by companies like Match.com, Yahoo Personals and Lavalife.

The online dating sites lets users create and publish catchy profiles for free but charge a monthly fee to let users contact each other. It is a model now being used by Ryze, which styles itself as a pioneering business networking service. Ryze charges $9.95 per month for gold membership and also makes money from organizing networking events and, according to CEO Adrian Scott, the company is already turning a profit.

New York-based Visible Path is taking a different approach to marketing the service, by targeting enterprises with social networking technology. Visible Path Chief Executive Antony Brydon believes the corporate customer is an easier sell for technology that offer relationship networks that connect them to prospective customers, partners, investors and employees.

At the panel discussion, Brydon announced the closing of a $3.7 million round of funding from venture capital outfit Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Ray Lane, a general partner in the VC firm will take a seat on Visible Path's board of directors.


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This is an old article, but felt it worthwhile to post here. I had not realized the fairly aggressive activity going on in this space in silicon Valley.

Here is a quote:

Search-engine giant Google recently made a $30 million offer to buy Friendster, the hot Sunnyvale online dating site that lets users meet and date friends of their friends.

Friendster spurned the proposal, choosing instead to accept $13 million in fresh investments from venture capital firms, according to two VC insiders familiar with the events.

And the full article:
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/7148749.htm


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The Kirk Report, which is of of the blogs I personally read on a regular basis has become a real life example of the commercial service that could be developed with QuickDraft.

http://www.thekirkreport.com

Here is the service that he just announced a little more than a week ago.

http://www.thekirkreport.com/2004/01/new_service_ann.html

A few weeks prior he had made this comment in his weblog.

Quote:

Also, as just a quick reminder to everyone, I'm no longer able to handle the volume of email I receive asking me for advice regarding specific stocks, trading strategies, etc. Today my inbox had over 700 emails that did exactly that, despite my note on the contact page saying that I couldn't take time to personally respond in this manner even though I'd clearly like to. It took me about an hour just to sort through the messages.

This is the link to the service he developed.
http://www.kirkreport.com/consulting.html

And of course, he continues to promote it in his daily weblog posts, such as today's

Quote:

On Tuesday one reader asked me what I thought Nortel (NT) would do later this week when earnings were announced. I told him that I thought that there was a 80% chance that we could see a nice rally because of the high short interest in the stock and because Wall Street currently sees this stock as one of the best plays on telecom in 2004. (I wish I followed my own advice, at least for a short-term trade.) Still, that wasn't a bad call for only $25.


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The Internet, when viewed through a Browser, provides access to what now amounts to billions of pages of searchable content.  The Browser though, as its name indicates, was only designed for the display and navigation of information.  Today’s knowledge workers need capabilities beyond what the Browser was designed for and are looking for ways to extract valuable pieces of content from the flow of information and reassemble those pieces for specific uses.

These pieces are known as microcontent and can be anything from a link, a paragraph, a page, a part of a page, or an individual idea, picture, file, message, fact, opinion, note, data record, or any other kind of “content object.”

Our contribution to this emerging space is QuickDraft, a client application that works in conjunction with a Browser.  It functions as an interactive workspace that allows for: 

• the rapid assembly of links, files, data, images and other relevant items of interest,
• subsequent easy manipulation of the collected microcontent,
• simple addition of annotations and commentary,  and finally
• one-click publishing.

QuickDraft is a microcontent management and  “rapid assembly” publishing application that is specifically designed to speed up the process of content creation by quickly generating a “first draft” of the ideas that users want to communicate. The application then allows for editing of the “first draft” before making available its fast one-button publication features.

QuickDraft becomes the organizing mechanism – the “hub” – for gathering information from any and all sources, then using annotation and sequencing – storyboarding, in essence – to filter & recombine information in useful ways before presenting it either as views or as feeds for other consumers.

In the coming microcontent-driven Web, information will also be published in discrete, semantically defined "postings" in addition to traditional content such as files, Web pages, data records, etc.  Weblogs are an example of this trend and we hope that Bloggers will be the vanguard for this type of tool. 

The purpose of this Weblog is to introduce the concept of QuickDraft to a broad audience and recieve their feedback such that we can create a product that improves both the quality of the conversations we are having through weblogs and allow the participation to expand to a wider audience.