Hectic Eclectic

Having spent some time at LCTY2010 in Edinburgh...

At times reduced to a Barcode...

I may still just agree that Lotus Knows...

At the event there were some great speakers, for me the Highlights being (I've retitled)

Stuart McRae a Collaboration Evangelist - Connections plus with special sauce

John Schumacher a Director of Development at Lotus - It's the ROI stupid

and

Eliza Manningham-Buller, from the Bond movies - on being in MI5

So there was a lot to see...

Stuart's demo showcased a load of little 10second savers (widgets) being used in concert and in context within Lotus Connections and Domino (yes you could have used outlook for this bit).  Widget shown were either Business Partner e.g. Snapp, Big publically available stuff like linkedin and TrippIt and some internal IBM tools, or publically available stuff from the IBM Lotus Labs.

If you can save people 5mins every day through smarter working.  That is about 1% of a working day.  So with hundred staff you can have 100 staff doing the work of 101.  With a 1000 staff you are getting the work of 1010.  So for a 1000 employee business you save 10 average salaries... Think about you average company salary for a moment....  think you should be considering this stuff?  I do.

For a £20k average salary

1000 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a. 

For a £40k average salary

500 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a.

or

1000 staff equates to savings of £400k p.a.

Powerful stuff ... but who believes the 5mins right?  Well Stuart showed one example after another of how time could be saved.... if you couldn't easily find AT LEAST 5mins you are probably doing something mad.

Stuart McRae also touched on some of the stuff I've mentioned already about Blackberry and the iPhone but it was cool to see some iPad announces too and to hear reinforced that IBM's view is - you choose the device and we'll work with anyone.  Some really cool announces on how people are working well with Alloy by IBM & SAP (wee blog on that), Connections, Quickr and the rest on the Blackberry.

Amongst other things I was reminded by a colleague to check out Ed Brill's blog - where I hadn't been for a while, which led me to some Lotus Protector articles.  Zero false positives at 99% effective... not bad and ICSALabs certified.  If you don't know it much check out these videos with Arthur Fontaine

Glue - now I've only sniffed it - not had a full look yet

... but this look pretty interesting for folks going down the in house social software route... but perhaps looking to take it out to the network edge and (eventually) beyond.

The offering extends the functionality of Connections to include more of the Twitterlike ( @stuart-seric ) microblogging functionality.  Here's a wee demo from Youtube land

There's a 30 day trial available and I can see this being useful for at least a decent subset of staff in an fully online business and a smaller proportion in others.  No news/comments on whether mobile support will be offered or how this fits in on what Lotus are up to with RIM for Connections

Lotusphere Comes To You 2010 - Edinburgh Date Announced

This year's (Scottish) Lotusphere Comes to you Event has been announce and the word on the grapevine is it will be a corker, with even more great demos.  I know David Hood has been working on bringing the right people to the show.  We'll be there along with the usual suspects and of course hoping to see many more new folks along.  Why not tell a friend...

You can get updates and register (not quite yet) for the Edinburgh event at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/events/lcty2010/europe.html

If in the meantime you want to let your contacts know you're interested or are planning to attend I've created an event on Linkedin so you can let folk know you are going and get some of your own networking done at the event too.

Aussie bank launches online social community for people with plans

I picked up from a fine article at finextra.com that Australia's Bendigo and Adelaide Bank have launched an online social community where anyone with a plan, project or idea can connect with other people to find support, resources and expertise.  This sort of community enterprise enablement through social media is the sort of thing that could really bring big changes to communities.

The PlanBig site, currently in beta, lets users come up with any plan they choose, from a campaign to bring music education to rural communities in Queensland to fundraising for a horse rescue centre.

Users provide a description of their plan, the reason they are embarking on it and an explanation of what will constitute success. They can also post pictures, videos and documents.

Other visitors can then post comments, offering support, money, advice and information. They can also "get involved" by telling people about the plan through Facebook and Twitter, voting to support it and signing up for progress updates.

The bank says PlanBig draws on the strengths of social networking to enable people to efficiently share information, create partnerships and support each other's plans.

"One day we hope that PlanBig will be part of everyday life, a self-sustaining and self-moderating community that is of real use to passionate people and real benefit to communities with all kinds of plans, big or small," it says.

Themed collaborative platforms such as these will help to bring people together around a common purpose.  Interesting to see banks getting involved in this space given older survey of facebookers have suggested they might be interested in taking up such things should vendors run with them.  Good on the boys down under in getting this one out, looking to take a lead in their market space.  Fortune favours the brave and this might just erm disrupt the apple cart.