How do I Invest in The Startup Bus Investment Game?

The Startup Bus is on the way to Austin for South by Southwest, and the teams are ready to start getting investment via the Investment Game.

What's the Investment Game?

From the Site:

Want to help a team succeed? Well earn capital and invest it into a team – and if you invest the highest amount, you will become the chairperson of that startup.

Chair’s are typically tasked with raising financial capital for startup businesses. What we need however, is something just as important: social capital. By participating in this fun game we’ve developed, you actually help us grow our business.

How it works: you get rewarded for activity with http://thestartupbus.com- either your own or from other people. For different types of activity, you earn a bus dollar: the more bus dollars you earn, the more you can invest between the teams. If you invest capital in a team, you will be ranked against other users who have done so. Invest the highest amount of capital and become the chairperson.

As chair, you will get listed as the teams chair on the website. The startup’s – at their discretion – may choose to reward you with stock, if they believe you provide continuing value to their business.

Specific rules:
- when you login, you earn 100 bus dollars
- when you login, you can send a Tweet saying you just made an investment and that will give you another 100 bus dollars
- for every unique user that clicks on the URL in the Tweet message, you will get an additional 10 bus dollars
-for every minute that passes when you are logged in, you will earn 1 bus dollar

Now my question is the teams are great, but how do I invest in 'The Startup Bus Investment Game'? Brilliant.

Tech Mamas: What Have You Done For Your 'Digital' Baby?

As a Techie Mama, there are a couple of things that i did, either during my pregnancy or right after i gave birth to prepare my little one for her digital life. These included:

• Setting up a gmail account with her name [i did this about 3 months before giving birth and started sending her messages, figured if we didn't go with that name i would get a new one and forward the messages] i am pretty sure that gmail will be around when she is old enough to have an email account
• A couple of months before giving birth, when we had decided on a name, after many Google searches, i setup an filter on my Twitter Tweetdeck to see how her name was being used
• Bought my daughter's name Domain name [after birth because i wanted to make sure that it was a girl and she looked like a Ramona :-) i did check its availablity a couple of months prior and was a bit nervous that it could get picked up but didn't want to spend the 10 bucks!
  
• Setup up a digital babybook [2 weeks prior to giving birth]. I am using a great service called lil'grams that allows me to securely share pictures, videos and stories for friends and family while allowing them to choose how they want to be updated of new things i post. i will be posting up a detailed review about the service shortly on this blog
• I checked facebook, there is already someone else with her name (in Italy) but i didn't bother, i am pretty sure that facebook will be the MySpace of her generation due to something bigger and better (perhaps even sooner!) so there will be better places for her online. i didn't bother with twitter either i can't see myself tweeting on her behalf and i think there will be other fads when she is ready to speak her mind.
• [Edit: Addition] I setup all the grandparents on Skype! Ramona's grandparents are scattered all around so we had to make sure they got skype working for all those video calls as they watch her grown remotely!
• [Edit: Addition]I got a Flip Mino Video Camera, i have a camcorder but it is to bulky to pull out to catch those special moments, the flip is always with me even when i am out of the house
  

What am i missing that you would add to this list?

Ramona Week by Week: First Three Weeks

3D photo wall created with Cooliris.

DJ Reorg Combining Enterprise and Consumer Divisions

A couple of people pinged me last week to see how i was doing and to find out how i felt about the news that Dow Jones had a major reorganization and was combining the Enterprise and Consumer Divisions. As many of you know, i have been with the Enterprise Media Group (formally factiva) for 10 years.

Of course timing is everything and I happen to be on maternity leave and although i have spoken to a couple of my colleagues after the news (yeah i just couldn't help it!), i mostly have gotten the news from internal memos, blog/media coverage and industry analyst insights that have been published.

So what do i think? If you have been reading my blog for a while you know that since 2005 i have been writing about enterprise information delivery and the consumerization of information and information delivery and consumption tools in the enterprise. My main theory being that the tools that employees use outside of the workplace influence and drive the tools that they will ultimately use within the enterprise and at times become one and the same.

So since i have been advocating and working with customers for years trying to assist them in creating the right tool sets for their employees, i believe that the combining of the two divisions could not come at a better time. Four years ago when i first started writing about what our former CEO/EVP Clare Hart eventually called the 'prosumer' - those users were the early adopters. Fast forward to today and most if not all enterprise users are keenly aware of how consumer web applications, portals and tools operate and facilitate their information finding needs. These users now demand that the tools that are given to them to do their jobs offer the same if not superior functionality.

I am hoping that this change will make my job easier and even more rewarding when i return from maternity leave as we continue to leverage the technologies that the consumer media group has developed to deliver innovative tools for enterprise use.

Semantics in Financial Services Presentation

The Silicon Valley Semantic Technology Group organized by Peter Berger is one of the meetups that i have been going to for a while and have even helped coordinate and host in the past. Last Thursday the 15th they had what seems to be a great session about Semantics in Financial Services with David Newman who is a Senior Architect in the Enterprise Architecture group at Wells Fargo Bank (now part of Wachovia). I missed it due to the bambina, but lucky for me and for the rest of you that were not able to make it, the excellent slidedeck that David Newman used has been posted on Slideshare- see below (thanks Peter!).

Based on the Slidedeck, the presentation covered:

• The Case for Semantic Technology- Important Key Drivers, Limitations and Benefits
  
• Overview of Semantic Technology - Basic Overview that hits all the most know items for business and technology folks
  
• Semantic Technology Providers and Adopters -a high level list. He makes mention of Dow Jones as an adopter but forgets to mention Synaptica as a technology provider of ontology editor
  
• Semantic Applications for Financial Services- I am always a sucker for 'use-cases' of semantic technologies in the enterprise and Newman provides two slides that outline various semantic applications for financial services which i have highlighted below
• Recommended Semantic Technology Books and Articles

Many of the Semantic Applications that Newman points out for financial services can also be extended to other non-financial services companies but his breakdown highlights specific opportunities for financial services. Wish i had been there in person to learn more about which of these applications Newman and his team are tackling using semantic technologies:

Semantics in Financial Services -David Newman

View more presentations from Peter Berger.

From Peter Berger's introduction:
David Newman serves as a Senior Architect in the Enterprise Architecture group at Wells Fargo Bank. He has been following semantic technology for the last 3 years; and has developed several business ontologies. He has been instrumental in thought leadership at Wells Fargo on the application of Semantic Technology and is a representative of the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC)on the W3C SPARQL Working Group

Welcoming Ramona into Our Lives

Seven days ago on December 23rd we welcomed into our lives a baby girl- Ramona. The last 9 months have been an amazing experience thanks to my husband, family, friends and all the powerful women i have met through my pregnancy and birth.


Makes sense as to why no blogging, tweeting or anything else out of me lately- uh? :-)

Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season~ i certainly am!!

Enterprise 2.0 - A Conference, Conversations and a lot of Common Sense

This week the Enterprise 2.0 Conference made it's debut in San Francisco (it has been an annual event in Boston). I was only able to attend one of the days but got my fill of colleagues who work in the space that i have not seen for a while, vendors (expo hall had many new and 'old-timers') and got to attend some interesting sessions.

One of the things i love about Twitter is the value that it brings at conferences- both when you are physically there as well as when you are 'listening' in remotely. Commonly called the 'Back-Channel' attendees tweet their thoughts, location, what speakers are saying etc. The Enterprise 2.0 site has a handy 'Back Channel' page or a quick Twitter search on the #e2conf hashtag will let you read through some of the conversations occurring in the back-channel as well the 'reporting' that was done during sessions and post event. The days i was not there, i was tracking the conversation that way. Today i also spent some time reviewing various 'wrap-up' posts including:

• Oliver Marks - The Enterprise 2.0 Value Propositions Agenda -
• Andrew McAfee's Top Enterprise 2.0 No-No's - CMS Wire
• Tony Bryne- Enterprise 2.0 Conference wrap up
• Nenshad Bardoliwalla - Is Enterprise 2.0 a Savior or a Charlatan? How Strategy-Driven Execution can pave the path to proving legitimate business value (great post need to digest a bit more myself)
  

My own thoughts align with some of the criticism and frustration that can be heard about E2.0 that it is early, how do you define, what are the business values, etc. Do you have to give it a special name- or it is just for marketing purposes. Spending some time with the vendors in the expo hall- the business proposition is primarily productivity benefits, increasing sales, capturing knowledge- nothing new in the Enterprise software space but the key is that the user (enterprise user in the role of the consumer) is driving. Adoption is still a huge issue and although the 'wikification' method of enterprise penetration (Mary puts a wiki server under her desk, at 10 dollars for 10 users that grows to enterprise) has proven to be successful for some of these smaller vendors and it is still early on but the big platform vendors are quickly catching up.

From the start, the labeling of Enterprise 2.0 has been debated and for instance the panel titled "Is Enterprise 2.0 A Crock?" that featured internal evangelists from EMC, Eli Lilly, CSC Booz Allen, MetLife and Alcatel-Lucent was supposed to prove that it isn't- although it was good to hear these big name companies on a stage advocating and proving some benefits- i didn't manage to hear anything new and specific. That is why i enjoyed sessions like the one that Susan Bouchard from Cisco did on Enterprise Mashups Deliver Business Value: Cisco's Story (disclaimer Cisco has been a client of mine for a while).

Susan recently co-authored a book titled Enterprise Web 2.0 Fundamentals and the years that i have know her as been an advocate of adopting new technologies for Cisco- primarily sales teams. Susan's presentation had specific use cases on leveraging mashups (a technology that is included in the E2.0 'stack'). She also mentioned some of the work that my team has been doing around executive dashboards to deliver contextual data that incorporates mashup principles (Cisco is currently not a client of that solution).

Susan also made note of a recent publication by Cisco titled the Economics of the Cisco Collaboration Story: Case Studies of Web 2.0 Collaboration Initiatives where over $650 million in savings is sited based on their use of Web2.0 collaboration capabilities (this number includes things like reducing travel and the use of some of their own product lines (e.g. Webex)). Susan posted her slide deck on Slideshare (E2.0 presentations are locked down for attendees only-boooo) so here it is :

Enterprise Mashups Deliver Business Value

View more presentations from SusanBouchard.

Always good to be surrounded by like minded individuals and although i am sure i missed meeting many many many more because i was only on site for a day- i certainly enjoyed it and all the while making the brain juices flow which sometimes is hard to do when you are in front of a computer and talking to Enterprise clients about existing solutions (cause that is what they are ready for)- when the mind wants to explore and build the next thing!


Image|Flickr| Alex Dunne