Review: BitWine

Did you ever have this dream:…about sitting somewhere under a palm-tree doing your business online, making money, far away from traffic jams, your boss? It will become a reality and for some it already is. With that in mind I had a closer look at an application called BitWine and found myself a nice terrace in the south of Portugal to try it out.

First let me explain what BitWine is. It is much like Skype, in fact it is a Skype plug-in. You just have your Skype call to any other Skype address and you thus can share your expertise online. Your service consultancy online will be billed to the other person by the minute for which both parties need to have a PayPal account. BitWine has a nice layout and easy website taking you one step at the time, helping you to subscribe as a BitWine expert.
After subscription, you download a toolbar, which settles at the bottom of your screen and which you can make to disappear at will. No annoying pushy toolbars here, just the plain basics.

Talking about basics, one of the best features of BitWine is its’ simplicity. They understood what we want to see in order to assess a profile and some-ones expertise. You can share your video to your audience by uploading a video-profile to Youtube and copying the code or hyperlink to the profile. I mentioned it over and over again, but a good video-profile is a great enabler to build ‘confidence’ on the internet especially when money is involved.

The BitWine team only concentrated on using best practice tools to integrate with. I already mentioned Skype, but it also interacts with PayPal in such way that you can fully benefit of all the PayPal payment protection and insurance during your BitWine experience. Simply said, your payment is assured.
Using it with clients I noticed that people sometimes didn’t understand that I was going to charge them for it. BitWine helps to streamline that process as well, because you can have endless conversations using the tool without charging anything, the 'meter' only starts ticking if and when both parties agree to it.

For BitWine advisors that means that you have to agree with your customer when the meters starts running and which part of the conversation will be charged.

So installation was easy, using it even simpler. And it worked! All I needed was my laptop and a wireless connection to be online. Payment was automatically done, it was already there on PayPal when I looked at it 10 seconds later. Furthermore, when I closed the application I noticed that the experience could be rated as well. Best practice consultancy portals such as Guru.com and Elance always used rating systems, but this one is instant giving much better feedback to the real experience.

One reader informed me about a similar feature which will be in Skype 3.1 Prime beta. I had a short look at it and can tell you that it is no-where in the same league as Bitwine and clearly targeting a non-quality marktet. There are no quality ratings (and who wants to talk and pay to someone if he can't be sure about the quality of the advisor?), commission for Skype is very steep (30% !) and the maximum allowed fee is 2 Euro per minute (which self-respecting senior consultant will work for that?)...

Since that first review a few months ago, thousands of new BitWine consultants have joined. The success strengthens itself as more people are joining. The areas of expertise have increased as well (click to expand view):

This week I spoke to Alon Cohen, co-founder of BitWine, who assured me that BitWine is coming to your mobile platform or phone as well soon. They even intend to make a version for Mac OS X with the upcoming Iphone in mind. They even have a solution for Second Life now, which any self-respecting web 2.0 networking company should have these days.
That might be another great enabler. Can you imagine meeting people from under your palm-tree in Real life on a business location in Second Life enabling making money in Real Life…No? I can understand that that might sound a bit too far off, but it might prove a real winner and a first moneymaking enabler for Services on Second Life…

So where is the catch you might ask? Interviewing the team of BitWine I am perfectly sure that there isn’t one. In the past I frequently noticed collaboration or referral tools that promised a lot of money to its’ subscribers, but in fact where not even having an integrated payment system. BitWine has been made around PayPal and Skype and that is a winning strategy.

Alon was also very honest on where BitWine will earn it’s money from (something else you don’t often hear from web 2.0 companies…): for now they are doing it for free, but in the future they will ask for a modest commission on each deal. No deal, no expenses for the BitWine consultant and that is something I like too. Often you have to pay for a service like Elance and you discover that no business comes in at decent fees…

Summary
BitWine is build around best practice and is totally basic, no-nonsense. That has worked for all the (now) big names such as Google, Yahoo, Skype and Ebay. It will be in the same League, it just needs time…

If you want personal advise regarding your online strategy, just call me, I became a Bitwine advisor too…

Review: CollectiveX.com

CollectiveX came across my path about a year ago. I liked it instantly because it has a good user interface, it couldn’t be simpler and basic services are free. Its’ portal lets you write your profile in a user-friendly way and helps you to find business objectives of other profiles of people within a Same Interest Group. That is something we like to see in a business portal! It really matches your business objectives quite nicely. The indexing and content management is quite good.

It also shows you the objectives within your network. Quite neat! CollectiveX has chosen to target SIGS users (same interest groups) and therefore the amount of people you can see is limited to the people on your SIG, which in general isn’t a lot like e.g. LinkedIn and Xing.
In this stadium of Web 2.0 development they thus need to do more to let users see all the profiles on the portal, regardless the SIG you have joined. They are thus missing out on the growing potential generated by the enthusiasm of their users.

I have spoken to people at CollectiveX, they are very much open to improvement suggestions, which is good. Try to contact e.g. people at LinkedIn and they will not even answer your email or call.

Summary
CollectiveX is promising and that is why I chose to write about it. It is the only portal I know of which matches business objectives, which is a start. It doesn’t have any Skype or IM integration and it totally misses out on the opportunity to reach out to the masses first.

But maybe that makes it ideal if you want to create a limited and very selective SIG…

If you want personal advise regarding your online strategy, just call me, I am a Bitwine advisor

A Web 3.0 story , November 12th 2011

1.08 PM, November 12^th 2011,

I was having a lazy day. I just finished a cup of coffee and decided to go online to find some new friends. I clicked the remote control and the full HD TV panel disclosed my online community to me instantly. It showed the location and coordinates of my friends in Real-life and in Second Life. I had to choose, if I wanted to meet with my friends instantly, or if I wanted to make a closer selection. I decided for the latter because I wanted to talk about a very specific subject; hotels in the Algarve. I always wanted to have a few weeks of holidays there and surely somewhere among my network there must be someone with the same special passion. I typed in my request and the system gave me a choice of three people in my network and 8 other specialists to the subject.

One of the specialists looked very nice, judging from her biography, photos and short videos in her online profile. Also her communication-stereotype seemed to match my own, so I selected to meet Verity on her location on GoogleLife, the second-life version of Google-Earth.

It was really amazing how Google Earth had developed over the years. Tens of thousands of programmers, mostly in India and Eastern Europe had created the GoogleLife.com after the huge success of Secondlife. GoogleLife was even more successful because it had something Secondlife didn’t have: a close resemblance to Real-life. You just got on through your TV screen and flew towards a copy of real-life in 3D.
So instead of taking the airplane to the Algarve I met with the avatar of Verity in the Algarve in GoogleLife. We decided to have a drink at a terrace in the small marketplace of Fuseta. Her Avatar was breathtaking. Her profile showed me that it was a close real-life resemblance, actually made out of real picture of her. I knew of course that some wrinkles and a few pounds of excessive weight where probably auto-erased from her Avatar-settings, but nevertheless..

We ordered a few virtual drinks and discussed the scenery; the old men shuffling by for a meeting in the local cafe and the tourists sitting on the terrace nearby ordering some local fish fresh from the market.

Being an expert of the scenery, Verity showed me some integrated videos of the town and interesting features. I told her that I wanted to have a closer look at a hotel at the beach, so we teleported to the main lobby. In the lobby I looked around and noticed the guest-book where other guest had entered their recommendations. It looked very promising so far, so I asked Verity to show me some rooms, the dining area and the swimming pool. This GoogleLife hotel was fully equipped with integrated high resolution RL cameras, so the information which I saw where up to 73 % real and life images, which added to the overall score of the hotel.

I was having a good time with Verity and remarkably she seemed to enjoy herself too. We shared our passion of the Algarve and had eye for the same details in the landscape and…each other. Well, I will not tell you what happened next, I can testify that the beds where good enough for a short online experience with my brand-new ‘kinky-suit’. Naturally you had to pay for that at the hotel lobby, but VR receptionists are perfectly discrete because my privacy settings are set on ‘full-privacy’.

So it turned out to be a quite active day in the end and when was logging out from I could help to wonder: will Real-life ever be the same again…?

If you want personal advise regarding your online strategy, just call me, I am a Bitwine advisor

Small Crimes and Misdemeanors

Imagine what we miss if honest and innocent truths are buried!

I was so pleased when you invited me to come here to your open network blog Ray. You represent the aspect of the Internet that is genuinely professional and true.

I work for a multi-author Web 2.0 and technology blog called Profy. Ray and I are Linkedin professionals and I am very pleased to be in the same network with many honest professionals like him.

The subject of this little post deals with "the other side" of the network community. That would be the people who detract and sap Web 2.0 of its credibility and true potential. These people could be bloggers, CEO's, investors, geeks, manufacturers, SEO experts or the janitor at the high school for that matter. Negative elements exist in the digital world even more easily than our physical one.

A few days ago I interviewed a very nice CEO of a startup company for our blog at Profy. The interview ran long, as the man really took an inordinate amount of time answering my many questions. The web site was actually very good, and I was excited to have the rare opportunity to share with people some unique news, to be able to do good work for Profy and to give a startup its just due. This was particularly fulfilling considering how many "dogs" an author is exposed to.

In short, I was hopeful that my little story would follow its rather established course and be picked up by Digg and a few other communities so that everyone concerned might be exposed to the little news. But, unseen by me there were undercurrents running beneath what I believed was an otherwise substantial platform. The short of it is that the story was out about one hour before someone buried it for a still unknown reason. I never even considered the possibility that such a thing was possible, let alone so easy to accomplish! I tend to be a little naive to such machinations out of choice.

I am sure this is not an uncommon thing, and perhaps I over react to what might be considered trivial to many. The point I am making is that these "small crimes" are the things that have made out real world so intolerable much of the time. The endless maze of structures where accountability is simply the diversion of blame, and where trust is no more than a relative term.

I am not out to get the Digg community or to beat up on angst ridden teenage geeks for that matter. I simply think it is important for us to at least acknowledge that we have a problem on the web. Secondly, we must make other people aware of how credibility effects us all. Finally, we have to do something to correct the problem.

The damage done by whoever clicked the bury button (for whatever reason) on that CEO's interview was minuscule by numeric comparison to what you and I may be being deprived of by similar "misdemeanors". Personally, I know the speed with which programmers could put accountability elements in place. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about "web site credibility" is that most of them seem to care little as long as their traffic stays constant.

Someone told me I was "tilting at windmills" when I exhibited my discord over this matter. I really felt more for the web site owner than for myself, as more people like this fellow are needed in Web 2.0. I am not in favor of some ultra conservative police state for the Intenet, but I simply would like to be able to win over those windmills in a venue dominated by Don Quijote success stories.

Rockin' the web with Tumblr | Me.dium

Jeremy Nel shares a new innovation on RSS feeds with us:

On TWiT Podcast 89, Leo and the team referred to Tumblr, and following a big debate no-one was quite certain of what benefit it would be.
Lo and behold, I find an entry on Me.dium today describing the use and value of Tumblr. Now, granted, this is obviously not a techno-phobe, but a serious techno-geek, but it is worth reading to try to understand how one can use this, if, like me, you are fascinated by the little things in life and how it affects/benefits us!

My favorite new web service (aside from me.dium, of course. No need burning my bridges on my very first day of being a featured member), is tumblr. At first, I thought it was somewhat of an online scrapbook. It was a place to post things that weren't QUITE worth putting in to a blog. Little quotes, conversations, funny images, etc. So I signed up and created a tumbl. I was immediately hooked.

Then, yesterday, a magical thing happened. Tumblr.com announced a killer new feature. RSS integration from other websites. Now, auto-magically, I can have my tumblr include my del.icio.us links, my Flickr photos, new songs I've marked as favorites on pandora.com, and so on and so forth.

Then what? Well then I can use tumblr's RSS feed to distribute to the masses. Suddenly ALL my stuff is combined in to one super, mutant RSS feed. Before this, I was relying on Yahoo! Pipes to achieve this. Their interface is powerful, but for simple things like combining RSS feeds, it was a bit much to grasp.

I thought the me.dium userbase, you tweakers, you... You bleeding-edge adapters... You deliciously glorious bunch of web hackers, you... I thought you would appreciate this.

I'm honored to be a featured me.dium user this week. I'll do my best to syndicate the way I browse the web to you. And hope that you can take away, by week-end, some tasty little morsels of knowledge. One fascinating thing about the Internet is, everyone uses it differently... And there are a million ways to skin a cat.

Until next time.

Static versus changing products.

I wanted to share with you an excellent Question by Aleksander Jaskowiak, about effective targeting towards same interest groups. I quite agree with his remarks, the full discussion can be viewed here.

In the last issue of the Harvard Business Review, among the breakthrough ideas, there is a new marketing approach (or rather a general thought) worked out by a group of HEC scholars. The main idea is that the firms, especially those in the cosmetics industry, would be better off (both in terms of market share, customer loyalty, costs to maintain clients) if they started to market and produce goods that will follow the targeted groups of customers as they advance in age.

These products are supposed to be moving rather than static products. Currently, these firms market and produce goods for a given, particular group of individuals (women aged 25-30; women aged 30-40; women above 50; etc.) – the static approach. The authors’ suggestion is to work out another marketing strategy targeted at the groups of individual varying and changing in time – the initial targeted group would, for example, be the group of women aged 20-30. The product is going to follow this group as it advances in time and evolve and adapt to their changing needs and requirements.

I personally do not see much difference between what these firms are doing now and the proposed effect – as these groups advance they will simply fall into the market niches explored by the existing products – women aged 20-30 now, when they are 40-50 will simply fall into the current product designed for this particular group of women. Can someone say more about this issue?

Review: Guru.com

I have liked this site for years, it has a very clear purpose and objective: state your business and what you would like to charge for doing that. People who are looking for specialists can thus choose if they want your services or the services from your competitor. Naturally it helps if you have some positive feedbacks and a low fee per hour.

One example; about a year ago I made my profile on Guru.com, stating my business as a business consultant. Naturally I put down my hourly fee and about a month later I got an email from Guru.com telling me that someone had a ‘business proposition’ for me. Naturally I logged into the system and checked it out. It turned out to be a shop-owner who wanted to have done some legal work and was looking for someone to help him writing his business plan. So I put down my offer to him and we were in business. Very simple and easy, and yes, Guru get a (modest) commission for being the online broker.

Every kind of service is represented on Guru.com and people are hiring. The only thing is that you first have to put down your services at very low costs in order to generate some leads and some positive feedbacks before you can make realistic normal fees. But it works!

The sad thing is that it hasn’t any networking tools. It therefore doesn’t reach out to the masses yet, like LinkedIn or Myspace does. Its all about business, no communication and no fun at all. If they would combine Guru.com with e.g. Tribe.net and build-in IM and / or Skype integration, it would have everything a business portal needs.

They really need to reach–out to the masses, so that there is a real choice in expertise for local areas. Now it is too much US-based. One strategic idea: merge with Ebay? In my opinion Guru.com would be a wonderful takeover candidate for Ebay.com.

Summary

Guru.com is not new, but has a lot going for it. The basics in their niche are all provided for. If they would partner with real networking portals, it can become a winner. The entire discussion about Working online using tools such as Guru, BitWine, Elance and Ifreelance can be viewed here.

If you want personal advise regarding your online strategy, just call me, I am a Bitwine advisor

Five Reasons Why Business Development Is So Difficult To Get Right

Today I had an interesting conversation with Earl, he provided me with this information to share with you...(entire discussion, click here).

Every conversation I have with a CEO of a middle-sized company eventually touches on the same conundrum … ‘How in the world does a company of our size get traction in new markets with new clients?’ This challenge seems to rank right up there with problems of arranging sufficient financial resources and getting top people to commit to a small but growing company.

Every conversation I have with a CEO of a middle-sized company eventually touches on the same conundrum … ‘How in the world does a company of our size get traction in new markets with new clients?’ This challenge seems to rank right up there with problems of arranging sufficient financial resources and getting top people to commit to a small but growing company.

This is often a challenge that did not limit growth in the early stages. During that early growth, the contacts and reputation of the founders and key executives drove the ‘top line’. Most often the client base came to resemble a silo in a corn field … one client dominating the business mix surrounded by other smaller clients that represent stunted attempts at broadening the base.

To be sure, this start up strategy is one of the preferred ways forward during the initial phase. In fact it is an early indicator if the management team has any business starting the business at all. If they don’t have ready clients for their product of service, they should get them before going forward.

But why, once the early growth phase is over, is it so difficult to get business development going? Why do the business development slots look so much like revolving doors? And, why is it that growing a company from nil to ten or fifteen million in annual revenues often does not seem to prepare management to take it to thirty or fifty million?

Here are some suggestions that might serve to channel discussions towards productive areas.

One: The senior management (particularly the CEO) is not really committed to making the journey. This is more common that you might think. Corporate growth requires significant self-reinvention among key members of the senior team. Often they are not prepared to give up control or manage a larger operation. Some prefer ‘writing code’ or whatever the company’s principal business happens to be. But whatever their ‘rationale’, they don’t want to or can’t become managers. In this case, expenditures on business development can just be a waste of resources. Better save the money and buy the new car.

Two: The structure pretty much guarantees failure. Business development is often an afterthought add-on to the evolved organizational structure. It seems to operate in a quasi-independent status with loose reporting arrangements to the CEO or COO. It is an appendage after the fact. Business development has to be integral to the company’s organizational structure and the CEO needs to be the senior business development member of the team. I once attended an all-hands retreat of a company where the COO gave the business development report. That spoke volumes on how the company saw the three business development employees standing in the wings. They were, of course, replaced by newer models by the next retreat and the revolving door was kept in good working order.

Three: Business development is seen as the province of middle-level people. Think of the message that such an approach gives potential new clients. “Talk to the ‘lessers’ and, if we deem you worthy, we will let you talk to the senior people.” New clients need/want to see the top person right off the get-go. It is the CEO that represents the Company’s commitment to client satisfaction, the ability of the company to commit as well as the ability of the client to find some person to rely on. Each time a decision-maker chooses to go with a new company they take a huge risk. If it goes wrong … how much faith do you think such a person would put in a middle level person with no real connection to the Company’s culture or senior management team?

Four: The wrong people for the job: A company often will bring in ‘business development’ types as a first attempt to attack the problem of widening the client base. These people are ‘specialists’ in chasing business … but frequently not specialists in the business of the company. Most often they are walled-off from the Company’s principal clients and are limited to higher risk longer cycle targets. What is most interesting about this approach is that it resource-starves functions that a company needs to provide in order to successfully grow its top line. Money is spent on business development types while the proposal development, capture team and red-teaming are radically under-resourced. In the end it is often the case of a middle level employee identifying a marginal piece of business that the company cannot properly pursue and capture.

Five: What is all this making us look like in the market place? The process is called branding … establishing the reputation of the company in the minds of actual and potential customers. It is by far the least understood and most dangerous threat to any company’s future. How is your company known … what is its reputation? How well do you understand why customers do business with you? Are you known as a group that knows how business is done? Or are you branded as a company that has ‘outsourced’ its future? These ‘costs’ are often overlooked as being less important than the business of the business. This mistake has probably killed more companies than any other. How you are known determines how seriously you are taken … and that largely determines what opportunities you will see and how successful you will become.

Business development is a tough nut to crack for any management team intent on growing a business out of the teens towards the ‘century’ mark. There are more dead bodies in that field than live travelers. Without careful planning and disciplined execution, the results are likely to be both disappointing and frustrating.

© Dr. Earl R. Smith II

Dr. Smith is Executive Director of Longview