Imagine, for a moment, that you are the General Counsel of Amalgamated Widget, the nation’s largest manufacturer of widgets. One day, you are sitting at your desk when your phone rings. On the other end of the phone is one of the lawyers who works for you; she proceeds to inform you that Amalgamated Widget has just been served with a complaint alleging that your latest model of widget has been negligently designed and caused serious bodily injury to one of your customers.

Acting quickly, you begin working the phones. Within an hour, you have identified all of the relevant people within the company — from the engineers who designed the widget to the factory workers who built it; from the salesmen who sold it to the marketing guys who designed the ad campaign. List of potential data custodians in hand, you call the IT department and instruct them to freeze the e-mail accounts of each of those people. All e-mail as it existed at the time of the complaint will be preserved from deletion. You also copy all of their hard drives and all servers to which they may save documents. Finally, you pull a copy of the relevant corporate databases — everything from the design database that tracks the R&D process to the sales database that catalogs your customers. Then, just for good measure, you make a copy of the company’s web page.

Think you’ve preserved every bit of electronic information that could possibly be relevant? That’s so Web 1.0. (more…)

You may have heard of a Morgan Stanley research piece called “Media & Internet How Teenagers Consume Media.”  If you haven’t, you can pop over to the Financial Times and have a look at the actual research.  This has caused a bit of a stir, partially because it’s based solely on interviewing a 15-year old intern.  Some people agree with it, some people disagree with it, some people merely grouse that nothing coming from a single 15-year old ought to be taken that seriously, but it has gotten some digital ink.

For the last four years, I’ve been teaching a college course on e-Business and while the students coming through my class tend to be 20-22, not 15, I’ve talked to considerably more than one person about many of the topics in this paper.  While observations from classroom discussions aren’t any more scientific than interviewing a lone 15 year-old, I think there’s a case to be made that kids may be kids, where digital media is concerned. (more…)

When talking with a software vendor, you may have had a cynical moment and said something to the effect of “and how do I know this works or “how exactly am I supposed to use this?  It’s OK.  We all have those feelings.  On the vendor side of things, StreetSmarts has decided to launch a pre-emptive strike on those questions in the form of a contest.

The “StreetSmarts Grand Prix 2009″ will take (most likely) 3-5 companies, send consultants amd industry experts over to evaluate how said companies could best utilize the StreetSmarts software package (a sort of mash-up of a knowledge management system and social media platform), then install it and train the companies how to use it.  In three months, the contestant companies will compare notes on who was able to increase their sales the most. (more…)

I may have been a little detached compared to the average attendee at last weekend’s Chicago Media Future Conference.  Then again, the last time I wrote something for print that wasn’t a book, was early 2005.  People were genuinely getting worked up, relative to what you normally see at a tech-related conference.  In many ways, it reminded me more of the interaction that goes on between the panel and audience at a comic book convention (I’ve been on a few), in terms of emotion overcoming order and, to a degree, common sense.

People were so wound up, as everyone started to sit down, somebody passed out fliers about what the topics were and what he thought the panelists ought to say.  He wasn’t part of the event.  Maybe he was just mad he wasn’t asked to be on the panel.  I really don’t know, and I can’t decide whether I think it was funny or psychotic.  It was a good indicator of how riled up people were going to get, though. (more…)

37 Signals is one of Chicago’s best start-up stories and one of the most prominent, internationally. Their business model is building work productivity web apps, like project management tool Basecamp and contact management tool Highrise. A “freemium” business, 37 Signals offers basic service from their apps for free while charging monthly subscription fees for larger service offerings. They also dip their toe into revenue streams from advertising and even a book on their project management/development philosophy.

You may see a re-occurring theme of Chicago tech start-ups using open source development tools. 37 Signals doesn’t just use open source tools, the Ruby on Rails framework so popular with open source developers spun out of 37 Signals (they’re arguably more famous for their affiliation with Ruby on Rails than for their very popular web apps). (more…)

Twitter seems to have gotten a notch more mainstream in the last few weeks.  Or perhaps Twitter is just getting more exposure with people over 35, in social media circles, that can sometimes amount to the same thing.  In a world where a popular avenue for the unemployed is reinventing themselves as “social media experts” (translation, I’ve been using Twitter and Facebook for 6 months), perhaps it’s time to spell out some of the more unpleasant truths about Twitter for businesses.

Twitter was not invented with business in mind.  Just like blogging was originally more of an online diary or journal (hence “LiveJournal”), Twitter was about sending updates to your friends.  Much like blogging, Twitter has expanded with business stumbling around in the dark, looking for a platform, and your main source of positive anecdotes is the legion of consultants looking to sell you their Twitter services. (more…)