Meeting will start with introduction video by Paul Greenberg, followed by master interviews with Natalie Petohouff, Ray Wang, Mitch Lieberman, Brian Solis and Frank Eliason.

They will cover the following topics:

- How SCRM plays in the world of enterprise applications;

- Justifying Communities in SCRM planning;

- How does SCRM work for SMB?

- How communities grow from Twitter..

This will follow panel discussions with LaSandra Brill [CISCO], Katy Keim [Lithium], Munish Ghandi [HyLy], Peter Grambs [Cognizant], Kira Wampler [Ant's Eye View] moderated by Esteban Kolksy.

Topics that will be discussed are:

- Using online communities for SCRM;

- How are communities being used today?

- How has the advent of the Social Customer changed communities?

- How are businesses reacting to these new social-networks-as-communities?

- Is there a business justification for using communities?

- What can we expect going forward?

- How can a business benefit from using communities?

- Case studies.

via Happenings, advice and technology thoughts !: Global Social CRM Community meet-up tomorrow.

I’m looking forward to this lively discussion.

PNC's pick an envelope campaign

If you can’t tell from the small picture, one envelope says I qualify for an introductory APR of 0.99%, another says 1.99%, and a third was blank on the cover, but opening it revealed a surprise – only 4.99%!

Last week PNC called me to see if I was interested in a home equity line of credit.  Well, I might have been, you know, if I actually owned a home!

I’m not sure if this is poor customer data management or just a bank that is trying to show congress that it’s eager to lend.

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I’ve been clearing out my ‘read later’ queue today, and came across another excellent post by ReadWriteWeb.  This one is on a rural banking innovation Called Cashnxt.  If I remember correctly, the majority of Indians do not have a bank account today (I remember a figure of 70%).  While there are many factors that have kept banking largely an urban activity in India, one critical component is the huge overhead of building, manning and maintaining a massive network of branches across the rural plains.  Cashnxt addresses this dilemma with an ingenious use of mobile phone technology:

Cashnxt: Low-Cost Banking for the Rural Poor – ReadWriteWeb

Mobile Phone Transactions

As a customer, if you and a vendor are a member of the Cashnxt network, you can conduct transactions using your mobile phones. The merchant dials CashNxt’s IVR number, enters their PIN and transaction amount, and then hears a high pitch sound on their mobile phone. The customer does the same – calls the IVR number, enters their PIN and hears a high pitch sound. The two phones are then brought together, held close enough for CashNxt to encrypt and decrypt the sounds. The transaction is then confirmed via SMS.

So, for those of you who haven’t been to India recently, one of the oddities of rural development is that mobile phone technology has often reached villages faster than other modern advancements.

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ReadWriteWeb recently ran a post about the state of India‘s innovation engine.  I’ve posted a clip here, but click through to read the whole thing:

State of Innovation in India: 2009 – ReadWriteWeb

That Big Wide-Open SaaS Opportunity

Indian start-ups that dreamed of creating the next SAP or Oracle faced massive hurdles on the sales and marketing front. Sure, they could invest five times more in R&D with the same budget. But the reality was that R&D was a tiny portion of the budget. The big money went into sales and marketing. The R&D budget arbitrage was not enough to move the needle.

This is totally and utterly different today. We have written about the SaaS opportunity many times. This opportunity is totally location-agnostic. But it is also totally price- and cost- sensitive, and R&D is the biggest cost. Success stories such as 37 signals, Automattic, and Zoho did not win by hiring an enterprise sales force or buying advertising. They “let the software do the talking.”

This is not just an opportunity for a few big winners. This is an opportunity for thousands of small companies to go after niche markets. The interesting thing about niche markets today is that they are inherently global and can be a lot bigger than people think. These small niche start-ups won’t make headlines and probably won’t get VC financing. But they won’t need VC financing. What is fascinating about SaaS globally is how few start-ups have been VC financed. Most have gotten to profitability on tiny seed rounds or even with revenue financing from clients.

As this portion of the post highlights, there are two important pieces of the puzzle that will enable Indian developers to thrive, a focus on building excellent software (DimDim being a good example) and the rise of SaaS and cloud computing delivery models.  Excellent software, along with a strong social media strategy, enables a natural sales process, and cloud computing allows development and delivery of software on a global scale.  Rather than focusing in on the struggling IT conglomerates, India’s near term innovation future may well rely on a group of agile cloud-based companies.

Pragati, an online and electronic journal, is by far the most thoughtful collection of analysis on India that I’ve come across in a long time.  Back in graduate school I once had a professor tell me that the best political and economic analysis was done in journals that had distinguished contributions, not distinguished contributors.  While some of the writers for Pragati are the later, the quality of their contributions remains at a high level.  I choose to get Pragati in my email as a PDF (subscribe here), and then make sure I have a copy with me on my iPhone to read when I’m out and about.

Anyway, the latest edition just ‘hit the stands’, and it has an excellent interview with Nandan Nilekani, vice-chairman of Infosys.  The interview is focused around Nilenkani’s new book  Imagining India – Ideas for a new century which is scheduled to ship in the U.S. in March 2009.  Here’s a link to the online edition of the interview:

» Ideas for India’s future | Pragati

Your book is about ideas, and you have quoted a number of people and their ideas. If you were to pick one to focus the governance agenda of the coming central government, what would it be.

The most important idea and the central theme that I start off in my opening chapter is the change in our view of the population. For a long time, in part due to international pressure, we treated our population as a burden and something that needed to be controlled. But today, we’ve finally realised that people are our biggest strength, our assets and not liabilities, that human capital is what makes you tick. The moment you think of our people as human capital then automatically the challenge becomes how do we make sure they are healthy, educated, have roads to go to work and school, have lights to study at night, have jobs and can become entrepreneurs. The fundamental shift in the way we think about population is the central theme of my book and everything I talk about is how do we leverage and exploit that human capital, and what are the obstacles that you see in doing that.

This will be on the top of my book list for 2009…hopefully the publisher gets it issued for the Amazon Kindle.

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Sodhani’s multi-billion dollar investments include major positions in Clearwire (recently announced) and over 400 other early stage startups.  Below is a brief excerpt from the interview:

Interview with Arvind Sodhani: Intel Capital isn’t backing off on venture » VentureBeat

VB: How is the downturn changing what Intel Capital does?

AS: Not much has changed on our side. We will continue to invest. My belief, shared by the CEO of Intel, is that you continue to innovate in a downturn, and innovation doesn’t stop because of slowdowns. We’ll continue to invest in technology innovation. The good news is valuations will be more attractive. I think other investors will pull back. We have heard a lot of stories about the venture capital community pulling back. Depending on the life-stage of the fund, VCs are not funding existing companies or new companies.

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Nassim Taleb was on Charlie Rose this past Wednesday, and I just got around watching the interview. I wish Charlie had scheduled Taleb for the entire hour. Last week I wrote about the current financial crisis being an opportunity to learn about how financial markets function, and I referred to the fact that I’d been lucky in dodging the major collapse of the past few months. Not all of it was luck, much had to do with Taleb’s thinking as revealed in his book ‘The Black Swan‘. If you haven’t read it yet, add this book to the top of your list. And, if you can stomach a sobering reality check, watch the interview here:

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Image by scottpowerz via Flickr

I recently posted an entry over at the blog for the Information Overload Research Group.  Click on the link to read the entire post:

IORG Forum Blog » Blog Archive » IO in a call center environment

The same successful companies that spend vast sums of money to optimize their supply chain and partner network, overlook the lowly call center as a place to radically increase productivity through some simple process and systems enhancements. Much of this productivity increase can come from simplifying the dizzying array of systems and databases that agents are required to interact with.

Call center environments are fascinating places to observe. Being more than a casual observer, one of the major problems I’ve seen in these environments is how poorly technology is aligned with business process. Most call centers operate in a forgotten ‘back room’ of the enterprise. The funny thing is, those that occupy the front office, are struggling to engage with their customer. They often lose sight of the fact that their customer is already engaging, and often with an under-equipped, over-burdened customer service agents. Many companies could improve their brand image and enhance customer loyalty by aligning customer service processes and technology, and let their agents focus on customer exceptions, not juggling technology.

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I posted about how the current financial crisis was an opportunity to learn about how the global financial markets function. Another great resource for digging deeper is Charlie Rose‘s show on PBS. Last night he had Citibank CEO Vikram Pandit on for the hour.  As one would expect from a CEO of a major financial institution, Pandit doesn’t offer much of a mea culpa, however he does offer some insight into the causes of the current crisis.  Pandit arrived at Citi a about a year ago, and began to deal with a mess that had been created when Citi merged with the Travelers Group.  It’s an excellent interview:

SAJAforum has a full transcript of the interview.

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Image by LunaDiRimmel via Flickr

Over the last few months, we’ve seen a roller coaster ride of unequaled magnitude in the financial markets.  Having been in the institutional banking world myself, I’ve had many friends and colleagues ask me if I can make sense of what is going on out there.  Many are just worn out from the gyrations in the stock market, others are in utter panic about the collapse of their life savings.  I’m no stock picker – never have been – but I did get lucky about a year ago when I decided to pull almost all of our personal wealth out of the equity markets and put it into cash or government securities.  Basically, from a net worth perspective, we haven’t been hurt…yet.  While that won’t help those who were deeply invested in the equity markets, I have advised them to follow the broad trends in the news, and not worry so much about the day to day, hour to hour hysteria that grips Wall Street.  The problem in trying to do this, however, is that the main stream media (MSM) doesn’t provide a sober analysis of events of the day.  Instead, MSM focuses on the latest crisis, or the political angle of the events as they unfold.  Now, I have some opinions on the political angle, but that won’t help me (or my friends) ride through the storm.  What I have suggested is to augment the daily hype that MSM dishes out with some thoughtful blogging that is going on out there.  Not all blogs offer quality insight and most have a particular political-economic bent that may not be the same as yours.  But, there are many that offer a good set of lessons on what has happened, and possibly on what will happen next.  Here are two that are on my daily radar:

naked capitalism – This blog offers opinionated, but well thought out analysis of the nature of modern finance.  From a recent post:

naked capitalism: Finance Has Lost Sight of Its Role

In 1980, financial firms accounted for 8% of S&P earnings. During the peak of our last stock market cycle, their profits were over 40% of the total.

Now consider: finance is a necessary function, but is represents a tax, a drain on the productive economy, just as defense and lawyers do (aside: I had a lawyer from an entrepreneurial family who was refreshingly aware of that issue, and would write off hours before sending bills to clients, recognizing that the amount of time her firm had spent on certain matters simply wasn’t worth it from an economic standpoint to the client). It is ironic that free market fundamentalists have so vociferously argued for unfettered markets, without understanding (or perhaps understanding all too well) that the house always wins.

Read the entire post, in fact add naked capitalism to your daily RSS feed.  I don’t totally agree with the sentiments in this post, or others from this blog, but this analysis is more thoughtful – and thought provoking – then any of the crap that is pushed out in MSM.

Another blog that is worth following on a regular basis:

Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed – Kedrosky often offers the best near real time analysis of events in the financial markets.  Take this post about the deal that Citibank secured to save itself:

Paul Kedrosky: Good Bank, Bad Bank, and F**ked Bank

To be clear, this is not a “bad bank” model. Assets are not, apparently, being taken off the Citi balance sheet and put into another entity walled off from the Citi biological host. Instead, they are being left on the Citi balance sheet, but tagged and bagged for eventual disposal via taxpayers. In other words, we are, given the size and nature of the maneuver, creating a new variant on the good/bad bank model that I hereby christen “fucked” bank. You do that, of course, when removing all the toxic assets from a “good” bank’s balance sheet would leave no bank behind at all.

[Side note, as a former banker at Mellon, the good bank, bad bank structure that saved Mellon in the 1980's was stuff of legend when I was there.]

So, while times may be tough and you may have successfully avoided boring subjects like finance and political economy in college, make it a point to spend some time every day to learn about what is actually going on out there.  We are all participants in this market, and it is time to understand capital flows and how they will shape your future.

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