Category " News"

Hugo with an Android

In March we were in Germany and made a stop in the city of Hannover to attend the mega event of Information Technology, CeBIT , presenting the talk “Leveraging E-commerce with Enterprise Social Networking”.

This time, we were reflecting on the evolution of Social Software and how it combines with the E-Commerce to win engagement and shopping experience of users, but mainly speaking about the new trend of shared purchases that lead WE-Commerce. These business concepts are predominant in Europe and it is expanding at a rapid pace. It was amazing to see the huge number of entrepreneurs who are focusing on technologies “Mobile + Social” facing the promise of boom in the coming years.

You can find photos of the presentation and slide show below:

Leveraging E-commerce with Enterprise Social Networking

Guess how many results Google can find for “Knowledge is our competitive advantage”. Did you guess 10,000? If so, you win. If not, you might be surprised by this number. “Knowledge is our competitive advantage” has been a very popular phrase used in business over the last twenty years. I have heard it in several languages. The first time was in Portuguese, in 1993. It came from a director at Shell Portugal. When I first heard it I knew that it was absolutely true. At the time I was a young software architect implementing a system to exchange instant 140-character messages between Shell Portugal points of sale around the country and the head-office in Lisbon. No, no, it wasn’t Twitter or SMS. Email hadn’t become popular. Hotmail appeared five years later in 1998, so you can see that Shell was clearly ahead in sharing information within the company.

Knowledge as a competitive business advantage was a new concept at that time, popularised by Peter Senge’s 1990 bestseller “The Fifth Discipline” and developed by Peter Drucker who provided the foundational ideas of Knowledge Management and argued that knowledge was among the most important economic resources. In 1995 Leif Edvinsson started measuring and valuing this resource: he produced the first annual report supplement on Intellectual Capital for the Swedish Skandia Insurance Company.

The efforts to manage knowledge started at the same time that the concept of “knowledge as an asset” developed. The initial focus was on capturing, saving and sharing explicit knowledge. Many organisations developed big repositories and databases to save and share processes, best practices and lessons learned. The major consulting firms championed this practice. I remember in the late 90’s working on a project at PwC in Buenos Aires. We used information that their consultants had gathered and shared around the world. Discovering this capability really impressed me, and it was an asset to our project.

With the new century, a new perspective began to emerge. Lew Platt’s phrase “If only HP knew what it knows it would make three times more profit tomorrow” became popular and marked the start of a new era: The era of the Community Knowledge. The knowledge gurus realised that most of the information was in people’s minds instead of databases, so they called this “knowledge embedded within individuals” and started recognising the importance of human motivation in sharing this “material” (the social aspects of knowledge) which made the way toward the concept of Communities of Practice, or “knowledge embedded in communities”.

The focus had moved from explicit knowledge (info saved in warehouses) to collective knowledge (dynamic, context dependent and saved in networks). Knowledge Management became more complex but kept developing and helping the move. Newsgroups, mailing lists, web discussion forums/chats and instant messaging services characterised the start of the new millennium.

But something different occurred during these years, suddenly shaking the world: Social Media. In 2002 Friendster.com pioneered virtual communities with three million users. A year later MySpace (which was coded in ten days) took the lead from Friendster and became the most visited site on the Internet in 2006, with one hundred million users. In the meantime Facebook started in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. In 2008 Facebook surpassed MySpace, becoming the king of social media. In coming months it will exceed one billion users.

I confess that I was anti-Facebook for years; I considered it a waste of time. In February 2011 I was invited to give a lecture about intercultural business communication at the South Yorkshire International Trade Forum. The next day, I attended a talk about Facebook given by Barry James, CEO of AngelRevolutions, at the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce. I got upset when Barry contradicted some of my ideas when he explained how people shared their private lives in Facebook. The day before I had been speaking about the reserved stereotype of the British people compared with Latin Americans. His assertions were not only in contradiction to my own experience, but also to well-known thinkers, such as FonsTrompenaars and Geert Hofstede.

I thought James was exaggerating, and argued with him after the talk. I discovered that he had not been exaggerating at all! Seeing the whole thing again I discovered that culture was rapidly shifting – and the movement is going faster each day. Most people have now jumped onto the Facebook train, and many passengers sometimes get sick due to its sudden accelerations.

I eventually settled my differences with Barry. We are now friends and AngelRevolutions is one of our clients. But where is Facebook taking us? Or a more basic question: what is Facebook? There are really many definitions. One of these definitions states that it is a “Neural Network”, though some people strongly oppose this concept. Without any doubt it is a huge brain, full of knowledge, and the state-of-the-art platform for the science of Knowledge Management.

Facebook is also the flagship of a growing family of communities, or private social networks, that are cropping up all over the world. Many companies realise that when knowledge was their competitive advantage, they have the tool to leverage this knowledge to create real value from it.

Do you remember the phrase “If only HP knew what it knows…”? Nowadays HP knows very well what it knows. They have been one of the pioneers of the new Era of Social Business with their WaterCooler platform. It allows their people to exchange ideas, as in a casual conversation over a coffee break, but much more effectively.

Not only HP, but also some big players such as IBM and Infosys, and a few very efficient open platforms, have entered early into the Era of Social Business.

The so called “Enterprise Social Media” allows businesses to reap enormous benefits. One of the most important is leveraging and sharing up-to-date knowledge and experience, which plays a fundamental role in innovation and increased operational effectiveness. If you are among those CEOs who think “Knowledge is our competitive advantage”, you might already be implementing Enterprise Social Media in your company, or planning to do so.

As with most new technologies, Enterprise Social Media started out being very exclusive but open source options are having a democratising effect. Despite the current economic situation, many companies are right now investing in the best tool ever designed for managing their competitive advantage: knowledge. We are in the new Era of Social Business and the winners are already moving ahead. Are you? Derek Bok’s insightful observation is worth remembering: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

From the coming days we will be in Germany in order to further enhance business opportunities with both local actors such as international ones gather there.

In this context, the March 7 will be in the city of Hannover, presenting the talk “Leveraging E-commerce with Enterprise Social Networking” in the E-Commerce Forum of CeBIT, the largest international trade fair for information technology and communication with an exhibition of products, talks and conferences. In the last edition in 2011, involved 4,200 companies from over 70 countries.

Again, all those investors, entrepreneurs, technology experts here and there that can find synergies with us in these initiatives will be more than welcome to contact us at sebastian@quanbit.com.

You may also follow the news through Twitter at @quanbit Follow @quanbit

A couple of weeks ago the site http://research.quanbit.com/ was launched. This site is the visible face of an ongoing effort inside Quanbit to progressively broaden our development field and start making room for self-motivated internal development.

So, why do we need a research department? One of the first reasons I can think of is because it enhances creativity. We consider software development as a process that requires a lot of creativity and, as many other things in life, creativity has to be trained and exercised. A research department is a great place for doing that; you can come up with new ideas, discuss them, evaluate their viability and impact, create proofs of concepts and so on. But enhancing creativity is not the only purpose of our research department. During our life as a software company we came across two interesting patterns:

Being a developer that generally finds himself in one of these situations, I know this can be quite frustrating. So we decided to start betting on research and slowly give us the time to show what we do besides customer-driven projects, publish what we develop in-house and how we eat our own dog food or just share some thoughts that we consider are worth writing about. We know it is going to be a slow process and it is going to take time, but we are confident that this will bring new life inside Quanbit and that is why its worth taking the chance.

Last December 5th we presented “Business Opportunities in Latam for UK” in the TechHub London Business Meetup together with BlueVia.

The Meetup was structured in two parts: a first one in which we reviewed the Latam growth and opportunities with main focus on mobile and outsourcing, and a second one in which we exchanged success cases and discussed different alternatives to enter to the Latam technology markets.

This was the first one of a series of cross-country Business Meetups that is going to be organized in the next year.

The Meetup was taken on TechHub, the most important community of tech entrepreneurs in UK founded by Google, Pearson and BlueVia. TechHub counts with a physical space in London, just in the so called ‘Silicon Roundabout’: the Old Street area of London where there is an existing cluster of tech start-ups from across the UK, Europe and the US.

You can get the slides of the presentation at the end of this post, which is also hosted in the Quanbit’s SlideShare profile.

Furthermore , you can follow the comments and news of the Meetup on Twitter under the hashtag #BizMeetup

On Dec 5, we are going to introduce the topic Business Opportunities in Latin America in an event organised by TechHub and BlueVia in London.

The event consists in presenting the Latin America’s technology market in conjunction with its business opportunities for UK’s developers and entrepreneurs. The aim is to introduce several alternatives that have a technological entrepreneur to grow businessin this region by analyzing benefits, case studies and real contacts with potential clients and / or partners.

Also, the meetup will be transmitted by internet streaming in several countries.

To booking: http://techhubmobilemeetupdec2011.eventbrite.com/

Following, the press release from Tech Hub:

LATAM Link-up

This month’s Mobile Meetup will be hosted by our sponsor Bluevia and will focus on business opportunities for mobile developers and tech entrepreneurs in Latin America.

The session will take a slightly different angle to previous meetups. It will start with a 45 minute presentation about doing business in LATAM: the market, main mobile communities & their leaders, co-working spaces, incubator initiatives and start-up programs and some of the most useful events in the region. 

This will be followed by an open discussion and we’re hoping to link up with members of the tech community in Buenos Aires for cross-continental questions!

There will also be an opportunity to sign up to a networking site provided by BlueVia to raise your profile and engage with businesses in Latin America (for more details drop an email to sebastian@quanbit.com and almo@bluevia.com)

PLEASE NOTE

As usual our mobile meetup is only open to entrepreneurs and developers with a special interest in mobile – we cancel tickets for those who do not fit the bill so please consider this before booking.

Please note that we usually add people who come to our events to our email list to keep you updated on what’s coming up @TechHub. Please let us know if you’d prefer not to be added.

To get to TechHub

• Take Exit 5 from Old St tube station up to City Rd
• It’s about 20 seconds straight ahead on your right, at number 76-80 

See you @TechHub!

About TechHub

TechHub is a new and exciting project creating a physical space in London for tech start-ups not just based nearby but entrepreneurs and others in the tech industry from across the UK, Europe, the US and beyond.

We’ve created a new community space reflecting the vibrancy and global outlook of the technology scene.

TechHub is affordable and accessible, with a great environment to bring together the right people in one place – the people who really do want to change the world through their businesses. We’re right on ‘Silicon Roundabout’ in the Old Street area of London where there is an existing cluster of tech start-ups.

 www.techhub.com

We started to work with BlueVia, an European organisations aimed to impulse software development companies to worldwide, to grow in business with customers and partners in this region.

To see the original link, go to http://blog.bluevia.com/2011/10/28/bluevia-internship-programme/

Follow the press release of BlueVia:

BBVA Banco Frances, one of the most important banks of Argentina, chose us to develop a critical internal process based on computed analysis of documents.

The Challenge

To build an application that learns of the human-oriented process of reading several formats of paper documents, recognise them according to a customized set of definitions and trigger actions according to a customized business rules.

The Requirements

That application must be developed under:

Highlights of the solution

• High speed of processing with a slight human supervision, had required a super fine-tuning applications usability.
• High volume of documents processing (digitalizations, OCR-ing, recognitions, clasiffication, applications of business rules and storage) demanded an entire suite of tests: from unit tests to stress tests.
• High customization of: document types, concepts definition and business rules.

Last June 16 was held at the Sheraton Libertador Hotel in Buenos Aires on OnLineMktDay, the mega event organized by Digital Marketing Group Pexo every year and attended by800 people covering all the quotas enabled.

RedValleys by Quanbit was in charge in the months preceding the request for proposals to present at the event. Over 150 Start Ups were evaluated and finally Sebastián Ortega chose 3 finalists to present their business model to the audience.

The three projects chosen, who had the opportunity to appear, are:

ProposoalRocket by Agustin Muñoz (www.proposalrocket.com)

Eudaimonia by Javier Daccorso (www.eudaimonia.com.ar)

RealRef by Mariela Sporn (www.RealRef.com.ar )

You can view more details of the event at www.onlinemktday.com.ar.