infoarch

Some time ago I wrote about the usefulness of Foursquare . At that time I shared I use Foursquare for fun, but it’s not really useful to me. Just recently something popped up that does show Foursquare is useful to me. Part of my work is to visit customers and potential customers. Some of the customers aren’t ready to do business with us at the time I visit them and ask me to come back later. So, after some time, I visit them again. Of course the company I work for has a CRM tool, but it’s a pain to go to that system before you visit the customer to check when you were there the last time and what you discussed. I usually just look up my notes stored somewhere on my iPad. But it is useful to know when I was there the last time. When I arrive at a customer I check in to Foursquare . And what does it say? ‘Welcome back! Last time you were here was in <date>.’ The interesting thing is the conversation with the customer almost always starts with: ‘Good to have you back, wh...

In the past I’ve written quite a bit about expertise location and knowledge mapping . Expertise location is about supporting people to find people with certain expertise they’re looking for. In larger and multi-nationals organizations this is a big issue. One aspect about expertise location is also finding out where the person is. This can be a static location (e.g. the person works in room 3, building 4). This is difficult enough, but it can be done as I wrote some time ago. However, the workforce is more mobile than ever. Less and less employees have a fixed space they’re working in daily. They work in several rooms in an office during the week, they work from home, in the car, etc. Supporting expertise location in this context is even harder. In theory it can be done. I wrote about this as well. But I never saw a company actually connect the dots and make it work. Until recently. I had the pleasure to visit Qbengo . Qbengo is currently focused on connecting people at larger confer...

Most people know the history of the intranet . And if you’re older you will have experienced its history. Many organization that have had an intranet for years are looking for ways towards a modern and future-ready intranet. But what is the future of the intranet? Many intranet experts and organizations are thinking about this question. Are we eventually going to be apply to wear the intranet? From intranet to social intranet  There’s lots of talk about using social media within organizations. In short this is also called the ‘social intranet’. The intention is to have an intranet that is more than most are used to: news, procedures, who-is-who and the restaurant menu. A ‘social intranet’ should make us forget the old intranet. The old intranet that often hardly supports the way employees do their daily work.  From intranet to digital workplace  For this reason the new intranet is also called the ‘digital workplace’ more and more. A new name to help us forg...

I'm really looking forward to the Enterprise 2.0 Summit ! Are you coming? If so, I hope to meet you there! Recently the organizers shared a pie chart of the participants per country. To my surprise hardly any people from The Netherlands are coming! I was wondering why hardly any Dutch people attend this conference. Last year I was there with one other Dutch guy. I know of many people in Holland who are interested in Enterprise 2.0 and social business. So that can't be a reason. Is the conference not well-known? I don't think that's the reason either. The location can't be a problem either. So, what is? Let me if you have any thoughts on this. My goal is to get more people in Holland interested in the summit and hopefully many more fellow Dutchies will be at next year's Summit. And for this reason I won't just be blogging in English but also in Dutch about my conference learnings. What are my expectations for this year's Summit? Last year we had...

The New York Times has an interesting 'experimental projects' group, beta620. ReadWriteWeb recently pointed to an interesting experiment, called Longitude. Wouldn't it be neat if news items could be browsed through by a map? So you can see what news has been published about the city or country you live in or are interested in? Longitude does just this. One thing I was wondering is: Is this concept also interesting for the intranet? Could it be valuable to international companies to link the news items and intranet pages to a location? Clearly there are good cases for the combination of location and intranet . Curious to hear your thoughts about this. Go ahead and play with Longitude. Great stuff for in the weekend if you ask me!

Location-based services are very interesting, I find. And I see a big future for them. The fact that you can connect content to a location is intriguing. It's even more fascinating to realize that it's not just content linked to a location, but also the person sharing the content is linked to it. I've been using Foursquare since the beginning, checking in regularly (now 1379 checkins). I changed my location sharing strategies several times: from sharing everything on Twitter to sharing nothing and everything in between. Looking at the numbers location-based services are growing , but they're still a niche. It's great to see businesses experimenting with these services. Starting now will give them an edge when things go mainstream. But has it been useful to me? Has it made me more productive? Have I met more interesting people? Did I get interesting discounts? In short: No, it didn't. Let me explain. It's great to get badges every now-and-then, to s...

Location-based web services are hot these days. Even though the amount of people is limited, but growing rapidly . I enjoy using and experimenting with Foursquare . Currently I can't give you many examples of how location-based services have helped me (except for the fact that I'm Mayor of six places and I was awarded some cool badges...). But I'm sure I will be able to soon. I think it's just interesting to use follow this area and see how others are using it to generate business. For companies I think there are many ways it can be useful. For one location-based services can be used as a people finder. And if you relate interests/expertise to those people, it's also an expertise finder. At least you could know where to find a person with/without a certain expertise. Current location-based applications will give you a 2D map telling you where to find that person. One thing I hope will happen is that location services will also be available in 3D ( Layar with Fo...