Startup Experiences, Technology, and other ramblings

Very cool! This is one of those services I wish had been around years and years ago. I just used Bringo to get through to a customer service agent at United Airlines, and I am impressed.

I am traveling tomorrow down to LA, and I couldn’t find my confirmation number, nor was it on my mileage plus account. I was getting the sinking feeling that I might have forgotten to actually book the flight a couple of months ago. I decided to call United Airlines to see if they had any records of my travel. I called the number, spent about three minutes navigating their phone tree to try to speak with someone, and at the point where the automated voice gave up and was going to transfer me to a human, it hung up. I was about to dial-up again and do the whole routine once more when I remembered a recent TechCrunch article on bringo.com.

Using the service is drop-dead simple:

• Go to the site and select the company you wish to engage
• Bringo will then ask for your phone number, and then perform a quick call to that number to verify you are who you say you are. My phone rang immediately, and I simply clicked #.
• The site immediately acknowledged my confirmation of the number, and began to do the dirty work of calling United Airlines.
• About 30 seconds later, my phone rang and there was an operator on the other end!

Not only was this a much better experience (I could do work while Bringo worked for me), but United did have my record and all is well.

Great, simple service Bringo…

BRINGO : Stop Talking to Machines and Talk to a Real Human

The following is a review of Microsoft’s new beta, SharedView. It appears to be an attempt to merge document collaboration with web conferencing’s screen-sharing capabilities. As the review points out, screen-sharing is useful for real-time collaboration, but it limits the collaboration to single-user control over the editing experience. This type of workflow has been supported in web conferencing solutions (including Acrobat Connect) for years…

User research indicates this isn’t enough to solve the distributed document collaboration problem. Google has started to try to address this through Docs and Spreadsheets, along with a variety of other vendors that have recently cropped up in the web 2.0 bubble. Looks like MSFT has a ways to go in order to provide an effective, real-time, document collaboration solution.
First look: Microsoft SharedView beta

ApolloHunter.com – a place to share Apollo Apps

This is an interesting site to follow.  List of available early-adopter Apollo-based applications.

A wise man once said:  "Don’t confuse motion with progress."  That could also be applied to email volume.  I use X1’s desktop search engine on my work computer, which indexes all of my email/attachments/docs/etc…  I am a pack-rat with email, and have archived every single email I’ve received at my current company.  I was recently in a meeting where we were discussing email proliferation and our reliance on it as a collaboration tool, and I decided to run a couple of queries with X1 to see what my usage looked like.  Here’s this relatively useless, but scary, information:

Range:  From June 2003 – December 5, 2006

Received Email Stats:

• Total Emails:  130,000 emails
• Total Emails with attachments:  31,341
• Top Email Sender (either To or CC’d me):  4194 (and counting)
• PowerPoint Presentations Sent to me: 1199 (and counting)

Sent Email Stats:

• Total Emails I’ve Sent:   32,417 emails
• 2004 Emails Sent:  8704 emails
• 2005 Emails Sent:  9293 emails
• 2006 Emails Sent (and counting):  11,332 emails

All of this totals up to about 8GBs of information sitting in several .pst files on my computer.  Does any of this total up to productivity?  Hmmm…

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Preezo Enters Online Office Race

It’s articles like this that remind to keep in perspective how great the value proposition of Adobe Presenter (formally Macromedia Breeze Presenter) is.  Presenter is the original product within a series of applications that make up what is now called Adobe Connect (formally Macromedia Breeze), and has literally been out in the market since 2000.

When engaging with customers on the Connect/Breeze product line, I end up spending the majority of my time on our web conferencing or training solutions, basically assuming that people “get” the value proposition of being able to take your huge presentation with animations and such, add voice over, and publish it all together as a rich Flash application on the web.  However, every now and then I run into a customer who isn’t aware of this technology, and am reminded through their reactions of what a great concept this is.  Kudos to Keith and Kevin (Presedia founders) for having the vision back then…