Harnessing Social for Vital Living
South Africa-headquartered Discovery is a financial and health services company. It offers an innovative program called Vitality. Vitality rewards people for making healthy lifestyle choices. Read more
Creating Meaning from Data
According to CarSort.com, there are 9 cars below USD 15,000 that are easy to park. Their length is less than 15 feet. Read more
A Hosted Coupons Referral Service from Curebit
Curebit is a simple idea: a service that enables an online retailer to serve a coupon after the buyer has checked out, which can then immediately be shared through their social networks. Co-founder Allan Grant likes to think of Curebit as a referral service; coupons and rebates are just the starting point of things that can be referred. Read more
Six Emerging Marketing Technologies for Enterprises
Brian Mullin is partner of Manifold, a startup he defines as a non-traditional marketing agency. Read more
Social Media, Lead Generation and Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com presents an interesting case study in the use of social media. While the big buzz in social media continues to center around brand-building, salesforce.com thinks about social media in a more bottom-line way – how does it complement other marketing channels to generate customer leads?
Twitter in the Enterprise
Over the years, software vendors have enhanced enterprise communication & collaboration through email, instant messaging, VOIP, file sharing, web meetings, etc. Blogging, wiki's, micro-blogging, have now been added to the mix.
Now, it's very easy for me to connect with a colleague in China. All I do is look her up, email her, instant message her or call her via my laptop. This obviously enhances productivity & lowers costs. However, there are few tools that help me identify the right colleague to contact. Read more
The Heart of Social Media - Separating Hype from Reality
As corporations sort out their social media strategies, its important to separate hype from reality, to enable enterprises to conduct real-business, impacting the bottom line. Read more
What Do Angels Look For?
What makes a startup appealing to an angel investor? Read more
An Angel’s View of Enterprise Trends
Having heard that last quarter was A good quarter for VC's, I asked Jeff Clavier, an angel investor I’ve known for a few years, for his thoughts on the latest Enterprise trends. Read more
Formotus - A Company Going Places with Forms
At the 2010 Mobile World Congress, Samsung recognized Formotus as one of its Premium Solution Partners while Formotus demonstrated its mobile business forms running on Windows Phones as well as Android. Read more
Confer Simplifies Micro-Blogging, Chat and Social Networking for Enterprises
Based in North-East Ohio, Confer’s is the quintessential startup story. Ed was working a full-time job as Director of Product for another software-as-a-service company and recognized a significant need around communication and transparency across the disparate workgroups of sales, service, product, marketing, and development. He put together a small team and, quickly built a prototype around the concept utilizing Microsoft technology from the BizSpark program. Read more
Startup Liaise helps Transform Email into Actionable Interactions
Liaise promises to help us turn words into actions. Most of us manage projects in email. I certainly do. Grounded in this reality, Liaise works with Microsoft Outlook to annotate text in email messages with four parameters: issue or action, who is the issue or action assigned to, when is it due, and what is the level of urgency. It’s very simple. Imagine writing an email message. “Hello Gordan. Could you help fix the video issues on MicrosoftStartupZone.com? Read more
Re-Thinking the Search Engine
When looking to travel, I use Fodors.com for quick information about destinations. I’m a sucker for Fodors, having become used to the well-organized information in their hard-copy travel guides. Read more
Calinda MindUp helps make email interactions more efficient
Calinda Software’s MindUP is a software-as-a-service solution that helps workgroups collaborate more efficiently, within the email environment, that most of us are used to. A user would set up a MindUP group, including identifying its members, and start by sending an email message to the group. Read more
Your computer becomes a mentor with Loqu8's 'augmented learning' tool
Tim Uy's and Jim Hsia’s eyes light up when they talk about “augmented learning.” Both co-founders of Silicon Valley-based Loqu8, their software applications aim to provide contextual information in a small pop-up window, simply by hovering over a word or two. Say you’re writing a digital training plan for the latest IT system your team rolled out. Read more
Microsoft Bing – Learning’s on customer-driven innovation from a startup venture within Microsoft
With Bing, Microsoft made many surprising moves in search. Read more
Cognidox offers a SAAS application for document sharing, management and control, enhancing collaboration.
With its plug-in for Microsoft Word 2007, Cognidox, is a simple, web-based application that allows employees of companies of all sizes to upload documents, grant permission to team mates for viewing, editing or approving, and to upload them for online storage with revision histories, for anytime, anywhere access. Read more
Lokad makes statistical forecasting accessible to small, medium and large businesses to help them lower costs.
Lokad has democratized time series forecasting for businesses of all sizes. Whether you're a small coffee shop or a division of a large enterprise, forecasting point-of-sales, scheduling staff, call center management, eCommerce, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), all became easier because of Lokad's forecast-on-demand service. Read more
Formotus' cool patent-pending technology automatically turns Microsoft InfoPath forms into mobile forms.
Formotus is really cool! Their technology allows businesses of any size to instantly convert their Microsoft InfoPath forms into mobile forms. These forms can be deployed immediately over the air to the mobile devices of employees. Employees can download the forms and immediately start using them. They can not only access the data in the forms, but edit the data or use blank forms to enter new data into.
And, it's a simple business model. Businesses pay a subscription rate per user, however, many forms they deploy. Read more
Huddle offers Microsoft-Office friendly alternative to Google Apps
Huddle is a startup that could give Google Apps a run for the money. Huddle makes a Microsoft Office plug-in that adds secure collaboration features as a quick and easy extension to Microsoft Office. Named as one of BusinessWeek's Fifty Best Tech Startups, Huddle lets users post profiles, initiate discussions, share files, edit documents, set up meetings and web conferences, and share calendars. Read more
- About The Social Enterprise
Alpa Agarwal is Director, Product Marketing at eBay Inc. In her role she works with the engineering team to release new features to enhance the shopping user experience on eBay.com. Prior to eBay, Alpa worked with the engineering team at Microsoft's MSN.com to release new social & community features, working with partners such as Facebook.
Alpa has also held marketing communications roles in Microsoft's developer division working with startups.
Prior to that, Alpa led a global team at Microsoft to identify market trends. She regularly advised Microsoft’s senior leadership team, including Bill Gates, resulting in new acquisitions, technology investments and strategic corporate shifts.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Alpa founded MarketingCafe.com, an online community for marketers. She also worked at Sprint where she built a successful new product pipeline.
Alpa has taught in various Executive MBA programs, authored numerous articles and been quoted in international business journals. She has an MBA from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Alpa is based in Silicon Valley and can be reached at Alpa@AlpaAgarwal.com.
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