Nerd Stalker

Small Businesses use Collaboration Tools to Grow Faster and Turn Higher Profits  Want to know collaboration tools we use? This post is prompted by the inforgraphic below from  SCORE , the nation’s largest network of volunteer, expert business mentors. Score has published an infographic showing how small businesses that use online collaboration tools see 26% faster growth and 21% higher profits. Among businesses with fewer than 100 employees, 12% currently use online collaboration tools, while 17% plan to use these tools in the next 12 months. Businesses with 100-1000 employees are using collaboration tools at an even higher rate, with 28% currently using them, and 35% planning to use them in the next 12 months. 

Fewer notifications. More meaningful teamwork. Twist is the communication app for teams who believe there’s more to work than keeping up with group chat apps. Calmer communication n Twist , threads keep all your conversations clearly separated by topic so replies won’t get buried in an endless stream of group chat. Disconnect to focus on work and catch up when you’re ready.No matter where your team happens to be Fully distributed across the globe? Collaborate across several offices? Or just work from home when you need? Twist was built by a remote team for remote teams. Access conversations from anywhere on any device and communicate asynchronously without missing a beat. More organized team knowledge Twist automatically turns your threaded conversations into a searchable catalog of topics. Instantly connect your team to the information they need – along with all the context of the original conversation. More productive teamwork Twist lets you communicate in full though...

6mins Interview with Trevor Goss, founder of ideakick. From the ideakick site: So you want to know what happens at an ideakick? Well, here’s your answer… IDEA PITCHES The main point of coming to an ideakick is to pitch an idea that you have for something… anything. This might be something you’ve been thinking about for 6 months or it might be something you’ve been thinking about for 6 minutes. It’s all good. Basically what happens is you get to stand up in front of the group and tell them what your idea is. You have a total of 10 minutes, and in that 10 minutes you can use as much time as you want to tell everyone about your idea. Once you’re done, everyone else in the room gets to use the rest of the time that’s left to “kick” the idea around. Don’t stress about whether your pitch is refined or not. This isn’t like you’re testifying before Congress or anything like that. All you really need to do is say enough to get the conversation started. You might talk about a specific id...

WebGreek is a simple to use, but powerful management solution for all levels of the Greek system. Isn't this how Facebook started? Nerd Stalker interviews CEO Patrick Allen at a recent Plug And Play expo in Silicon Valley. With WebGreek, Greek letter chapters and councils will be able to collect and manage money for rent and more online, increase event attendance, share files with ease, stay in touch with instant SMS/email tool, and easily manage their website. In addition this technology can be easily white labeled for use in any type of collaborative or group scenario.

Management gurus have always said “people matter.” But those same gurus still relegate strategy to an elite set of executives who focus on frameworks, long presentations, and hierarchical approaches. After many years of working with Apple, Adobe, HP, and many other companies, Nilofer Merchant discovered the best way to create a winning strategy, which she details in her book. “ The New How : Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy.” Nilofer Merchant is the founder and CEO of Rubicon, a strategy and marketing consultancy, and leads a distinguished team of hands-on operational veterans. Her firm works with global corporations such as Hewlett-Packard, Pinnacle, Logitech, Openwave, Symantec, among others, to create solutions to win markets. She’s won multiple awards for her insights on applying strategic thinking and innovation, and has been quoted or published in major business publications such as BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal.

(4mins) Nerd Stalker interview at a recent SF New Tech with co-founder of Outspokes , Sean Ahrens . With Outspokes, you instantly gather the feedback of your entire team by doing nothing more than sending them a link to your site. No more arduous screenshot annotation or endless email ping-pong. Empower your team to express their feedback about your website the easy way: on the site itself. Who is Outspokes for? Teams of All Sizes Remote Development Teams Freelancers Outspokes began as a class project for UC Berkeley's Software Engineering course, Computer Science 169, taught by Professor Eric Brewer in Spring 2009.

(Duration 7 mins) Nerd Stalker (in partnership with SF New Tech) sits down and speaks with CEO Charles Feinn and CFO/Director of A&R Alan Khalfin of MixMatchMusic . MixMatchMusic is the new music community created by musicians, for and about musicians. They have created an environment where musicians easily collaborate online and profit from their art. They built tools musicians need to engage with and involve fans. And they put shape to a place where fans discover new music and new musicians. Of particular interest to me is the web based GarageBand like application for creating/editing music, very slick. The music creators cut of sales was impressive, and the fact that you can both upload and download large very high quality audio files in various formats was key. I believe we will see musicians flocking to this service, if they can get the word out.

Nerd Stalker attends the SF New Tech meetup where we got a chance to speak with Mark Christian, Software engineer at PBwiki . PBwiki was there to announce their new API with the hopes that developers will see it as a rich platform for wiki data pulls, push's, and more. PBwiki is the world's largest provider of hosted business and educational wikis. They host over 550,000 wikis, serve millions of users per month. They are making a push into the enterprise with Sharepoint squarely in their sites. See a live PBwiki demo .