Digital Common Sense

First thanks to Pat Phelan for this great photo of my pals Alex Saunders and Howard Thawe, the business brains behind iotum’s Relevance Engine.

Just a today someone asked me if the Relevance Engine did everything they claim. It isn’t often I can answer a question like that so easily. Yes, 100%.

One of the approaches I’ve often taken is to explain that iotum is the David Allen’s Getting Things Done of online tools. It takes my daily life and puts things in context. Presence and availability our powerful data elements, but they’re only really useful when they are in context. iotums Relevance Engine puts my life in context. Now they give easy context to my conference calls too.

I can’t possibly tell the story as well as Alec, so I’m taking the liberty of sharing. In an email this morning, Alec said

I wanted to give you a small update on what we’ve been up to. After all, I am sure you’ve seen the odd blog post over the weekend hinting about an iotum and Facebook tie-in. Well, ten weeks ago we paused, re-evaluated the market and opportunity landscape and put development of the Talk-Now Blackberry application on hold.

Why?
A huge opportunity presented itself to us that we felt we could not ignore. Facebook, the white hot social networking platform that is all the rage today, opened itself up to third party developers to allow them to integrate their applications within the portal directly.

We were already evaluating how to enlarge the network of Talk-Now users with a web presence. In addition iotum had previously planned to incorporate social networking features into our Talk-Now platform eighteen months in the future (do you remember our briefing on the “Minerva” concept Luca?). We have always seen the growth of social networks in business as a huge opportunity. As I’ve written previously, business is social. We meet, talk on the phone, arrange events, dine together and socialize just as we do in our personal lives. Business social networking simply happens for different reasons, and it’s the natural evolution of the portal.

Facebook’s platform announcement presented the opportunity to accelerate our plans by 18 months.

The first application that we chose to build for Facebook was conferencing. Coincidentally, this is also the service Blackberry users of Talk-Now have indicated a high desire for. Tomorrow we will be launching the beta of iotum Conferencing on Facebook, bringing free conference calls to the Facebook platform. It’s a dial-in system, which may present problems for you, Luca and Paul, since the only numbers are in North America at this point. We will roll out international numbers in the future.

There are a few things I want to bring to your attention.

1. The conferencing application feels nearly identical to the Facebook Events application. Our goal was to model a conference call exactly like an event, except that it takes place over the telephone. By integrating with the Facebook portal in this way, conferencing becomes a natural extension of Facebook, rather than a separate application.
2. To make conferencing easier to use (after all, who hasn’t scrambled looking for a dial-in number and PIN), we are planning to send you the dial in number by text message before the call (this feature will be implemented in the next couple of days), and we use your mobile phone number as your personal identifier. In fact, if you’re calling from your mobile line, our software simply uses your caller ID to validate you and puts you automatically into right conference room. And there is an added benefit. In 60% of calls today, at least one person is missing. Often, it’s simple forgetfulness. Our text message acts as a reminder.
3. The application also takes advantage of the Facebook integration to allow you to post an agenda, and see who is already on the bridge (a bit of AJAXy magic we did allows that to be refreshed without you having to reload the page…). In future, we’ll do more Facebook integration, with features like a wall to allow notes to be captured, and recordings and documents to be posted. Plus, we’ll add more features allowing for live interaction with users, based on the AJAX work we’ve done.
4. You can operate the conferencing service in two ways – either as a standard scheduled call, or an unscheduled “instant” call. We think instant calls have the potential to change how people use conferencing, and make it much more useful for quick ad-hoc calls to arrange an activity amongst multiple people, or to manage unexpected events and crises.

I know you’re probably asking “what does this have to do with the iotum Relevance Engine?”. Everything. Although our presence capabilities aren’t in the application as you will see it today, they will become part of it over time. We made a strategic decision to get to market quickly with the conferencing system, and then roll out additional features, like presence, as quickly as possible afterward. Also, later this fall the capabilities we have developed for Facebook will be re-integrated with the Talk-Now application on BlackBerry, allowing users to create instant conference calls from the BlackBerry driven by the iotum Relevance Engine. Users will be able to see at a glance who is available for a conference call, and then immediately bring all available people into that call. We’ve had interest in this feature from organizations ranging from sales groups, to political parties, IT professionals and public relations companies.

Over the weekend, I’ve been giving restricted access to the app to anyone from the blogging community who has asked. Later today (we’re targeting 1 PM Eastern time) we will completely remove the restrictions, allowing anyone to sign up and use the software. It’s still beta, and we may reset the database one more time between now and tomorrow, but it’s good enough that you can begin using it now. I encourage you to try the software, and let us know what you think. I suggest you begin by looking at who else has also installed the app, and try a call or two them.

As always, both Howard and I are grateful for your continued friendship and support.

I knew the beta was underway, but I’ve been time constrained and also knew I couldn’t really test it. So first, I’m not happy that TalkNow is frozen in time. It is by far the single most powerful business productivity tool I’ve used, but it’s severely limited to Blackberry users only. You will have to trust me that I’ll be taking Alec to task in person next week for this. TalkNow needs multiplatform support, and now. There’s power there that iotum needs to leverage.

But this addition to Facebook, and it’s live/available now, is one of the first and few genuinely useful apps for business to hit Facebook so far. It’s a powerful tool, and I expect iotum to reap the reward of widespread adoption very quickly.

Kudos Alec and Howard, and the whole iotum team!

Technorati Tags: iotum, Relevance Engine, Facebook, unified communications

Filed by Ken at 6:15 pm under Technology