The new winkwaves blog
We decided that it would be a good idea to merge this justmy2p blog into our corporate winkwaves.com site. So, today I copied all my former posts into our new winkwaves blog, and from now on we will stop posting on this justmy2p blog, please update your favorites to our brand new blog:
blog.winkwaves.com.
If you use RSS, please update to
feed://blog.winkwaves.com/.
Thanks for your time, attention and comments, and hope to see you soon on blog.winkwaves.com :)
It has been my pleasure!
--Rene.
The new winkwaves blog
We decided that it would be a good idea to merge this justmy2p blog into our corporate winkwaves.com site. So, today I copied all my former posts to justm2p into our new winkwaves blog, and from now on we will stop posting on this justmy2p blog, please update your favorites to our brand new blog:
blog.winkwaves.com.
If you use RSS, please update to
feed://blog.winkwaves.com/.
Thanks for your time, attention and comments, and hope to see you soon on blog.winkwaves.com :)
It has been my pleasure!
--Rene.
Some google fun
Always fun to check how well your company scores in google.
I posted earlier why we chose winwkaves as our new company name. One of the nice advantages was that winkwaves scored a ZERO RESULT in google, meaning that we were really the first winwkaves on earth!
Wanna know how many hits winkkaves currently has? Just
google :)
Last night google bot checked watvindenwijover.nl
So, I just checked with google "wat vinden wij over web2.0" (meaning: what do we think about web2.0), and see: we're number one hit to explain what all of us think about web2.0, cool!
First Dutch blogger to refer to watvindenwijover.nl
Today a first Dutch blogger refered to
watvindenwijover.nl. Vincent, I quoted him earlier because of his interesting posts on web2.0 and
attention xml.
Read his
review and opinion about watvindenwijover.nl (sorry guys, again in Dutch, isn't it about time to start to learn Dutch? :)
Hating the term web 2.0
Today one of our beta test users posted an interesting link to Harry Pierson's blog post titled
Hating the term web 2.0.
If you check
our homepage, it states: Winkwaves brings web2.0 to the business market in the Netherlands. So, you might easily be mislead and think that we love the term web2.0
Let me be honest with you: I hate the term web2.0 as much as Harry does. However, we have two simple reasons why we decided (for now!) to use it in our marketing communication:
- On the contrary to some opportunistic companies who just try to jump on a potential new hype-train, we do have a vision how web technology enables the creation and development of communities of practice, and can be used internally within companies to enable smoother cooperation and knowledge sharing. If people wanna label social bookmarking and blogging as "web2.0", that's fine with us
- we are opportunistic enough to try to benefit from surving the web2.0 media attention these days ;)
So, I would like to invite everyone to judge our vision and our
products, not our opportunistic use of a communication label :)
Public beta!
This week we finalized the work to make our first web2.0 service IE compliant. Oh my god, how much time we had to spend on creating fixes around IE bugs (I'm afright MS insists to call these features). If we could only charge this additional work to MS we wouldn't need investors anymore...
But anyway, the good news is, we decided our service is mature enough to go into public beta. Therefor, I would invite all dutch readers to check
watvindenwijover.nl.
We are very excited to bring the first real web2.0 service to the Netherlands (and sorry guys, that's why it's al in Dutch, to stress the Dutch nature of this service...). Watvindenwijover.nl is a combination of light weight blogging and social bookmarking.
I posted as well a white paper on how to use web 2.0 for knowledge management on our
corporate site. This white paper explains as well the basics of "watvindenwijover.nl".
Our business model is pretty easy: Anyone can use watvindenwijover.nl (of course) for free to manage his own bookmarks, share them with others and publish his opions like a lightweight blog. In March we will introduce a paid version for the business market in the Netherlands. It will offer the ability to control the access of your information to a small group of friends, some collegues, your deparment or even your company.
Next week we will try to get some attention in the Dutch press and of course we hope to raise the interest of some bloggers in the Netherlands...
We will as well continue to fine tune layout and functionality, so any tips or suggestions are appreciated (you'll find the contact details on
winkwaves.com.
End of the virtual era
This week we encountered the end of the virtual era. No longer just a digital existence for Winkwaves. Why? We bought a printer. Strange, we have been working for quite some time now and could pretty much live without a printer. But now we are entering the era of contracts. And contracts are physical things you know. People like contracts on paper. With signatures. And stamps. And spoiled coffee. God knows why people are so fond off paper...
And secondly, we recieved our new winkwaves business cards and winkwaves letters (until now we used the former bPerform ones of course). Thanks to good old Andre, who designed them for us. Thanks Dre :) Wanna learn more about Andre? His
web site contains an extensive presentation of his work... (kidding)
So, now you understand what I mean with: the end of the virtual era :)
Energy!
Well, to start simple: I experience a kind of overflow of energy these days!
Well Rene, you might ask, I haven't read many posts from you over the last month, so what's the excitement all about? Right, that's true, so let's bring you up to speed again and give you a short update of the last few weeks.
In December lot of things happened. Until then we were working for my holding company, but since December we are officially a company dedicated to bring web2.0 to the business world in the Netherlands (and afterwards to the whole world of course ;)
But, just a few days before we went to sign all the official papers for starting this company, we realised that we had to change our name. bPerform simply wasn't the best name for us. We have a "board of inspiration" and they suggested us to reconsider our name. Well, so we did. Since December last year we are called: Winkwaves.
Sounds good, right? Wanna know what the name means? Just check our homepage at
http://winkwaves.com...
Then, we benefit from raising the interest of an investor. Lovely, since this enabled kick starting our activities. Mark and Hans are since January 1st officially working for Winkwaves (and of course, so am I since we officially launched Winkwaves...).
So, we needed an office space to work from. Working from Hans apartment, Mark's house and my house simply didn't work anymore for full time work. So, we found a very interesting office space in the former
Cabellero Factory in The Hague. Since they are still in reconstruction phase, we found a temporary office next to the prestigious Malieveld in Den Haag, a beautiful old style Dutch "herenhuis" from our glory years (that is around 1600, remember the "VOC", when we, yes "we" discovered America and founded New York... Interesting twist of history right ;)
Anyway, that's where we will be based until March 10th, when we will get the keys of our own brand new office!
But, that ain't everything: we are in the final beta stage of our first web 2.0 service, that will bring web 2.0 to the Dutch business market. We will send out our press release next week, and in a few weeks we will present it to you! It is really exciting to realise that we might indeed be the first agency that brings web 2.0 to the business market in the Netherlands...
So, if you read between the lines you might realise why we are so excited these days!
Will keep you posted...
Microsoft and flows: about attention
With the design of bPerform we try to enable the user to work in a "flow", a state of mind that enables you to work highly efficient and effective. I recieved a nice link to a blog on this topic, explaining a Microsoft research project on
attention and life-hacking.
The strong point is that this guy understand the essence of usability: prioritize information instead of filtering information. Interesting! Thanx for the tip, Vincent...
bPerform on the right track, just need some more PR
Just bumped into a nice article on
Frankwatching, a nice blog on web2.0. This describes exactly what we are doing, we need to work on our PR asap, that's for sure :)
Major steps...
It has been a while since I posted. You could ask yourself: is that good news or bad news... I would say, optimistic as I am, that's good news :)
We have been quite busy over the last few months, and made several very important steps forward:
- We found an investor who understands the importance and fun of doing business in the knowledge economy and web2.0 world. We are really happy to have him aboard!
- Our team is now strong and fully focussed on delivering excellent web2.0 services. We have capabilities available according to Alan Coopers golden triange: understanding users and usability, understanding business and commerce, and understanding the enabling technics.
- We have created our first web2.0 service. It is running alpha these days, expected to go in beta next week. This service will create a major breakthrought for web2.0 in the Netherlands, and we can hardly wait to show it to you!
- We were able to acquire some very interesting projects. Will tell you more about this in later posts, but expect some fireworks ;)
- We set up a nice "board of inspiration". A board of very interesting people who are willing to act as sparring partners every now and than, to keep us awake, sharp and focussed on our promise to our users: "perform with a smile"!
So, the fact that I didn't post very often, is just a result of priorities. Priorities in setting up and running the business. But to avoid that this blog is falling asleep, I invited the other team members as well, so you might expect postings from them from now on as well. And if you just wonder how we are doing: drop us an email or come over for a coffee or a beer!
Attention XML and the Big Brother fear
Today I received a nice mail from Vincent, author of the
Zesser blog. He pointed my "attention" to his posting on
Attention XML.
Attention XML follows the kind of the same methodology as bPerform does, in a sense that it monitors users behavior, to enable the easier "re-finding" of information you once read. Secondly, it enables to suggest (pro-actively) content that might be interesting for you.
His post reminded me on a topic that I wanted to discuss with you for quite some time, what I will call the Big Brother fear: Today in the Amsterdam subway, I bumped into Maureen, a nice girl who used to sing in one of my former bands. I hadn't spoken to her for quite some time, so we had a nice chat and a good laugh. After a while I told her about bPerform and what we try to achieve.
When she learned from me that bPerform will kind of monitor what you do to be able to pro-actively guide your attention and focus to information that might be interesting for you, she reacted like "oh, mmm, so, my manager will have a powerful means to monitor what I am doing? I would hate that!".
I explained to her that the objective is definitely not to "monitor and punish". I heard about this fear earlier, and this fear is actually an important reasons why we offer our product in combination with training and coaching of both the knowledge workers and their managers. If managers should use web2.0 to monitor what their people are doing, they will reduce the willingness of users to share information in a web2.0 way, and by that, remove all the advantages that web2.0 offers to all of us.
During this discussion I realised two things:
1) The Big Brother fear should be addressed in both the software and the marketing communication of our product
2) that our product is most suitable for organisations with "new types of managers". The former "command and control" managers will not realise any benefits with web2.0, but I am sure the new generation managers that understand the essence of the knowledge economy will not use bPerform to control their people, and by that, will benefit greatly from improved information sharing, community building and happier employees...
