Marketing and Technology News

There are many new and exciting business opportunities emerging that are technology-focused. If you are the tech savvy type, feel comfortable with early adoption of new technology and can effectively promote or sell a new media concept, there could be some interesting business opportunities waiting for you.
As vitally important as e-mail is in business communications, some business executives are becoming frustrated with certain aspects of it. While most in business today consider e-mail to be essential in terms of business communication, others feel it is distracting and unnecessarily time consuming as a communications tool. Still, a huge amount of business communication takes place this way.
One Internet executive recently stated his belief that e-mail is highly abused: “It’s being used for more than it was intended for. With cc’s, we’ve stretched a point-to-point medium into a broadcast medium.” He has an alternative, however. wiki applications are giving  businesses a new way for their employees to communicate.
You probably know something about wikis because of Wikipedia, the hugely successful open-source encyclopedia, which is rapidly becoming its own alternate Internet. You might be wondering, why will we ever again need any other form of reference?. Wikipedia is created by readers. Anyone, even you, can alter any entry. Despite that, it is a reliable, accurate source about almost everything. If someone contributes erroneous information, intentionally or unintentionally, a devoted group of volunteers monitor and correct it, usually in minutes.
There are several companies bringing the same concept to corporate communications. Their software gives employees tools to create shared conversations and collective dialogues without using e-mail. 
There are also a significant number of of other products on the market that want to facilitate group communication, including a  Microsoft product, which is working to add blogs and wikis. Because of Microsoft’s formidable market share in corporate software, many Internet entrepreneurs are starting to believe that the simplicity of the wiki could ultimately become a major online communications alternative to conventional e-mail.
Now, how does this all affect the business opportunity seeker?
First, if technology is your thing, you might have already considered a business opportunity within an emerging product or service. But be sure you are comfortable with the technology, how it benefits the business and consumer markets, and how it can be proactive within the business opportunity’s community.
With wiki-based products and services, you are essentially looking at what is becoming known as “social computing.” It is something that Microsoft Office was never meant to do. Office is all about creating a finished product, a brilliant PowerPoint or another document that someone does in isolation. Meanwhile, enterprise software chains people to top-down processes with rigid business rules. The glue that has been holding it all together up to now has been e-mail.
Their are some major corporations now communicating primarily with wikis and blogs. Seeing the trend, venture capitalists are jumping into the mix, realizing that there is a hot market trend that is only beginning to become explored and penetrated. 
One high growth, wiki-based communications software company claims that 10 Fortune 500 companies are among its 50 customers. One of its clients has a good portion of it’s entire Intranet - for about 7,000 employees - turned into a wiki format. Employees can even alter information posted on a wiki by their human resources department. The wiki-based software communications company, a passionate believer in the bottom-up ethic of the Internet, believes that emerging wiki-based editing software won’t restrict the ability to edit wikis to certain employees, even though that would be easy to do. They wants to stay true to the wiki spirit of collaboration and trust. So far, at least, it has been working. In three years, they have not seen one single case of someone deliberately damaging a corporate wiki.
Wikis can either be permanent or set up for a short project. Content can be posted to a wiki in several ways, including by e-mail. A wiki can also generate e-mail, but only if you ask it to. You can set up the wiki to alert you, for example, if your boss posts something new, so you will not have to receive every last announcement about a lost notebook in your e-mail inbox. E-mail is pushed to you and you have no control over what goes into it. But a wiki uses a “pull” model of attention management.
In addition, if you let go of a little bit of control, you get back participation and innovation. Of course, a prime example of this is Wikipedia. It was originally called Nupedia, a for-profit attempt to develop an online encyclopedia written by experts. Only when Jimmy Wales and his team gave full control over to readers, did it begin to flourish and grow rapidly. Recently, there were Wikipedia versions in well over 100 different languages, with a total of 2.5 million articles. The English language edition alone includes 825,000 articles.
Businesses can make good use of wikis. More than two million copies of open-source wikis (which generally have fewer features than licensed software software) have been downloaded from an open-source web site. Once companies decide the service is essential, wiki-based software vendors, affiliate marketers and related business opportunity seekers can charge them for hosting it.
Given how overtaxed we all feel at work, it is inevitable we will need new, more efficient ways to work together and collaborate. E-mail won’t go away, but tools like wikis prove that there are alternative, and sometimes more efficient ways, to get work done.–http:geoff-caplan.com, email geoffcaplan@comcast.net 

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