Here another nice phenomenon I came across in my daily blog feed-overload.
It’s called video tracing. This is a technique which allows you to generate a 3d-model by drawing lines in a video.
What i like about it that it can also be used to generate a 3d-model of your face.
I’m not quite sure how much time this will take up.

Have a look at the video below. Thanks to the Australian Centre of Visual Technologies for this interesting technology

For more detailed information about the technology click on this link

Have a look at this video.
Amazing what you can do with a Wii…

For more info check the guys website.

Yesterday I was doing a bit of surfing and I stumbled upon the site of Asterpix.
Asterpix is a software-company that enables companies/people to add hyper links to areas in movies, creating a so called Hypervideo

Amazed by the simplicity of the application I started thinking what the possibilities could be.
To broaden my horizon I looked up a report to see what the digital television penetration is in the Netherlands (Click here for the UK figures).

Turns out that over 3.000.000 subscribers are currently registered (16 miljon people live in NL)!
In the UK there are 30.000.000 households….

What if you would use the technology Asterpix uses and create a TV channel with high quality series and you give all digital viewers a TV-remote with Nintendo Wii-capabilities, so if they see a product they like they can click on it and it is stored in their favorites. After the show is finished the favorites show up and people can click on them to be forwarded to the website of the sponsor who paid to have his product featured in that show.
This technology can also be used on the millions of Apple iPhones/Windows Mobile-phones.

By providing this new channel to companies it will maybe finally pave the way for a TV-channel that once again shows more programs than commercials.

I think it’s just a matter of time.

Update 30-01-2008: Click here for a small demo by LogicaCMG of this technology

It looks like almost everyone around me has discovered the Social Networking Game. The Plaxo, Hyves and LinkedIn requests keep pouring in….
More and more companies however deny their employees access to these sites. Not without reason if you look at the hours people would spend on them if allowed. However professional social networking gives a huge boost to collaboration and knowledge sharing if provided in the right format.

Finally today it hit me how companies can have the benefits of a true social network within their own walls (and with limited features outside these walls) and not be depended on the commitment of it’s workforce to join in.
Companies however do need to have written permission from their employees that they are allowed to see the content of their mailbox (only mail headers, agenda & contacts is enough).

The idea is quite simple.

Scenario on Microsoft based environment.

You create a server application that analyzes your contacts/activities on the CRM-system and all content on the mail server like:
- Address books
- Mail headers
- Meetings in Outlook Calendar (if integrated also the netmeeting server meetings)
- Distribution lists
- Call option data (in Outlook)

You throw all this info on one big pile and per person you generate a profile.
This profile is nothing more then the entry in the Global Address List in Exchange.

By creating an algorithm that analyzes the frequency that the person interacts through mail, meetings, use of the call option with the other persons and the distribution lists its a member of it generates a view of the persons informal network.

The person must be able t0 select which non-colleague contacts to show to various type of people depending their status in his/her personal network.

Imagine that all your employees have editor rights on the customer data in your CRM system (of course there needs to be an auditor in place to make sure that the data updated is correct) without having to bother them with learning a new program.

The only Microsoft-program that shows a small resemblance with my idea so far is SNARF.
This counts the number of mails sent to/by people in your mailbox and can analyze mail threads.
With Salesforce.com it’s probably easier to realize. Just create a SN-Portal application in combination with a web based Outlook-like client that interacts with Salesforce.com.

One add-in I found for Salesforce.com is Faceforce.
It’s nice but it still doesn’t give an insight in the internal Social Network.

I know that legislation regarding the use of mail/contact information is a critical issue, but if employees are well informed in combination with enough features that enables them to exclude information, they don’t want to have published, this could be a valuable tool to optimize employee /customer interaction.

Here’s a little trick I want to share with you all.

In MS Access it is possible to make a download of your Global Address List.
Might come in handy sometime.

What you do is very simple.

1. Open MS Access
2. Go to the file menu, select open.
3. Then select under filetypes: Exchange()
4.  If you have multiple profiles press OK in het profile-select screen.
5. Click on the + next to Address Books and click on Global Address List.
6. Click ‘Next’
7. Give a name to the table.
8. Click Finish.
9.  Now wait…….
10. Right-click on the table and select export to save it as a .xls-file.

Unfortunately it doesn’t export the e-mail addresses, but if your company uses a default way of generating these you can easily generate these yourself in excel using the LEN, LEFT, RIGHT and CONCATENATE

Good luck,

Daan

Here a funny movie about shopping 2.0-style in the real world

Happy monday,Daan

Knowledge is power.
In the land of the blind, one eye is king.

These are just a few sayings that apply to today’s corporate jungle.
In a report of the GIA (Global Intelligence Alliance) you can see that Market / Competitor / Customer Intelligence is finding it’s way to the board room to assist the CxO’s in making strategic decisions which way to go.

In another report of the CMO Council the following key challenges are addressed:

• Quantify and measure the value of marketing programs and investments (44%)
• Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing organization (39%)
• Grow customer knowledge, insight and conversations (34%)

A report by The Economist Intelligence Unit sums up the 12 mega trends in B2B marketing.
Mega trend no. 1 is the shift to a 360 degrees thought leadership.
When the marketers were asked what the most important non-traditional marketing activity was the majority said Meetings & Conferences (A 3.85 out of 5, First place)

In all of these reports the aspect of ROI on marketing investments is mentioned.
To be able to generate maximum ROI on your investments knowledge of the possibilities you have, where to spend your marketing budget on, is a very important necessity.

This is the primary goal of CXO Event Network when it comes to event marketing.
Event marketing is is such an important element in the total marketing strategy because it’s one of the few occasions that (potential) customers want to be informed on what choices they have when looking for a solution to their problems or what the possibilities are to move forward. This is also called ‘Permission’ marketing.
With other traditional marketing methods like E-mail marketing, advertising, tele-sales decision makers are confronted with your companies information when they don’t want to be bothered most of the time, also called interruption marketing.

Another important element why event marketing is so successfully is because of the face-to-face contact.
Instead of creating a monologue like in advertising and e-mail marketing the customer is able to give input and get the exact information necessary to come to a decision what’s best for his organization.

CXO Event Network enables marketing departments of all companies to determine:

• What is the best event to reach my target group
• What event is best suited for sponsoring, supplying speakers, attending with a stand
• What is the best time frame to initiate a in-company event for customers
• What is my competition doing (exhibiting, sponsoring, speaking)

Marketing departments will also be able advertise on CXO Event Network. This way without attending or sponsoring the event-organization they are able to reach an even broader audience than if they would sponsor the event itself.
In a report of the Event Industry Alliance (E.I.A.) a graph shows the the no. 1 reason for exhibiting on an event is the increase of brand awareness. CXO Event Network enables to increase the awareness by providing companies with a number of services:

• Sponsoring (based on industry, tag words, search queries)
• Option for visitors / customers to ask questions from our website about products/services (like Yahoo’s Q&A).
• Talk to an expert option for visitors. This option will make sure that the right people will be available when the customer comes to your stand.
• Possibility to attach your corporate blog to our site or create one directly attached to our site

The blog function is added because we want to give companies the ability to show their thought leadership on certain subjects.
On this mini-site all the events that a company attends with a speaker, stand or sponsors is showed.
Visitors can select to get an alert if one or multiple mini-sites get updated with new data.

Why should event organizers use our website?
The most important reason is probably that they get more exposure of their event. Which will increase the number of attendees.
Because the looking for events are interested in solutions to the issues they are struggling with and not the organization that organizes the event they will rather go to the CXO Event Network-site than to a event organizer-site (a link to the official event-home page is presented in the event details).

In the E.I.A. report there’s also a graph that shows the sources companies use to decide where to exhibit.
If you add up the values mentioned for the sources Search Engine and Expo Database it comes in on second place below Trade associations.
We are planning to provide these associations with a free calendar service that they can integrate in their website, which will redirect visitors to our site.
This service will also be made available to companies

Some other tools for event organizers that we’ll provide:

• Event rating system
• Location rating system
• Speaker rating
• Reports on trends in the B2B event business based on polls and intelligence out of the CXO database.
• Sponsor matching (what are potential sponsors for your event based on previous sponsoring)

In the future our website will also provide assistance in finding experts on certain topics, by using the speaker-search option, online event organization collaboration-tools and more…..

At this moment cxoeventnetwork.com and the websites surrounding this main website are still in a development phase. Currently we are still planning and working on the details of how this community should be shaped in our vision. Most likely this vision will be wrong, we are completely aware of this fact and after we have gone live we expect a large number of people who will take part in this new community to disagree with the initial plan. We expect them to tell us that we have done the wrong thing, made the wrong decision, did the wrong coding and that virtually everything should be done on a complete other fashion. Tho be honest we are prepared to take those comments, we are happy to recieve them and reprogram parts of this website.

This is the way a community should work, not all of us can be working on the coding but the people who will be working on the code and the way the website is working will need the input from the user community. At this moment we are working from our own vision of building the number 1 event website because we found a lack of good websites. There are some out there but not to our liking.

In a situation like that there are a couple of things you can do, you can accept the fact and adopt to it or you can try and do a better job than the other websites. coming from the IT world and have been working in the opensource community we are aware that this can, in our opinion, only be done by having the backing of a large user community who are willing to devote time to it and are sharing the same passion as to make this work.

We hope, and are sure, that a community will form who will make this a succes and a place to share information about events, companies and markets. This will make your and our lives much more easy to manage. Knowing where and when to attend to get the information you need to have. Knowing which speakers will be where, never be missing a keynote from Steve Jobs or always aware of where Richard Stallman wil be speaking next. Also knowing which events there will be held for your market segment or knowing where which CIO, CFO or CEO from a specific company will speak so you can ask him some questions and expand your network.

This website will be turning out to become a tool to boost your professional and social network and enhance your capabilities to penetrate a market segment and get to know the people who matter, the thought leaders of a market and making sure you will stay on top of the information without having a information overkill.

It will turn out to be the most valuable tool for marketing departments, CxO’s from companies and everyone who is searching for just those invents and information arround events that are invaluable for them.

To say it again, This can only be done with the help of community so we call again on those who are willing to create a account and enrich the information we present on this website.

With kind regards,
Johan Louwers, CIO CXOEventNetwork.com