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Refinder pitch @ the INiTS/SpeedInvest Investors Day

The Austrian startup scene is composed of a vibrant and colorful crowd of talent. This got once again quite apparent at yesterdays Investors Day, a joint event of INiTS and SpeedInvest at the Deloitte headquarters in Vienna.

Get a version of the new Refinder whitepaper

Indeed, this was a good morning, because today we released our first Refinder whitepaper, titled "Semantic Technologies Tap Unrealized Potentials of Social Business Platforms".

Here is, what the whitepaper´s executive summary says:

Email to go? Not really.

No question about it: email is on trial. 40 years after the first email was sent, the role of email as a main bearer of business communications is disputed, resulting in striking headlines by companies announcing zero-email policies, or being scrutinized in the highly regarded self-experiments of IBM researcher  Luis Suarez, who tries to live his professional life sans email. A good moment to reflect email in the light of emerging social business platforms.

The red flag means "There is news for you"

Traffic signs, road markings, signboards - the urban environment is paved with visual cues competing for our attention. Switch over to Refinder, a collaboration space exposing a steady flow of information events to its users. As in real life, some sorts of signage is necessary also in a social interface, to support users navigating their activity streams, receiving imminent orientation and directing their attention towards new and unseen stuff. 

Refinder deployment options

As you may know, straight from its beginnings Refinder has been designed as Software-as-a-Service. This means that the software runs, and the user data are stored, on servers managed and operated by Gnowsis. To use Refinder, you just fire up a Web browser, go to www.getrefinder.com, enter your email address and password, and there you go.

Social software adoption and the psychology of users

Enterprise social software sees some hype in the media, but it does not need much digging, to find voices dedicated to one of the fundamental problems of participatory technologies: software adoption.

Adoption deals with the problem, why and how a software tool finds acceptance, affirmation and sustainable usage by its alleged users. It raises the question, what can be done to facilitate and to unburden the process of introducing software in order to achieve the hoped-for business outcomes lastingly. 

What's next in Refinder

A couple of days ago, Franz asked his crystal ball (which, I sometimes suspect, rather looks like this) for predications about how social business will evolve in 2012. I'd like to follow up on that with a short outlook on what the Refinder development team is currently working on, and what we plan to release in the next few months to you, beloved customer.

Content curation strategies in Refinder: Filtering

A platform to collect and manage large inventories of information is only as good as its filtering tools. Remember the “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure” quote by Clay Shirky.Talking about "filters" or "filtering" in the context of an online application like Refinder addresses all mechanisms, which help you to narrow the information inventory down to a desired and manageable range of results, while suppressing the rest.

Reading the crystal ball for 2012

Exhausted from culinary extravaganza and exuberant festivity, I'm starting the year with a worthwhile collation of some of the predictions for "Social Business in 2012", which  I stumbled across during my post-xmas recovery reading:

Content curation strategies in Refinder: Relating

Probably I´m a bit of an information junkie. At least it might appear so, as my Refinder account activity, which I check occasionally from the Dashboard page, exhibits a conglomerate of  8.949 Things, which I have aggregated in Refinder since I subscribed a year ago. And as Refinder turns more and more into a cross-platform tool, which adds integration and collaboration capabilities with connected business apps and online services, the volume of Things piling up in my account is rapidly growing. 

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