The best mix is what is called the “Hustler and the Hacker”.  The Hustler is the passionate business person that loves to go out and tell the story.  He is a networker, and when he talks, he is captivating.  He spends every waking moment thinking about the problem, and he wants to change the world.  He is eloquent, confident, and mesmerizing.  The Hacker is the guy who spends 18 hours a day building the product and delivering on that vision.  He is thinking about scalability, availability, reliability, and how they can incorporate the next cool technology into the platform.  There is great respect and great trust in this partnership.

This mix used to be a “nice to have”, but since the Genome report, it is nearly a “must have”.  The best way to solve the problem is just make sure that you have this mix and make sure you push it in your pitch.  Stress the role each of you play and stress your great connection.  If you do not have this mix, you should be very prepared to defend why you don’t.  Many Angels are now considering this mandatory and a business guy and a contract India team are no longer sufficient.

Guy Kawasaki calls it the “Art of the Start” and founding a company is clearly an art.  It is an art because you are playing a very significant game, with tightly defined rules, and the penalty for breaking the rules is death (of the company that is).  The problem is, no one gives you the rules.  You are expected to understand a game that is neither intuitive nor obvious.  In fact the game is quite complex and often based on a set of traditions that were never written down.  Founders must make extremely critical business decisions every day that could literally be worth 10s of millions of dollars in 2-3 years.  Although it is unfair, it is the game and if you win the game you win a lot.

So why don’t your company advisors help you navigate this game.  To a certain extent they do.  Your Angel investors, attorney’s, accountants, and venture capital partners all help you navigate, but they do the navigation from a certain context and biased that is not always in alignment with you as the Founder.  Your attorney probably provides the most advice in these situations, but it can often be very slanted.  If you go to any of the top startup law firms, these guys very much understand both the game and the ramifications of the game.  But there is also a biased at play here.  If you are negotiating with a top VC, you are doing one deal with this law firm, but the firm is probably doing 50-100 deals a year with the VC on the other side of the table.  I think that most of these attorneys do their best to be fair, but the dynamics are clearly rocky at best.

So who is in the best position to help you?  They don’t teach this stuff at Harvard, you can’t learn it by being on a Board, and people that have not founded a company can simply not understand it.  The only mentors that can help you play the game and understand it from your perspective is a serial entrepreneur.  The serial entrepreneur knows where the tricks and traps are, not because they super smart, but because they probably have stepped on them and seen their critical ramifications.  They may not be smart enough to not experience the pain once, but they quickly put in place a strategy to not experience it again.  By looking back in time against a game that has already played out, they can see how the game can be played better.

Over a series of 10 blog articles, I hope to give you some insight and perspective on how you can play this game and not get burned.  Although it does not layout all of the rules, all of the tricks, and all of the pain, it puts “bumpers on the bowling alley” and tries to keep the ball in the center.

I hope this information in interesting to you and that you find valuable.  I would love to hear feedback and your experiences in the comments.

SaneBox

But because I get so much email, 300-500 emails a day, I could never justify leaving my Outlook.  I use a lot of tools to manage my inbox including QuickFile, Getting Things Done for Outlook, Xobni, Gist, and Producteev.  I just cannot do all this within Gmail.

But SaneBox came to my rescue and not only provided the advantages of Gmail’s Priority Inbox, but far surpassed it.  The installation was very easy and it allowed me to see how it was processing the email.  I have a lot of email, so it took about 2 hours to complete the process.  When it was done, only about 75 messages (out of 438) were left in my inbox.  I said “Oh Shit” and scrambled to find where the rest had gone.  But when I looked in the SaneLater folder, there they all were.

I went through the folder and sure enough SaneBox had done a wonderful job of determining what email was important and what was not important.  Of the 75 left in my inbox, 100% of them were emails I would have selected to be priority.  Of the 363 that it put in my SaneLater, all but 2 should have been gone into the folder.  To train the system, all I had to do is drag the emails from the SaneLater Folder to the inbox and Voila it was done.  From that point on all email from those two users are left in the inbox.  If there had been something left in the inbox that should have been moved, training is just as simple.  Drag the email from the inbox to the SaneLater folder and you are done.  This is completely brilliant!

But SaneBox does not stop there.  In addition to the obvious value, it has some cool tricks up its sleeve.  It goes through your spam folder and finds email that was spammed and puts this into a folder called “SaneNotSpam”.  It found over 100 important emails that my spam filter had miss-grabbed in only the last 30 days.  I moved the email to the inbox and SaneBox will never let that happen again.  If there is someone emailing you that you want to lose, just drag the email to SaneBlackHole and you will never see it again.

There is even a cool set of folders called SaneTomorrow and SaneNext week.  If Monday morning you drag an email to SaneTomorrow, Tuesday morning it will re-appear in your inbox.  If instead you dragged it to SaneNextWeek, next Monday it would re-appear.  Very cool!

Finally, the customization is really well done.  If you are not using one of the folders, you can make it disappear from the list.  SaneBox lets you connect to Facebook, Linked-In, and Twitter to find more contacts and optimize the algorithm even more.

This is a real no brainer.  If you use Outlook, you must go and install this product.  The value is off the charts.

I am a big Evernote fan and definitely a power-user of the tool.  Recently I wanted to enhance the way my executive assistant and I work together and decided that Evernote was the platform for the job.

I created an Evernote Notebook called “Virtual Assistant” and created 10 folders.  Each folder has a specific purpose:

• 0 – Unfiled Note: I put all of my unfiled notes to be processed in this folder and this lets my assistant know what needs to be done.  It also lets me know what still needs to be processed.
• 1 – Daily Updates: My assistant does 3 updates each day that includes what tasks have been completed, what is in process, and what is up next.  This allows me to see the progress and eliminates a lot of calls I used to do to get a status.  At the end of the day, she does a video update using Oovoo Video Message and puts a link in the folder.  Since I am often tied up until after 8:00, this allows her to communicate with me even when I get back late.
• 2 – Communications: My assistant gets all of my phone messages and puts them in this folder.  Even voice mail is transcribed and this allows me to easily review my messages even when I am in a meeting.  When they come to me on my iPhone, I can just click on the number and it will dial for me.  I can then attach a voice file to the note if I need her to do something for me.
• 3 – Business Cards: Whenever I get a business card, I take a picture of it with Evernote.  My assistant takes the picture and uploads it to bizcard reader.  It converts the card to an Outlook Contact and then hits Linked-In and pulls information from their Public Profile.  If the card is for a lead, I tag it and she enters into the CRM.
• 4 – Meeting Notes: I use LiveScribe for all of my notes.  Whenever I have a meeting that I want the notes managed, I use LiveScribe Connect to transfer the notes to Evernote.  I draw a one inch line, right then left.  I then write Evernote above the line.  If I look at the pen display it will show Evernote.  I click on the right arrow and it says point to each page you want to transfer.  It beeps for each page.  I click on the right arrow again and it allows me to select how I want to transfer the pages.  I always choose automated Adobe Reader File.  It will then transfer the page to Evernote the next time I dock the pen.  I put a section called Actions and she converts all of these to Outlook Tasks.
• 5 – White Boards: Anytime I do a White Board, I take a picture of it and it goes into the system.  I always put Actions in the lower right corner and she converts these to Outlook Tasks.  I have just started using ZigZag and I am going to convert these to PDFs and send them in as well.
• 6 – Expenses: Whenever I have an expense, I take a picture of it front and back.  I send these in and my assistant imports the pictures into Expensify.  They are automatically scanned, converted to text, and put on my expense report.
• 7 – Audio Instructions: Whenever I need something special done, I create a voice note. As she progresses on the tasks, she puts it into the note and I can tell the status.  This is really helpful.
• 8 – My Brain: If I have any lose piece of information that I need to remember, I either create a note, picture, or voice note.  My assistant tags it and it goes into My Brain.  I always do this with things I forget a lot.

This seems like a lot of work, but it actually only takes about an hour a day and often saves several hours a day.  She likes it because it is easier to connect with me (I am often times at a remote location) and I like it because it gives me a great sense of control.

All these tools are evolving a lot and I am getting new tools every day.  I can’t believe someone has not come up with an application for tightly integrating an executive assistant and the executive. I would love to hear other ideas about how to use Evernote, especially in working with your executive assistant.

So in my previous article I talked about how Klout measures influence and the sophistication of its model.  In this article I am going to tell you what I did to drive my Klout Score up nearly 20 points in 30 days.

First, it is important to understand that the score is not a linear scale.  It is much harder to go from 40-50 than it is to go from 20-30.  This is my interpretation of what the score is really saying:

So to increase your Klout, you must do three things: create or curate great content, use the content to influence a defined topic, engage the thought leaders around that topic to expand your reach to other users.

Before I go to the strategies, let me say that yes there are a few ways to game the system and bounce your score for a little while.  If you post interesting quotes from important people, they will often be retweeted and your score will go up.  If you post jokes or funny things about movie stars, your score will go up.  I assume if you post links to porn or tweets with provocative words in the title your score will go up.  But these are all very short lived bumps and not really helping you increase your real influence.

If you think about your Klout Score as “Page Rank for People”, you will start thinking of it the right way.  Klout pays attention to how many people are pointing at you and how influential those people are based on their Klout.  The Klout team is pretty smart and now that they have a lot of money (Kleiner and Greycroft gave them $8.5M earlier this year) I am sure they are going to start flushing out gaming just like Google does.

So let’s look at the strategies I used:

Strategy 1: Focus on Posting Great Content in a Defined Topic
I selected “Startups” as my topic because it is something that I amvery passionate about.  As I said in my previous article, I use Zite to read my content and it allowed me to identify great articles about the content.  I would scan 50-100 articles a day looking for good content.  Of that, I would read 25-30 articles.  I would then tweet 15-20 articles that I found most interesting.  For each article, I would curate the article with a quick lead-in,
make sure the title of the article was engaging, and then tag the article with #startup, #entrepreneur, #VC, or #Angel, depending on what was appropriate.  To find the right #hashtag to use, go to hashtag.org and look for the top tags.  You can also check www.whatthetrend.com and www.tweetmeme.com to see what is trending.  Finally, analyze your tweet stream, your followers, your re-tweeters and see what tags they are using.  Most avid Twitter followers use saved searches are looking for specific #hashtags.

Strategy 2: Engage with the Thought-Leaders of Your Topic
For this, go to the website www.wefollow.com and put in the #hashtags you commonly use.  It will give you a list of the top thought-leaders for that
topic.  Create a Twitter List with these top thought-leaders and watch the stream.  As they post something interesting, retweet them.  You might even send
them a direct message and engage them in a conversation.  You can also write a blog article and @Message them.  The objective is to get their attention and
have them look at your feed.  If it is interesting, then they will likely follow you and you will be in there feed where you can influence them every day.

Now as you tweet, they will see your post.  If you can interest them, they are very likely to retweet your message to their followers and now your post has amplification.  This is especially true, if you retweet them often.  Now, Klout sees all of this.  Your score increases because an influencer follows and engages with you and your Klout score increases when your messages are amplified.  Both of these are good things and a true sign of your
ability to influence.

Strategy 3: Pay Attention to the Time of Day and Activity of the People You Are Trying to Influence
I made a big mistake the first week I was trying to increase my Klout.  I am a very early riser and that is when I like to tweet.  But when you tweet at 3-4 in the morning, unfortunately no one is listening.  It did not take me long to see the error in my ways, so what I started doing was posting the links to my Delicious account and then when the right time came along, I would tweet them using Hootsuite.  I think for every topic on Twitter, there is probably a “best” time.  I experimented a lot and found that between 7:00 and 8:00 am, then again at 3:00 to 4:00 was the best time.  I did some Google searches on the topic and I found other people have found a similar trend.  I think the best idea is just to watch your feeds and tweet when they are active.

Strategy 4: Increase the Half-Life of Your Tweet
I think a big way to increase the likelihood of a tweet being retweeted and your ability to increase your own influence is to increase the “half-life” of your
tweet.  What I mean is to say that you should focus on getting into streams that are as persistent as possible.

Here is an example.  If you tweet with no #hashtags or @mentions, your tweet is likely to stay in someone’s feed for less than one hour.  Since many people have columns in their twitter console for specific search on #hashtags or @mentions, if you use them you will likely stay in the feed for several hours of even days.  If you get your name on a list the same is true, as is being retweeted by an influencer.

All of these increase the time your tweet is visible and the longer it is visible, the more chance you will be able to increase your influence.

Conclusion
So these are the techniques I tried and these all worked.  I am sure there are a lot more ways to increase your influence, so if anyone has any additional suggestions, I would love to hear them.  I do think that Klout is very likely to be one of the next “big things”, so I would pay attention to it.  I have been paying attention to them since they first started and in the beginning everyone was just giving me reasons why it would not work.  Now, I am hearing a lot of thought leaders saying how important influence is and how Klout is leading the pack.  I guess Kleiner and Greycroft saw the same thing.

It seems that Adam was walking around the Garden of Eden one day , feeling very lonely.  The Lord took notice and felt sorry for Adam.  “Is there anything wrong with you?”  God asked.  “Is there anything I can do for you? 

 “Well, it would be nice to have someone to talk to,”  said Adam.  “You seem awfully busy these days.”

“Okay, tell you what I’ll create a companion for you.  She’ll be a woman. She’ll gather food for you, cook for you, and when you discover clothing, she’ll wash it for you.  She’ll agree with every decision you make.  She’ll bear your children and never ask you to get up in the middle of the night to care for them.  She won’t nag you, and she will always be the first to admit she was wrong when you’ve had a disagreement.  She’ll give you love and passion any time you want it, and she’ll never go to be with a headache.”

“Wow, that sounds great!” said Adam, his interest rising.  “What will a woman like this cost me?”  

“An arm and a leg.”

 This seemed like a lot to Adam.  Then he had a brainstorm.  “What can I get for a rib?” he asked.

 The is rest is  history…

There are several sites out there that measure influence, but probably the most well-known is Klout.  Klout was launched in 2009 by Joe Fernandez and Binh Tran and it is an interesting service.  The service monitors Twitter, Facebook, and Linked-In and then uses 35 different metrics to measure influence.  I saw an interview with Joe that said they were going to expand this to over 45 other services including Yelp, Foursquare, YouTube, Flickr, Stumbleupon, and Delicious this summer. 

I liked the idea, so I decided to really focus my Twitter efforts for 30 days and see if I could quickly drive up my Klout Score.  The short answer was “absolutely”.  I was able to dramatically increase my scores and it allowed me to not only understand what was going on, but why it was going on. 

 The Klout Score tries to provide a metric of how you interact with people: who you engage with, who you engage, how often you engage, and how often they interact with your content.  The score ranges from 1-100.  These are some of the things that Klout measures:

• How many people follow you?
• How many people that you follow, follow you back?
• How influential are the people that follow you?
• How often you tweet?
• How often are you retweeted?
• How often are you @mentioned?
• How influential are the people that engage in your content, i.e. Retweet or @mention?
• How far is a tweet implied in the network, i.e. is it retweeted by friends of friends of friends?
• Are you on list?
• How many people follow those list?

 It is actually pretty comprehensive and pretty smart about the way it does this.  But your Klout Score is actually a compilation of 3 underlying scores.  This first is your True Reach.

True Reach is the number of followers that you are able to engage with and influence.  It is pretty smart about the way it does this and eliminates any known spammers or inactive accounts.  The algorithms determines which people were most likely to see your tweet, how many retweeted it, and/or @mentioned it. 

True Reach is based on these metrics:

• Do people like your tweets and are they interesting enough to build an audience?
• When you tweet, how far is it amplified on the network?
• Are people adding you to list and who is following those list?
• How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers?
• How often do people follow you when you follow them?

 Amplification measures the likely hood that people will interact with your content, i.e. how often it is retweeted, you are @mentioned, or someone on Facebook likes your post.  It essentially measures your ability to create an interesting conversation.  To drive this, you must make content that compels others to respond and then drive the conversation into the network beyond your own social graph.

Amplification is a composite score of the following: 

• How diverse is the group that @messages you?
• Are you broadcasting or participating in conversations?
• How likely are you to be retweeted?
• Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?
• Are you tweeting too little or too much for your audience?
• Are your tweets effect in generating new followers, retweets, and @replies?

 Network Influence is the level of influence you have on your audience.  The influence is again measure by engagements such as retweets, @messages, follows, lists, comments, and likes.  When your followers, or their network, complete one of these actions they are essentially validating your authority and the quality of your content. 

Network Influence not only determines how many people engaged with your content, but who they were and what was their level on influence.  If a top thought leader retweets your message to his 10 million users, it is more influential than if your mother retweeted it to her 5 followers that were all her kids.

These are the factors that make up your Network Influence: 

• How influential are the people who @message you?
• How influential are the people who retweet you?
• How influential are the people that follow you?
• How influential are the people who list you?
• How influential are the people who follow the lists you are on?

So, how did my little 30 day experiment go?  Actually quite well.  The things I did clearly did effect my industry influence.  I greatly grew the number of followers, but more importantly the followers were important people in the area I was trying to influence.  I greatly increased the number of retweets and the retweets were amplified significantly more than there were before.  Finally, I now have a handle on my Klout Score and understand what I can do to even further increase my score.

Next week, I am going to write a third article about what I did, what the results were, and what I learned.  I am also going to talk about what I am going to do next month to increase it even more.  I am also going to go over some other tools I am using and some recommendations for the Klout team.

If you have any “secret sauce” for increasing your Klout Score or just your industry influence, let me know in the comments below.

One of the keys to being influential is to be seen as very knowledgeable to the people you are trying to influence.  I am always encouraging the CEOs that I am working with to become experts in their industry and position themselves as  top “Thought Leaders”.  So how do you do that?  Here are three top techniques to make yourself knowledgeable and then increase your influence.

In a series of three blog articles, I am going to cover these topics:

• How to read your news and use sharing to increase your influence?
• How to measure your influence and determine your strengths and weaknesses?
• How do you analyze the effects of your sharing in increasing your influence?

This first article is about reading and sharing articles.  There are a lot of ways to accomplish this and I have tried most of them.  None of them are really great, but today I am going to talk about a very cool iPad application called Zite and how I use it to read my important news and then share it with the people I am trying to influence.

Zite is a very personalized experience.  Even if you and I both select the same topics, we will still see different content.  The personalization begins right up front.  After you install the application on your iPad, it will ask you to connect it to your Google Reader and your Twitter account.  It then scans what you are reading and sharing in those applications and present a set of topics you would most likely be interested in reading.  It then shows you a set of very high level Sections (i.e. Entertainment, Sports, Politics) and ask which ones you would like in your custom magazine.  It will even allow you to create custom Sections, which I did by selecting one of my favorite topics Virtual Work and of course the iPhone and iPad.  Then my personal magazine was “automagically” created.

Zite gets its content by crawling over 500,000 news sources and RSS feed.  It then indexes the content with an advanced sematic engine originally develop by the University of British Columbia.  The index does all of the traditional semantic linking and also identifies the social footprint of each piece of content by seeing how many people read, shared, commented, and Tweeted the article.  The top articles are then displayed in the personalized sections in your custom magazine.

Then Zite watches you read the content and engages with you and finds what is most important to you.  If you tend to read short articles that are about these topics, that is what you will see in your magazine.  If you tend to read long articles by this author, that is what you will see.  Zite even allows you to help in the personalization.  A sidebar is presented with each article that allows you to say “More Like This”.  It also ask “more from this source”, “more about these topics”, and “more from this author”.  Zite monitors this and includes this criteria in your own personalization.  This is very cool and very effective.  The articles are actually very good too.  Many of them are from obscure sources that I would never have found through a traditional news reader.

Articles are formatted very nicely and often include pictures and charts.  The width of column, fonts, and layout make the articles very easy to read.  Then Zite allows me to easily share content with my colleagues and friends on Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Delicious, and by email.  Exactly what I would want it to do.  The sharing methods for each is done very well, especially the Facebook sharing and Delicious sharing.  It is a really great reading experience.

So I have created sections around Startup, Entrepreneurs, Venture Capital, Gadgets, Social Media, and the custom ones I spoke of above.  I read about 100 articles per day and share about 15-20 in the morning and 10-15 in the evening.  I get about 25 new followers per day and a lot of retweets and mentions.  In doing this for about a month, my Klout score has grown from 31 to 45 (I will talk about your Klout Score in my next Blog article).

Zite has greatly improved my news reading experience and provided me a great way to expand my industry influence.  As always with a tool, I like to continue the innovation process and expand Zite with the following functionality, so Zite if you are listening, this is a wish list from a very avid user.

• I would love for to not only tightly personalize the experience to what I want, but show me what that tight personalization has made me miss.  Maybe a view that says these are important topics that all Zite users like and these are important topics for Zite users like me that I am not reading.  This could be displayed in a “Bubble Chart” with the topics I like in the middle and topics I am not following around the edge.  The size of the bubble would show popularity and the location of the bubble show how recent the topic was trending.  The idea is to not only support the topics I am interested in, but to “discover” additional topics of interest.
• I would like to see tight integration with something like Klout, showing me how my shares are increasing my influence.  The URL shorting should be done with Bit.ly and then give me great analytics.  It would show me my current influence and then tell me how to increase my influence.
• I wish the Share button was done in a more integrated fashion.  I often share one article on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, and Instapaper.  In the current version this is 4 different steps.  I would love to see a single share that capture the information and then let me select where to post it to on the Web.

Next week, I am going to post an article on how to calculate your influence using Klout, what you can do to increase the influence, and how get your followers to help you.

Let me know if you use Zite or if you have found an even better tool, let me know about that.

PS: Zite Cease and Desist Order
If you read much about Zite, you will see that they were served a cease and desist order by several very large publishers earlier this year.  This was over them scraping content rather than just showing the content in the RSS feed.    You are seeing a lot of this right now and I am sure it will continue to be a problem.  RSS is a great way to aggregate content, but because publishers want to monetize the content, they don’t want applications to just peel out the text and not display the ads.  Most companies get around this by showing a “Web View” of the content and a “Reader View”.  Zite has already implemented this.  This is both a changing and controversial topic that will not be fully locked down for several years.

Virtual working has become very popular and over the next decade is going to become more and more so.  The reason, it makes more sense for everyone involved and drives inefficiencies out of the system.  As business models continue to remove overhead and effectiveness becomes more important the efficiencies, business are going to look for ways to attract better talent and do so in the most economical way.

If you look at the recession we just went through, you will see why this is going to be very important.  This recession was very different than recessions of the past.  In most recessions, the blue collar workers take the brunt of the pain.  But in the recession of the last decade, the group that got hit the hardest was the upper class white collar worker.  They took it with both their equity, i.e. their real estate and tech investments, and their jobs.  Many were laid off by the tens of thousands without even considering their work quality.  What seemed like a rock solid career turned into a bad nightmare.

But where the blue color workers went home, got depressed, got drunk, and ultimately drew into despair, the white collar workers handled it very different.  They went home, spent more time with their families, relaxed a little, began assessing their lives and said, “hey this working from home is pretty cool”.  Then they started consulting, building new companies, and refocusing their lives in a much more fulfilling way.

As they began working in this new remote and “for hire” model, they began patching together tools like Google Docs, GotoMeeting, Skype, and Base Camp to meet the requirements of this new work style. This showed promise, but also introduced new requirements and exposed a lot of holes.  The true Virtual Office needed have more “There There” and users began to look for better solutions.  Well the new batch of solutions has now arrived and they are getting closer.  Most of them lack several key features and need some UI dressing, but they are providing significantly more value and capabilities.

One that has done a good job of figuring out the requirements is Team Space f Sococo of Mountain View, CA.  Team Space provides a virtual office complete with a court yard, conference room, and individual offices.  Although the graphics could be improved (a lot), the concept is a pretty good one.  You move from room to room by simply clicking to where you want to go.   Everyone wears headsets and as you enter a room where other users are present, you can hear and speak to them.  This allows you have meetings, private conferences, and even go to the court yard for the proverbial “water cooler” conversation.

Besides chatting and audio conversations, each room is equipped with several shared screens.  You can have a project room for a big client and have Base Camp running on one screen, a shared white board on another, and a dashboard with KPIs on the other.  Everyone sees the same shared screens and they can easily get up to date on the latest progress.  If you go to the conference room everyone can see a shared presentation, just like GotoMeeting or Webex.  This is a good concept and users quickly adopt to the metaphor.

Team Space also has a presence bar with all the users showing their current availability and status.  You can easily text chat, make a quick audio call, or collaborate on a document.  This is similar to Skype and other IMs, but the environment makes it seem more natural and engaging.  I am really glad they did not make the big mistake of adding silly avatars like Second Life.  I think we are a long way from this type of interaction going mainstream.

So where does it need to improve and what is missing.  Well the most obvious is the UI.  The little bubble heads are pretty sophomoric and it is hard to feel professional is such “PacMan” environment.  If they don’t greatly enhance the UI, they are never going to reach critical mass or the applications potential.  If they do, they still have some significant features they need to work on.  First, presence should be made richer.  The system should track when the user is working, when they will be in the office, and how they are doing on their work assignments.  They should either build in a project management system or tightly integrate into one (they should probably do a hybrid of both).  It should include time tracking, document management, and good application integration into tools like Google Docs, Salesforce.com, and others.  I would also add a cool dashboard system.

Expect a lot more solutions going in this direction.  I think that video conferencing  is going to play an important part here and so far I have not seen anything that does this well.  Skype has probably the work user experience of any solution on the market and tools like Oovoo and FuzeMeeting still have a lot of infrastructure issues.  But video conferencing is clearly here to stay and something these systems need to embrace.  I do wish Sococo luck and I think they are on to something.  This is two steps in the right direction, but they need to raise their game and execute even harder.

The iPhone and iPad are totally changing the TV experience.  I have integrated 4 applications into my life and I love all of them.

The first is call the Unity Remote from Gear4.  This has replaced my Logitech Harmony 100 (good riddance to that one it never worked right).  This is the best remote system I have seen and I have seen a lot of them.  All the programming happens on the iPhone and you simple tell it what devices (by model) you have and it automatically sets everything up.  Once it is complete, you can then set up specific scenes (I set up Morning Reading, Movie Time, and Game Play). 

The iPhone connects to the device via bluetooth. This works well and allows you to put the device anywhere in the room.  One thing I was a little disappointed in is that it does not work well if you have multiple iPhones or iPad’s that want to control it.  They have tried to make this work by allowing a second device to share the settings of a master.  But as soon as the master leaves, everything else fails.  As a family where everyone in the house has an iPhone and iPad, this breaks often.

I will go over the other three applications in future post