I just returned from the fabulous ODTUG (Oracle Developer Tools User Group) Kaleidoscope conference in Monterey, CA. I had the pleasure of giving two solo presentations and sitting on one panel.
I recorded both presentations and the panel. Here is the first full recording for your edutainment pleasure.
We received a letter of commendation from one of our newer customers, The National Arts Festival of South Africa. Tony agreed to allow us to post it here on our blog.
Chris Bucchere
Social Collective
13800 Coppermine Road
Herndon, VA 20171
USA7 May 2009
Dear Chris,
Just a note of sincere thanks to you and your team at Social Collective for the highly professional way in which you’ve approached the implementation of your tool on our website.
Undeterred by the fact that his client is several thousand miles and timezones away, Mike has done a great and very patient job of attending to the implementation and the multitude of requests for tweaks and changes from us.
The end result is great and in the couple of days the site has been live the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.
You’ve got a great product and a great team – we’re very glad to have encountered both!
Thank you.
Regards,
Tony Lankester
CEO: National Arts Festival, South Africa
Co-founding CEO Chris Bucchere and CTO and Lead Developer Mike Buckbee of Social Collective, Inc. just accepted a seed round of funding from Launch Box Digital and an invitation to join their 2009 summer incubator program, which began on Monday.
“We’re thrilled to be a part of this great summer program and very excited to work with the investment team, sponsors and advisers to continue to give Social Collective, Inc. the momentum it needs to keep gaining traction with conferences, trade shows and festivals worldwide,” said Social Collective, Inc. President and CEO Chris Bucchere.
The company also recently announced the acquisition of several new customers, including National Association of Dental Professionals, The Sloan Consortium and the Open Government and Innovations conference. In addition, they recently brought on software sales veteran Clinton Bonner as Senior Vice President of Sales.
For more information about Social Collective, Inc. or to schedule a demo, contact them at [email protected].
Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer (from SocialFish) shared the stage with Chris Bucchere and Susan Mernit on a panel at NTC (the Nonprofit Technology Conference) last week in San Francisco.
Here is the complete video for your edutainment pleasure.
Continuing their efforts as fine purveyors of “awesomesauce,” those ebullient SocialFishes Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer interviewed Chris Bucchere of The Social Collective for an article in FORUM Magazine.
The interview touches on a lot of different topics from defining the word “automagic” to how to make effective use of SMS at your next association event. Check it out for yourself or download your own copy.
Our lead developer, Michael Buckbee, put together this great collection of un-prompted testimonials from tweeps who enjoyed using my.SXSW, powered by The Social Collective.
UPDATE: SXSW released a complete audio recording of this panel!
I’m at SXSW again this year. I attended SXSWi last year and, if my memory serves me correctly, I also attended SXSW Music in 1995, though I might be confusing it with H.O.R.D.E., Austin City Limits or one of the other great music festivals in this fine city which is known internationally for its eclectic music scene. Anyway, because The Social Collective is powering my.SXSW, I actually have the pleasure of spending 10 full days in Austin and attending all three festivals this year: Film, Music and Interactive. I’m also speaking, oddly enough, in a Music Panel called Social Networks for the Anti-Social.
I have to warn you, most panels (at any conference, not just SXSW) totally suck and this may not be an exception.
But who knows, it might be a completely magical and transcendental experience, but you won’t know unless you check it out.
South by Southwest (SXSW) Music, Film and Interactive Conferences and Festivals has launched the official mobile social networking and scheduling tool for their 23rd annual event, which begins Friday, March 13th. Powered by the industry-leading whitelabel conference software application, The Social Collective, the mobile site integrates seamlessly with my.SXSW’s networking, messaging and calendaring features. Open to registrants of the film, music or interactive events, the site can be accessed by loading http://my.SXSW.com in most mobile phone web browsers, including Blackberry, iPhone, Andriod, Treo and other handsets with modern web-browsing capabilities.
SXSW teamed up with The Social Collective to provide anywhere/anytime access to all the official films, music showcases, parties, interactive panels and other events via my.SXSW.
People who have phones with web-browsing capabilities can use my.SXSW’s lightweight and highly optomized mobile web experience. People who do not can still build their personal schedules using my.SXSW via a full-blown web browser and then use the provided iCal synchronization to push events to Apple’s iCal, the Google Calendar, or any other iCal-compliant software, which can then be synchronized with virtually any mobile device. my.SXSW also supports personal schedule export into Microsoft Outlook, which can be synchronized with many other types of phones including Blackberry and Treo devices. Finally, in leiu of (or in addition to) using a mobile phone calendar, registrants can use my.SXSW to sign up for SXSW Alerts, which provide realtime schedule updates via SMS.
“We didn’t want people to feel that they needed to lug their laptops around at SXSW,” said founder and CEO of The Social Collective, Chris Bucchere.
“Nearly everyone is already going to be carrying some sort of mobile device and we didn’t want to leave anyone in the dark.”
“So if you have an overacheiving ‘smartphone,’ you can use my.SXSW through your phone’s web browser. If your phone is more of a C-student, you can probably still synchronize your calendar using iCal, Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook. If your phone is more of the ‘beauty school dropout’ variety, at least you can still use SMS.”
The launch of my.SXSW’s mobile experience will make finding contacts, finding great events, and finding the locations of the different venues dead-simple, quick and portable. With The Social Collective’s modular design, enabling the mobile version of the hosted software was easy and painless. The resulting mobile web application carries the SXSW trademark and brand, just like the rest of the integrated social networking, messaging and scheduling features of my.SXSW.
“Our goals were simple: provide SXSW-branded social networking and scheduling capabilities to the greatest number and variety of mobile devices possible,” said Scott Wilcox, CTO of SXSW.
“Between The Social Collective and SXSW Alerts, we can easily reach nearly all of our registrants and provide a great user experience.”
SXSW opens Friday, March 13th with the concurrent film and interactive festivals. The music festival starts Wednesday, March 18th. Find out more about SXSW at http://my.sxsw.com
The Social Collective provides whitelabeled social networking, messaging and calendaring for events of all shapes and sizes. Visit http://thesocialcollective.com to find out how they can help you grow and serve the community around your next event.
We’ve been keeping a close watch on what people are saying about my.SXSW and trying to respond to as much of the feedback as possible, either directly from us or via the folks at SXSW.
It’s no surprise — in this “2.0” world of hypersharing and total transparency — that we’ve seen literally hundreds of blog posts and tweets about my.SXSW, but we’ve only received a handful of e-mails.
We don’t really like e-mail anyway, so this is cool.
The SXSW help desk has received a lot of support requests via e-mail, with issue #1 being that the welcome e-mails and password reset e-mails aren’t showing up, most likely due to downstream spam filters. Ah, the irony! Again, this is why e-mail sucks, but it’s sort of something that’s hard to live with and also hard to live without.
So, how are we tracking and responding to feedback?
We’re using a jury-rigged system of free tools: search.twitter.com (remember Summize?), Google Alerts and Google Reader.
This “system” only takes a few minutes to set up and it can be used to track virtually anything being said about anything in a public space on the interwebs.
Basically, you can set up “comprehensive” Google Alerts and have them “delivered” via feed (or e-mail, but you already know how we feel about that). You can do the same with search.twitter.com.
Simply plug the feeds into Google Reader, organize them into folders/tags and voila, your feedback tracking system is ready to roll.
We’re searching for terms like “SXSW,” so obviously we get a lot of false positives. However, it’s easy to manually “star” or “share” items in Google reader and then publish the resulting list of shared or starred items back out as a feed to share with your team via a web page or, if you like, put it back in Google Reader. (Yikes! We know that sounds like it might be infinitely or mutually recursive, but actually, it works — trust us, we’ve tried it.)
So, here it is: a pretty comprehensive list of all the good, the bad and the ugly things people are saying about my.SXSW. Hey, it’s all public information on the interwebs anyway, so why not republish it all in one place?
There has been quite a bit of chatter that we’ve been following in the SXSW community about the launch of my.SXSW. Fortunately, most of it has been good news. (Phew!) We’ve also gotten some great, constructive feedback and some fabulous ideas for new features that we wish we would have thought of ourselves!
There’s one issue that has come up a few times that we’d like to address in this post. Several people in the community have expressed concern about the lack of context in tweets coming from my.SXSW. (This only applies to people who have integrated their Twitter accounts.)
We’ve applied two changes to The Social Collective software to help with this. First off, we changed the application source from “The Social Collective” to “my.SXSW” with a link back to the my.SXSW site. Also, we added a “on http://my.sxsw.com” link back to messages that notify people when you join a group.
Keep the feedback coming — we’d love to hear from you!
