Robert Scoble interviews Apeer for Fast Company TV

Yesterday we had a visit from Robert Scoble, Tech Geek Blogger for www.scobleizer.com and Managing Director for Fast Company TV. Robert interviewed Bob Goldstein, Apeer CEO, and the interview features a full demo of Apeer Professional. The video can be viewed on Robert Scoble’s website: http://scobleizer.com/2008/10/15/apeer-brings-collaboration-to-multimedia-files/ . Please feel free to visit the site and comment on this segment and on your own personal experience with Apeer.

We hope you all enjoy seeing the latest from Apeer – and look forward to seeing where this latest buzz takes us.

Try Apeer Free for 14 Days

We have a complimentary 14 day trial offer in effect – just go to www.apeer.com and click on “Get Apeer” – or from any of our secondary pages click on the “Try Apeer” link to sign up.  It’s as easy as:

1. Sign up for a complimentary 14 day trial
2. Download the Apeer Professional 1.0 client and install to your PC (running XP or Vista)
3. Invite a guest to join you in an Apeer session
4. Start sharing media and transferring files

Please let us know what you think – and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Happy Birthday to Us!

It’s launch day – the day we’ve been anticipating for the past 3 years.  As of this morning, anyone can go to Apeer.com and get Apeer Professional v1.0 for the PC!  We’re offering a 14 day complimentary evaluation of Apeer – and can’t wait to see what happens now.  The outreach to the media and analysts will take place over the coming weeks – with an “official” launch event in another month after we’ve had some time to make sure the gears are turning smoothly.

We hope you give Apeer a try – and please let us know what you think!  See you on Apeer!  -lj

“Sorry, you can’t come, you’re a competitor”

So, here’s a good one.  A few weeks ago I registered to attend a TechWeb / Information Week seminar in San Francisco – Making the Case for Unified Communications. The agenda for this event indicated that it would be a discussion of “unified communications – winning converts from IT departments to lines of business for its ability to enable employees to rapidly and seamlessly share knowledge across multiple communications platforms, such as voice, e-mail, IM, videoconferencing, and telepresence.”  Sounded like a perfect fit for my interests, and I was especially excited to have a chance to meet Melanie Turek, Principal Analyst for Frost Sullivan and blogger for Enterprise 2.0.  We showed Apeer to Melanie in a demo, and she wrote a great blog post about the demo in July of this year.

The registration form indicated that I’d hear back in 3 business days with my confirmation, and after 3 weeks I followed up myself to see if I should keep this event on my calendar.  I got a prompt response that indicated that one of their reps would follow up with me the next day.  To their credit, they did – only to tell me that unfortunately, since I am the VP of Sales for a company with competitive technology to the sponsor of the event (Seimens), that I wouldn’t be able to attend.  I had to laugh.

I find it amusing, and somewhat flattering, that a multi-billion dollar company with close to 400,000 employees is competitively threatened by a start up that is just this month launching our first commercially available release.  If we are a competitive threat to Unified Communication technologies from Seimens, I guess we are also a threat to the telephone, email and instant messaging.  Good news is – we play well with others, and most “competitive technology” actually can be enhanced with the simultaneous use of Apeer across all those multiple communications platforms mentioned above.  If anything we are a “complementary technology”.

Look out world – Apeer is coming, and it’s the beginning of a whole new way to communicate.

Apeer Enters Forrester Groundswell Awards 2008

Apeer is without a doubt the most unique vehicle for communicating with employees, customers, business partners, suppliers, vendors and other constituents – and creates personal and spontaneous connections which improve communications, build consensus and forge relationships through advanced collaboration.

When it comes to social computing and cooperative information sharing systems, everyone wants to know what’s now, what’s new and what’s next. In a book called “Groundswell, Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies”, Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff write about the groundswell phenomenon, a trend that identifies the who and how of acquiring things we need from another other through technology, rather than from traditional brick and mortar means. Our connections through technology are more powerful than ever before.

The book perpetuated the Groundswell Awards, companies that represent an excellent and effective use of social technologies to advance an organizational or corporate goal. If you know anything about Apeer Professional, you know that its value to business is nothing short of powerful. Although still in beta, businesses are using Apeer every day to connect, collaborate and communicate in ways that have never before been possible.

From the Groundswell Awards perspective, we are in the “Embracing” category. Forrester has defined “Embracing” as an application to “integrate customers into the way a business model works, including using their help to design products and improve processes”. They may as well have just put the word “Apeer” in the description!

Let me give some examples:

• A designer in Austin can show comps to a client in San Francisco, and get immediate feedback on plans for a website.

• An advertising agency in Atlanta can share images with a client in Seattle to get instant approval on content for a new campaign.

• A video producer in LA can play a video – freeze on a frame, mark it up in a screengrab and get the client across town to approve the changes in the IM window.

• A team leader can host a presentation and know that when they click through a presentation the everyone on the team, no matter if they are in the next office or on the other side of the globe, is on the same slide at the same time.

What’s cool – all the activity in all the sessions can be saved in a session log – a printable PDF file that is a record of who was in the session and all the media that was shared – even the marked up images and IM text. No more waiting for email, hoping the attachments got through a firewall. It’s a hundred times easier than trying to connect with an always cumbersome FTP site.

That’s process improvement!

Apeer Professional represents a new wave in communication and collaboration – and the businesses using it recognize Apeer Professional as the perfect solution for a unique and innovative way to connect with customers, employees and partners and integrate them into their business.

Vote for Apeer!

Where do we fit?

There is so much discussion these days surrounding Web 2.0, Social Applications, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Software and the like, it’s enough to make your head spin.  Given that we are on the verge of launching our first release of Apeer Professional we are also very interested in finding the right niche (or niches) and discovering where we fit in the universe of categories that describe web based interaction, communication and collaboration.  For a long time, we were avoiding the “social” categories – and at one point were strongly of the opinion that we were NOT Web 2.0.  Well, that hasn’t entirely changed – but we are now coming around to the realization that Apeer does have elements of Web 2.0 and Social Media Applications.

Look at the following descriptions from the Gartner Hype Cycle report of July, 2008:

Web 2.0
Definition: Three anchor points describe Web 2.0:
• Technology and architecture — consisting of individual technologies associated with
Web 2.0, such as Ajax and Really Simple Syndication (RSS), as well as overall
concepts, such as Web platforms and Web-oriented architecture (WOA)
• Community — describing the “architecture of participation,” dynamics of social networks
and other personal content publish/share models, including wikis and other collaborative
content models
• Business model — consisting of Web-services-enabled business models, mashup/remix
applications, long-tail economics, advertising and other monetization models

Social Applications
Definition: Whereas social software is about the tools that encourage, capture and organize
open and free-form interactions among community participants, social applications are instances of social software tools and capabilities implemented to target specific and defined collaborative business challenges.
Examples of rapidly emerging horizontal social applications include idea exchanges,
crowd sourcing, prediction marketplaces, community-enabled self-service, customer-driven
product and service design, and long-lived and dynamic documentation. Existing process-centric
applications will continue to add in social capabilities, but social applications focus on delivering
collaboration-centric applications targeted at harnessing collective intelligence to address
challenges and opportunities that are fundamentally social in nature.

Apeer not only fits these descriptions – but in some cases we even extend them.  I posit that we are the epitome of participation – and we make it real time and synchronous.  And what better way to communicate in a collaboration-centric manner than to be able to exchange, play and listen to rich media files at the same time, in the same window.  It’s one thing to be able to post something to a site and hope that someone someday sees or hears it, but taking it to the next level of being able to see and hear it AT THE SAME time is in my opinion the true essence of communicating in a collaborative manner.

So, where do we fit?  Everywhere. And anywhere.  Can’t wait to get out there.

Apeer User Group Now Online

One of our early adopters has started an online Apeer User Group as a forum for sharing experiences, asking questions and discovering how other people are using Apeer.  The group is independent of Apeer, Inc. and we’re looking forward to seeing where it goes.  We will monitor the site to assist in answering questions about functionality and features, but the bulk of the content and conversation will be user generated.  Visit here http://www.apeerusers.com/ to join the group and get into the conversation.

Personalize it!

The Me button in the upper left-hand corner of the Apeer window is where you can change your status, access your Apeer account, log out of all sessions, or exit Apeer.

You can simply and easily personalize your Apeer user identity by dragging and dropping a photo or image onto the Me button. This image will now be associated with your account and will display at the bottom of the session bar for everyone you are connected with in an Apeer session.

Apeer Professional Tip #1

Visual Communication

As children, we were taught that words and pictures are not equal. Although we gain meaning from each, reading seemed to be far more valued than the ability to interpret pictures. However, we’ve also learned from our attempts to create meaningful presentations and communiques in our professional lives that a picture can be worth a thousand words.

As technology has progressed, we have all become more and more reliant on visuals in our daily communications. Charts and graphs, the workhorses of most presentations, show the relationships among variables and enable viewers to grasp complex data at a glance. Web sites and marketing materials without photos or graphics are unacceptable by current audience expectations. Even in real life, courtroom attorneys who communicate and persuade by speaking, are turning to photos and graphics using 3D animation and digital images as demonstrative evidence to influence jurors.

Many of the most common modes of communication support little or no visual content, including the telephone call, email and instant messaging. Video phones never made it to the main stream (and all of us who have worked “jammie jobs” are eternally grateful for that), and the ability to include images in email or IM is based on attachments or uploads.

These methods lack real-time, synchronous image sharing capabilities.  When we attach an image we hope that it gets through security settings and firewalls and that the person we send it to actually looks at it. When we post images to website and send people there to look at them, we’re never really sure that we’re both looking at exactly the same thing.

But, as Bob Dylan so profoundly sang, the times they are a-changin’.

Our beta customers are telling us that the ability Apeer provides to make a direct connection in an online workspace with a group of people to see images AT THE SAME TIME, simply changes everything.  Apeer brings visuals into the conversation in a way that up until now has only happened when you were in the same room – when you could say, “hey, look at this” or “is this what you mean?” – and let the conversation flow in an ad hoc manner.

Apeer makes visual communication a reality – with images, video AND audio.  It’s a whole new world.

Did you get my email?

This seems to be a question we hear over and over in our communication.  Have you ever sat at your computer repeatedly clicking the send and receive button, while someone on the other end of a phone call is repeatedly asking, “Did you get it yet?”

Using email to share media files with others makes about as much sense as having meetings just for the sake of meeting. Poorly planned or facilitated meetings frequently fail to meet the objectives or expectations of the participants. As a document sharing method, email is equally disappointing.

We’ve all had the experience of sending someone an email attachment only to have them say they didn’t get it or that they can’t open it. Not to mention that there is no way to be sure that when they do get it, that they are actually looking at the same file you are – not the one you sent as an attachment last week.

Today’s group collaboration tools permit more opportunities to meet the requirements of the creative process and facilitate project management.   With Apeer, when you are actually connected to someone in an online collaboration session you can be viewing and commenting on the same file, in real time – and know for sure that the person you’re communicating with is looking at the same thing.  That’s something you could never do using email.