Technologies for Empowered Employees

CMSWire wrote an interesting article about the "Top 16 Technologies for Empowered Employees" that were featured by forrester and placed in their famous hype cycle.

latershare is too young ans mall yet to be listed there, but it can play a role as a tool in five of these listed technology fields:

• Business collaboration: With latershare you can solve certain business communication situations better than by sequential communication.
• File (synching and) sharing - You can attach files to latershare requests and share them with your participants group.
• Infrastructure-as-a-service - latershare runs as a web service, so you can use it without installing it on your own server.
• Innovation management/ideation platforms - Innovation / idea development is one of more than a dozen possible use cases for latershare communication.
• Productivity - Improving productivity by saving time & costs, securing originality & improving fairness is core to latershare.

All these technologies are on the rise, according to Forrester:

The first round of press coverage

The most relevant german startup sites and other publications wrote good articles about latershare:

• Article on deutsche-startups.de - "latershare: Authentische Feedbacks durch zeitversetztes Sichtbarmachen":
  http://www.deutsche-startups.de/2011/11/10/latershare-feedbacks/
• Interview on Gründerszene - "Zehn Fragen an die Macher von Latershare":
  http://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/latershare-interview
• Article on netzwertig - "latershare will typische Kommunikations-Probleme lösen":
  http://www.foerderland.de/digitale-wirtschaft/netzwertig/news/artikel/feedbackrunden-mit-zeitversetztem-veroffentlichen-latershare-will-typische-kommunikations-probleme-l/
• Article on telepolis (heise online) - "Schlankes Tool gegen Dünnbrettbohren":
  http://www.heise.de/tp/blogs/4/150715

Listings

• latershare in the crunchbase database:
  http://www.crunchbase.com/company/latershare

ZEITmagazin: The end of e-mail

In the current ZEITmagazin the article "Das Ende von @was" ("The end of something") (german; online: http://www.zeit.de/2011/45/E-Mail) predicts the end of e-mail: "The e-mail just now suffers the same fate as the letter: it is abolished."

Definitely interesting are some statistics:

"According to a study by U.S. market researcher ComScore the e-mail use in the U.S. has decreased by eight percent in 2010. In the group of 12- to 17-year-olds the exodus of 49 percent was strongest, but even the 45- to 54-year-olds emailed twelve percent less."

In times of real-time communication (e.g. voice chats or video conferences), communication in social networks and other online tools e-mail is not needed as much as before.

Representing the office use Atos CEO Thierry Breton is cited: "Our managers spend 5-20 hours per week reading and writing e-mails." E-mail is endangered and should not be considered the "best way to work and exchange".

We think that also latershare will help to reduce the number of unnecessary e-mails. For certain communication situations latershares are simply better suited. We are pleased that a prestigious publication like DIE ZEIT creates awareness for change - away from e-mail, to new forms of communication.

Update: More on Atos Email Banning on Business Insider

Today is our official latershare beta launch

After some testing with friends & family users we are proud to launch our service officially today. We welcome all new users who come via linking blogs, media websites or startup directories. We already prepared some blog messages in the last weeks to give you some background information and some ideas how we were inspired. The beginning is the most important part of the work, said Plato, among others. And starting is done.

So have a look around and enjoy the new communication possibilities that this service offers. We are glad to have you here.

The logo design contest winner

We have accomplished a logo contest on the designer platform 99designs.com and got 195 logo designs, including a few dozen really good designs.
It was not easy to choose a winning logo entry. Now we can introduce the winning logo from the designer Sky Juice:

The logo icon has several meanings:

• A speech bubble - people say something, they communicate content via latershare
• An envelope - the contents are stored in sealed envelopes
• A clock - the contents are made available delayed, at a certain time
• Distribution arrows - The content is made available simultaneously to all participants

We hope you like the new logo as well as us. Now we can start with PR and other actions.

A Meetings Ad - "Meetings - The Practical Alternative To Work"

Not new, but often true: About Meetings (found here and here):



Thanks to Alex Scrivener & Mario Sixtus for this hint via Google+.
Stig Carlsson added even more "benefits": "Practise herd mentality", "Master obstruction techniques", "Dominate your co-workers" and "Practise group indecision".

E-mail Office Life before latershare - Comic-Strip

Before latershare, when e-mail was used for gathering the feedback of multiple people, work life was full of interruptions and side effects. This cartoon tells the story ;-):

Click to enlarge

E-mail Office Life before latershare.com via stripgenerator.com

"Slow Time" Communication

Jason Fried from 37signals (author of "Getting Real" and "Rework") discusses in a CBC interview meetings vs. communicating with passive communication tools - as aggregated in this blog entry:

• "Communication doesn’t always have to be in real time. It can be in what we call “slow time.” You can post something and three hours later someone can get back to you and then four hours later someone else can get back to you. And everything will work out just fine.
  
  Slow time is “Maybe it takes two or three days to have this conversation. And we do it over periods of 15 minutes here, two minutes there, four minutes there.” And that’s fine. It doesn’t need to happen all at once. Unless it’s really, incredibly, truly urgent. (Which most things aren’t. They’re made out to be that way, but they really aren’t that important.)
  
  Meetings basically make things happen all at once. And that means you’re pulling a bunch of people off their work to have this “right now” conversation. It’s very disruptive for a bunch of people. So if they can communicate over a long period of time instead, it’s much better."

He is so right. latershare is a slow time communication type. We believe that there are alternatives to meeting communication that are better regarding time efficiency, cost savings, originality - and more to-the-point.

A new means of communication

The New Media Consortium published this interesting paragraph in their article "The Internet Is the Place":

• "It is more difficult to grasp the potential implications of forms that are not modeled on a comfortable, twentieth-century mode of communication. One such example is Twitter: Twitter users post short messages that usually have to do with whatever is happening to them at the time—whether it is intellectual, practical, social, or professional in nature—to create an ongoing log of activity across a community at the minute-by-minute level. Twitter is controversial precisely because it does not have an elder analog; it is a cousin of instant messaging, but its broadcast nature marks it as a different type of communication. Twitter has been described as fun, trivial, innovative, addictive, a waste of time, and potentially a powerful social networking tool; but its implications for teaching, learning and creative expression, if any, are not yet fully understood."

latershare also is a kind of new communication type. It is a cousin of secret ballots, but it is not actually "secret" - since who posted what is finally visible to the group - and it has quite more use cases than that. It can be used without being at the same place, with asynchronous input and synchronous output. latershare is in a way a virtual ombudsman, a different kind of mail server, a content escrow broker.

In particular, we do not know yet how latershare will be ultimately used. There are many possibilities, but we'll see which will have a resounding success. I'm curious.

The first latershare blog entry. What I'm saying? Welcome? Hello?

In the latershare.com blog I'll publish news regarding the development of this platform, inspiration, information on use cases and public latershares and responses from the environment in irregular sequence (with about 2 posts/month).

The Bertelsmann CEO Hartmut Ostrowski said at this year's dmexco: "In the future it will be possible to come out big with a small idea. Small firms have more advantages over large companies here."
That's what I think. So we are working on that now.

I wish you an enjoyable read and always good results through the use of latershare.