So here is the question… at what point does a member list become a community or does it ever?

Our openBC community has a strong voice and some pretty clear opinions and it is vital and growing and I get a lot of feedback.

This has left me musing though on what is takes to create a new community?

Is there for instance an MSN community or are there just MSN users?

Is the face book a community or is it many groups of users?

I know what it took to kick off the openBC community and I know how much effort is required to maintain and grow openBC.

I have read a lot about communities and their constituents and I have many lessons learned (even recent ones) about what to do and not do.

Still the actually point at which a group of users becomes a community is a question that is currently occupying my mind and so I have decided to launch a research project into this area.

I am looking for a panel of international experts in the field of community so if you know someone who may be interesting to involve please put them in touch as I want to answer this question in order to serve our communities better.

Like almost every other company openBC employs interns. In our sales as well as our internationalisation and marketing & communication department (where I work ) we like to work with interns from different countries and we are constantly looking for university students who would like to get a 6-month insight into the every day work life at openBC.

We try to treat our interns fair. When we heard about the initiative “Fair Company” by the magazine “Karriere” (career) and read through their requirements we noticed that they align with the rules we have set up for ourselves.

So we applied and now openBC is officially entitled to wear the label “Fair Company”.  Being a “fair company” means following 5 Rules:

* Do not substitute full-time jobs with interns, trainees, etc.
* Do not put off university graduates, who have actually applied for a job, with a internship
* Do not allure interns with the vague prospect of a following full-time-job
* Do offer internships mainly for professional orientation
* Pay interns adequately

There is a chance that we might actually offer a vacant job to an intern. But there’s no guarantee. What we guarantee is an interesting and multifaceted work and a very nice team.  Applications welcome!

There is a foot of snow on the ground already in Appenzell and whilst drinking my second hot chocholate for the day I came across an email from my friend Phil which I have to say is one of the funniest I have seen in a while and considerably brightened my day and reminds me of many times I have had similar experiences so tenjewberrymuds and please excuse any political incorrectness

One of my passions is transforming situations for people in a philanthropic way and I have been a supported of The Hunger Project for many years so it is great to see some of our openBC community forming a foundation Trestle Group Foundation that has similarly aligned goals.

The 2005 openBC market survey has now begun. The survey looks at networking, examining many areas including technical devices, the software involved and the use they have for contact management. Internet communications and their importance for relationship management will also be explored, together with questions about the importance of networking on- and offline and the reasons why we use online networking platforms.

We always strive to maintain a user focus, so we want to ask the openBC users how satisfied they are with the openBC features and the extent of the user friendliness.

We would like to make it easier for you to take part in the study, so there are now three chances to take part:

1. Follow this link to the study: http://www.fittkaumaass.com/openbc/en.html
2. Follow the link found in the "News about openBC" found on openBC members personal homepage,
3. Watch your openBC personal homepage for an invitation to take part.

The survey will run until the middle of January 2006 and there is also a chance to win a year’s free premium membership!

Back again after much travel and recommitting to blogging regularly!

One of the challenges of openBC that I am in charge of now is product development and here we have some very interesting issues.

We have an enormous list of new features that we are working on many of which are  based on requests  from users and  many that we have researched and some that we think are just plain cool.

Now over the weekend we had an example of where we responded to impetus from many users and from our team as a preparation for a really big set of new features.

We renamed Forums to Groups something that we though was a minor change and that we needed to do in order to prepare the way for a host of new features to improve the existing system of forums.

We also checked to see that the industry standard in naming is groups. We also tried to send out a warning mail to our moderators.

And it all went, as the English say, pear shaped. Meaning that this small change caused a lot of unhappiness primarily I suspect because we did not communicate well why we are doing it and we did not involve people as fully as we should.

Mea Culpa

So how do we fix this in the future?

Well one thing I know is that the front line of user communication is our support team (and to some lesser degree this blog).  So from now on our support team leader Maren is going to have final approval on the release of new features and changes to the site, with the exception of fixes that affect site up-time and database performance. (Lars is now mourning his ability to ask for new things to be done right away. )

One thing that will not change is our pace of development as we want to deliver more and more new functionality while at the same time seamlessly integrating that functionality wherever possible.

There is a constant battle though for development time and till now my focus has been to improve the throughput of our development team by removing distractions such as their having to many requests for tasks from the various divisions of the company.

Having focused on that for the past two months I am now going to work on making the delivery of new features more comfortable for everyone with both users involvement and also the creation of help text for new features ahead of the release date.

In a nut shell the  ongoing challenge is to balance our development resources with our impetus to improve the platform while getting our users more involved in the process.

So I also intend to use this blog to get feedback on new features and on features people would like to see.

So I guess at the risk of being inundated your suggestions are welcome and please bear in mind that we cannot respond everything people suggest we do. (especially some of the more colorful suggestions we received in the complaints box over the weekend those I am not going to try )

Bill

openBC sponsored this year SIME’05 Event in Stockholm. If you haven’t been there, you missed a fantastic earning and networking event. And by accident it turned out to be a big openBC country managers meeting. Mahesh did a fantastic speech about the future of marketing online. Nic contributed on mobile business in Asia and Bill attended the closing panel of the event.

Martin Varsavsky spoke about his continuous fights against telecom monopolies and why 3G sucks. Maybe the best speech on this conference. He officially launched his new company FON which he founded by using openBC. I encourage you all the take a look at the project and to participate.

Andrew McLaughlin from Google explained why Google is not evil and will dominate the world in a good (i think scary) way.  One of the brightest and fastest minds at Google.

A big learning for me was the presentation from Annette Saarinen who won 2 SIME Awards for the great website Habbo Hotel.

A big thank you from me to our friend Ola, putting this great event together and supported us in so many ways.

I had the great pleasure of meeting with Nigel and Chris who have set up a very cool new networking event in Vienna called Vienna hub which is operating in the true spirit of open networking which openBC is keen to support globally.

Thomas from Ecademy was also there and we had a very entertaining evening violently AGREEING about network philosophies and the power of give – give networking.

I also heard that people are rumoring that Ecademy and openBC are going to merge and while I have nothing to communicate on that topic and I can say that Thomas and I agreed to do a joint event in the near future in England and that we may do others as well as Vienna Hub was a great success  ( although neither of us planned it )

Today I am in Sweden at the Fabulous SIME 05 run by Ola and I have to say I am right at home here with keynotes by Mahesh and Lars and moderation by Bob

I am looking forward to some very interesting talks and networking this evening so there might be some more gossip tomorrow.

we are very happy to announce a Series A financing round lead by Wellington Partners and our existing Business Angels. Find more infos here

We changed our company tag line from “We’re networking people” to “Get together – wherever you are”.

Why? Did our marketing department get bored one day with the old one? Actually we involved the entire company in the process of distillign the vision  of openBC.

We are focussed on being user orientated and with this message we feel we are able to better explain the value we are offering to our members. The new tag line is directed toward whats in it for you rather than being a technically clever play on words. Our  core values have always revolved around people rather than technology so we felt it was time that our motto refelcted more of the warmth our team feels and that the motto would focus on what is really important which is getting people together across the world.

Bringing people together. That is our mission: Online networking is about building trust to bridge the chasms of culture, language and distance. Allowing you to connect with and then get together with people you know, people you knew and people you don’t yet know in a secure enviroment.

Nearly every major online networking site can now see the value in an open and searchable index of all or most of thier members. To effectivly bring people togehter you need more than the feature “add me as a contact” or “forward a request”, with openBC we provide a whole range of tools and products like Forums/Groups where you can share information on a variety of topics and exchange information with experts. We provide search agents that can alert you when someone you are looking for joins the platform. We have a matchmaking tool, a secure way to exchange contact information to allow you to always stay in touch with your contacts most up to date adress etc. We provide a comprehensive tool to set up events with very sophisticated funtions that allow you to handle events of any size and we provide openBC official events where you can be sure that you will meet interesting people and have a great time and it is the abiltiy to do events that sets openBC apart. We see a time when no matter where you are you will be able to get together with liek minded business people to further you aspirations. Right now if you fly into any major city in Europe there is a good chance you could find a gathering to attend and we want to make this a reality globally.

In addition to what we have developed we are working on more and more features – our latest development list has over 300 major features and functions – and from the very beginning what have we been seeking to provide? We have always sought to provide benefits to our members that focuss on bringining people together and all that you see on the site is related to this goal of bringing people together wherever they are.

wherever you are. This is the second part of our comapnies soul and it expresses our understanding of global networking: It doesn’t matter if you are in Madrid, Spain, Guanzhou, China or in Dehli, India, your next business lead is online and your contacts are just a click away. Online networking brings effectivly a speed advantage to all other networking activities. As we all know that the world is flat we all face global competition, at the same time 80% of all business activities are national and people prefer to network in their mother language this is why we have so many languages and this is why we are increasing our physical presence and event around the world so that for you we will always be around the corner with a local in your country. Right now we have 18 managed countries and we have ambassadors in many more and over 2000 events per month are manged by the platform.  And there is more to come. Whereever should also means freedom of access/devices. We were the first networking site to offer mobile access. Our site is optimizied for over 200 devices already and we will continue efforts in this area.

So tell me what do you think about our new slogan?  I Look forward to taking with you about it.

After two weeks of maternity leave I am back at the office. Thank you all for your kind comments to Bill’s post, private messages on openBC, emails, letters, sms, etc. It was absolutly overwelming to get so many responses from all over the world. The time off was absolutly amazing, our little princess is so cute and Daniela and I have had a very good start together. I am now a professional nappy changer and being apart from her for the first hours I have to say I already miss her.  Here is a little photo of Helene Laetitia

I love China and its not just because I am half  Chinese.

China is huge, diverse, exciting, ancient, new, fast, slow, delicious, hi tech and prosperous.

One cannot convey the feeling of modern China in words and I have been visiting China frequently since 1974  and so should be well placed to describe the contrasts and intricacies that make up part of the huge richness that is modern day China.

I think that with China what you focus on is what to you take away as there is just so much going on that to try to see the whole would drive you beyond reason.

My dream has always been to bring east and west closer together. In openBC I finally have the ideal platform to realise my personal quest.

I see both sides intimately and have a deeper appreciation of the challenges perhaps  because of my  mixed heritage  or perhaps because  of the time  lapse  view  I have had over the years .

In either case what is important to me is the furthering of cultural understanding and thereby the furthering of great business and personal relationships between east and west.

So we have a fantastic JV partner and country manager in China Dr Song and he created for us launch events in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and the events were packed with both Chinese people and Western people.

We had major press coverage and I will be posting a pod cast of some of the interviews and also when we get it an AVI of the television.

What I saw was people getting together breaking the ice and starting to do business at unprecedented speed I also saw a whole lot of smiles and nods and some people (including myself) being pressed into urgent translations of what was being said. Proving that once you meet someone you can always overcome any language barrier (even if you need bablefish or some live assistance to do it)

Dr Song and his team really out did themselves with the venues and the program and we will be using their model a template for future events in China and around the world.

Maria and Udo both did and outstanding set of presentations and I will leave it to them to post more about their experiences and also about more of the attendees.

Personally I reconnected with old friends like Carol who attended our very first event in Shanghai and Hanna who I met through openBC and who I finally got to talk to in person. I also made new contacts like Weber, who is interested in the life of the entrepreneur, Allen one of the insightful journalists who interviewed me and Christopher who does international financial advice for people and firms coming to China.

The whole trip was vibrant and I cannot wait to go back and do more. I am 100% sure now that my dream of partnering East and West for the benefit of all will become a reality thanks to the members of the platform and our great partner Dr Song.

Finally a special thanks one of  Dr Song’s team Cindy without whom we really would not have had such a fantastic launch.

(Here are the pictures from all three venues)

East and West working in harmony during question time;

The openBC corporate area is divided into 2 parts: press releases, articles, success stories and general information on the company are accessible to everyone while our download material like studies and high-quality photos is exclusively available for journalists. The system is easy: You send us your press ID card and receive your password in return.

The other day we had a discussion going on: What about (amateur) journalists who run their own blog? Identification would not be a problem, they could simply send us the link to their blog.

The questions is: Are bloggers interested in PR material at all? Do they use it as a source of information, even if only occationally / in addition? Or are blogging journalists all content with RSS feeds and do not need access to any press area whatsoever?

We are going to offer an RSS feed for our press releases by the way .