Connectedness and mental personal space

It is when I read stories such as this one from web worker Pamela Poole that I know we are on the right track. She writes:

My husband and I continually try to teach our clients that sending an e-mail is the best way to reach us. For the sake of our sanity and the serenity of our work/home environment, we don’t give out our phone numbers, IM addresses, or any information that would make us instantly reachable if we can avoid it. We usually can avoid it.

…

In practical terms, the only downside I see in this societal trend is the increasing expectation that you should be available to all people all the time. It’s hard enough for web workers to draw the line between the mental energy, space and time devoted to work and play without this added pressure.

We hear you, Pamela!

Erik Starck
Managing Director, GlocalReach Ltd.

Announcing collaborative partnership with Programmersheaven.com

Currently we have a closed alpha of our service running. I have been promising an open beta on this blog for quite some time but we have had a few Eureka moments over the past months that I think all startups have (and should have). So, we have been going back to the drawing board a few times, causing delays.

Therefore, I am very happy to announce a partnership with Programmersheaven.com, a global community for developers with more than 200′000 registered users. This partnership will give us access to an interesting user base in order to test and fine tune our offerings along with providing an additional revenue stream for certain web communities.

Working with niched communities such as Programmersheaven.com fits in perfectly with our vision about reach management using social slicing and semantic presence. We hope to add more communities such as them to our list of partners in the future.

You will see the fruits of this partnership after summer as Programmersheaven.com will launch a complete redesign of the website in July.

Erik Starck
Managing Director, Co-founder
GlocalReach
Contact me

Power failure

Our homepage is currently down due to a major power failure in Stockholm, where the site is hosted. Hopefully back soon.

Updated: …and, we’re back!

How to prevent this from happening in the future? Amongst other things, we plan to move our servers to an Amazon EC2 hosted solution.

Launch Silicon Valley 2008: Introducing GlocalReach

As Nicolai mentioned we’re presenting our company at the Launch Silicon Valley 2008 event in San Francisco today.

GlocalReach has been selected as one of 30 out of 266 applicants. We’re really proud to be one of the select few as there are some other startups with really exciting products in the group!

If you want to get to know us a bit better you’ve come to the right place. Here are a few blog posts you can read that tells our story.

First out is Nicolai Wadstrom, one of our co-founders and the chairman of our board, presenting himself:

I am an serial Entrepreneur, I am 35 years of age, and have been starting companies for the past 12 years, ranging from consulting companies, software companies, media companies, computer games and internet companies.

We’re building services for reach management. Managing how people reach you, that’s the core of our services. Since people today use many different ways of reaching each other it’s important to understand how the communication protocol is part of the message itself. Another important aspect of any communication technology is its emotional bandwidth.

As the price of voice communication (telephony) goes down, VoIP spam (SPIT) will be an increasing problem. Read how researcher Daniel Putz investigated different strategies for preventing SPIT here.

What about social networks? Well, our first service, ReachCards, is not a social network. At least not like Facebook, Myspace and the other giants. We believe in social slicing, being part of many social networks based on interest and social context. So, we looked at how research in evolutionary psychology points to what is commonly called Dunbar numbers. One important Dunbar number is 150, that’s the average circle of friends a person has:

The existing social networking sites and somewhat older social tools such as the address book in your mobile phone does a pretty good job of managing these 150 people. With GlocalReach, we’re trying to build the tools necessary for the outer circles, beyond the Dunbar number.

At these circles, people know you more by a role you have or a category of people you belong to. They might know you as a politician, a programmer, a neighbor, a nurse or a blogger. If you have a slashed career people will know you by many labels and roles. GlocalReach will help you manage these roles and how people reach you from the outskirts of the social whirl. That’s our place in the social network universe.

Speaking of cards, the business card is the traditional way of doing an “add to friends” in your social network. We know what adding a friend to Facebook means - the implications of doing it are built in to the service, but what does it mean when I give you my business card? What do I commit to? What do you as a receiver commit to? Here are some thoughts on the subject.

That’s a few of the things that has kept us busy the last year. Follow this blog to keep yourself updated as we move forward towards the goal of helping people manage how, when and why they can be reached.

Erik Starck
Managing Director, Co-founder GlocalReach

Visualizing communication

A very cool blog to follow is information aestethics. It’s a blog about visualizing information so that humans can understand it or perhaps see patterns or new insights in it.

They point me to some graphics generated by an application running on a Symbian phone that monitors how the user uses the phone. A bit more interesting than your typical “latest calls”-list, don’t you think?

Erik Starck
Managing Director, Co-founder
GlocalReach

Going to Launch: Silicon Valley

I will go to Launch: Silicon Valley next week to present GlocalReach and the ReachCards service, will be interesting to get some feedback by Guy Kawasaki and the other VC’s at the event. As I often say to people around me; “each experience will make you wiser, no matter how it goes”.

We have been a bit quiet over here for awhile, but we have been busy working on the service and our next funding round that we are hoping to close real soon.

Hope to have some more news soon, now back to preparing presentations for next week.

Cheers

Nicolai Wadstrom,
GlocalReach
Co-founder

My name is Erik and I am an addict

Yes, I admit. I have an addiction.

I don’t think it’s harmful. In fact, it might even be beneficial to me. But it takes up a lot of my time, almost the entire day.

I think I started to develop the addiction about 12-13 years ago, but it wasn’t until maybe 4 or 5 years ago that it fully started to bloom.

So what kind of poisonous substance is it that I have let take control of my life?

No, it’s not something chemical and it’s no poison. The addiction is for ideas. Other people’s thoughts. Other people’s insights.

Bloglines, Google, Jaiku, Twitter, email, Twine, even good old fashioned books… they are the ones feeding me so that I can satisfy the addiction but they are not the producers, only the middle man.

No, the real source of my addiction is you, dear reader. It’s your thoughts, your ideas, your insights that keeps my addiction alive. I just can’t get enough of it. I want more, more, more!

My name is Erik. I am the CEO of GlocalReach and, yes, I am an addict.

And I love it!

Erik Starck
Managing Director, Co-founder

Guard your attention and increase the signal to noise

Seth Godin is one of my favourite bloggers (and authors). Today he writes about signal to noise and the increasing flow of incoming messages and information in our attention inbox:

Lately, I’m feeling noise creep.

Lately, the noise seems to be increasing and the signal is fading in comparison. Too much spam, too many posts, too little insight leaking through

Our Reach Management platform, ReachCards, is about picking out that signal from the noise. It’s basically a relevance filter. We want to be the guardians of your attention.

Help us beta-test the service by signing up at our front page.

Erik Starck
Managing Director, Co-founder

The protocol is the message

Marshall McLuhan was one of the first to study mass media as a cultural phenomenon. He coined the phrase “the medium is the message” and divided different medias into hot and cool medias depending on the participation level of the person consuming the media:

“Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue.”

What is the web 2.0, social media (as opposed to the mass media of McLuhan) equivalent? Maybe it’s in how people use different protocols of communication for different purposes?

Maybe the protocol is the message?

We call people for another reason than we email them or send them an SMS. The act of making a phone call bears a meaning in itself.

An indication of this is how soon people expect a reply for the different protocols. The blog Future Mobile reports:

84% of users expect a SMS response in five minutes according to an online survey by 160 Characters that looked at how different messaging platforms elicit differing response times.

Tomi Ahonen on Communities Dominates Brands on the same survey:

By contrast about half of users of e-mail expect a reply within about a day.

Techdirt adds a social behaviour aspect, arguing that people even wait for responding to email on purpose to give the impression of being more busy than they really are:

Last year, we noted a study that said many people purposely responded to emails fashionably late at work, because replying to quickly implied you didn’t have too much work to do. However, it appears the situation may be somewhat different when it comes to instant messaging and SMS text messages.

Fascinating. There’s definitely more to a message than meets the eye.

Also read my old post on emotional bandwidth.

…and while we’re on the subject, here’s a collection of “break up SMS” such as:

Roses are red, violets are… ah the hell with it. Get your crap and get out

77 characters.

Erik Starck
Managing Director, Co-founder

This is me…

My name is Nicolai Wadstrom, I have not been as active on the GlocalReach blog as my colleague Erik, but this as a good time as any to change that!

About me; I am one of the co-founders of GlocalReach Ltd. I am an serial Entrepreneur, I am 35 years of age, and have been starting companies for the past 12 years, ranging from consulting companies, software companies, media companies, computer games and internet companies. I have a fair bit of Telco experience, and have done some management consultancy to help other startups, and larger organizations in between, I have been a CEO, a CTO and have had few different hats through-out the past 12 years, now I try to do more, and have less hats (although I am officially a director in GlocalReach!).

GlocalReach story
The GlocalReach story actually started a bit more than 2 years ago, when I started thinking that Voice over IP can not be about cheap calls, it must be something else and there must be room for lots of innovation in this space.Since I hired Erik on the R&D team of my software company many years ago, I knew that this is a guy I want to work with in the future, and we had been talking about trying to get together to form a new startup for a while, so after me and Erik having had numerous sessions about the VoIP space and what spaces are still open for entry by a new startup when voice converge into just another Internet communication’s medium, we starting working on GlocalReach. We also brought along a business partner that I have been working on with a number of different startup companies the past few years, and in January 2007 Glocalreach was formed. Since then we have been working hard to build this service, get all the infrastructure components in place to handle Voice and messaging, and lot’s of other magic. We have mostly funded GlocalReach with our own money this far.

Today we have an Alpha version of our service that we think will be a very interesting convergence between Internet communication and presence. Presence in the world of Mobile phones and IM is basically available or not available, but the world is not that simple, I can honestly say that I will always be available for certain calls, but at the same time I will almost always not be available for certain other calls. My presence need to be more related to what-ever context I am in at that moment, it need to relate to where I am, what I am doing, how I am feeling, and it need to map that to other web properties.
A buzzword for this might be Semantic Presence (which was Jeff Pulver’s called it when I tried to describe our vision for him the other week), we call it Reach Management, or Attention Control (well, we are still working on the name!). Right now we are working on a Series A funding, and preparing for a Beta launch of the service.

Also, while I am at it.. We are expanding, if you are an excellent interaction designer or developer (Java and Seam are the name of “our game”) that want to be part of creating the next generation of Internet services, where presence goes beyond IM and Twitter, and where you have a greater control of how your attention and how you are reached, please do contact me or Erik.

Cheers,
Nicolai Wadstrom,
GlocalReach
Co-founder