Bantam Live

Chunky Nowness sounds like a Saturday morning TV ad for a candy bar appealing to a kid. And perhaps the silly sounding term we fused together isn't that far off in describing the live, real-time web that appeals to users who consume sweet nuggets of information. In a TechCruch post entitled "Jump Into The Stream" Erick Schonfeld writes about the shift to an increasingly streaming web. "The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness," writes Schonfeld. Nowness. Gotta love it. Not radically new and said before, but it just seems so perfect right... now. John Borthwick from Betaworks, referenced in the TechCrunch post, "has identified the real-time Web as a key investment opportunity" with a new metaphor emerging in the consideration of streams vs. pages. In a link to Borthwick's excellent post, "Distribution ... now," we find a cogent case for this new way of thinking, which also led us to discover a related post wherein Borthwick writes, "What is chunky content? It is bite sized, it is discrete and modular, it is quick to understand because it has borders."

The chunky nowness in the real-time, aggregated, and filtered streams of Bantam for business teams is a core attribute of our social CRM system. The streams that cascade throughout different sections in Bantam Live import chunky bites of real-time content for and among a business team. Internally it's a "workstream" among the business team on their dashboards, in contact records, and workflow modules. Externally the content from individual Bantam users disperse to partners, customers, and social connections and merge into the waterfalls of chunky content that flow in the realms of Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and newly forming rivers of syndicated content that embody the collective stream of electronic consciousness. ...Get chunked now, kids!

UPDATE, JUNE 19th: Bantam has been chosen by TechCrunch to appear onstage at their Real-Time Stream Crunchup event with August Capital on July 10th to demo Bantam Live. This event, taking place at the historic Fox Theatre in Redwood City, will mark the public-beta launch of Bantam Live.