Bantam Live

We designed Bantam Live around our collective work experiences in internet ventures in the past - and what tools we want now - combined with some market research and a sense of where things are headed on the web. So what is Bantam Live? That's the burning question we've been asked by friends, pilot customers, partners, investors, the media and our mothers. Indeed, the trade media have compared Bantam to everything from Salesforce to Facebook to IBM's LotusLive to Twitter-for-business, to Yammer. Wrote ReadWriteWeb at our private-beta launch as a Winning Finalist at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, "Bantam is part enterprise Twitter, part CRM and part Facebook for teams." ...Yeah, but what is that?

We think about this question frequently. Is Bantam an online workspace for business teams? ...Yes. Is it a social media collaboration app? ...Yes. Is it an online service to individually and collaboratively build better business relationships? ...Yes. Is it a group messaging app? ...Yes. Is it a contact manager? ...Yes. Is it a task manager? ...Yes. Is it a web-based simple CRM system? ...Yes. Is it a full-on CRM system after beta? ...Yes. Is it social CRM that aggregates profiles and content and allows users to engage and monitor contacts across the web and act on workflows for sales/biz dev/marketing purposes? ...Yes. Is it a microblogging "Twitter-for-business" type of web application with native CRM fused with social media tools for entrepreneurs, small businesses and nimble business teams in larger enterprises? ...Yes. Is it easily categorized? ...No.

This question reflects the new web world we live in, where communication barriers are falling, distinctions among sales, biz dev, marketing and support are blurring, and the web tools available in apps like Bantam allow groups of people to work in much more efficient ways. We'll get better at defining Bantam Live, and it will no doubt be influenced by the way in which customers sign on to use the service when we launch soon. Suffice it to say that with the private-beta users using Bantam now in wide variety of ways, it hasn't made the answer to this question any easier. Bantam is what our customers use it for. The best we can come up with for now relates to the brand name of Bantam, a "compact and powerful" online workspace for business teams to collaborate and build business relationships across the web. ...Not sure our moms would get that, but we hope our customers do.