Bantam Live

We've always admired what Salesforce.com has done in paving the way for the adoption of on-demand, software-as-a-service architecture across the business landscape. It seems they've evidently returned admiration for us with their pre-announcement of their forthcoming product called Chatter that targets the enterprise. To be sure, industry competitors borrow from each other and it's no secret that the "Bantam Live is Facebook for business teams" moniker has been frequently mentioned in trade media and in tweets, and we tip our hat to Mr. Zuckerberg. Indeed, Facebook gave us the idea, now implemented in Bantam Live, that if people wanted to know what was going on with their friends, then maybe workers would want to know what's going on with their coworkers' activities, ideas, productivity workflows, and data - all visible and interactive in a real-time stream.

Our view is that Salesforce is following our lead in the fusion of people/apps/content that we've pioneered with Bantam Live. It's quite validating. A brief history...

> July 10th, 2009: at the first TechCrunch Real-time Conference event, Salesforce.com and Bantam Live give back-to-back presentations from the stage of the Fox Theatre in Redwood City. Salesforce gave a corporate presentation and Bantam Live launched the public-beta version of its unique online product that fuses people, content, and application data with a real-time stream and integrates to social networks like Twitter. We even showed a social CRM demo with a lead-generation workflow, importing contact and content from Twitter. TechCrunch entitled its post of Bantam Live "The Ultimate Social, Real-time CRM" and ReadWriteWeb had said, "Bantam Live is part enterprise Twitter, part CRM, and part Facebook for business teams."

> July 11th - August, 2009: A swarm of Salesforce product managers and developers register with and use Bantam Live.

> November 20, 2009: at the second TechCrunch Real-time Conference, Salesforce will promote its pre-announcement this week of Chatter. Salesforce's description of Chatter is a product remarkably similar to what Bantam Live beta-launched back on July 10th, which fuses people, apps, content, and application data.

Bantam Live - uniquely in this industry - has blended the multiple apps of microblogging, online collaboration, social CRM, project management, document sharing, social network integration, etc., all of which are parsed and assembled into data objects and fully integrated in the real-time stream. If you want to get a glimpse of what Salesforce's Chatter might one day do for the enterprise, sign on today to see who they're following in the SMB space. We launch commercially with paid-subscription plans in January with new modules, features, and highly attractive pricing.

In the SMB space, we look forward to competing with Salesforce in 2010. Stay tuned.

Introducing the sweet treat of iPhone and Blackberry optimized access. Now you can thumb through your team's evil activity stream while the kids scurry about the neighborhood for sugar. You can also post creepy status updates to coworkers, access freaky contacts, view horrible tasks, read spooky notes, see scary events, and look up hellish projects and killed deals. Happy Halloween!

Today we started to add mobile access to the iPhone and other devices like the Blackberry, and we began with the all-important activity stream. Above is a sneak peak preview (of our own account), though we're not yet finished.

Bantam Live will soon be sporting a new brand identity in a redesigned marketing site and it'll include a new logo. When you're in startup phase and racing around to get work done and appear at various events, there's never enough time to take care of the front end brand, yet we're finally getting to it and it's important. While we'll redesign a much needed front-end marketing site by year end, we're happy to give you a glimpse of our new logo that will be appearing on it, the colors of which might be adjusted, particularly as we adjust some colors in the the app.

As we've written, "Bantam" as a brand represents a product that is "compact and powerful." We think this logo, with a certain solid but youthful, speedy verve to it (Bantam also means feisty and strong) is a good match for our product and, we dare say, the people who use it for productivity benefits to gain a competitive edge.

In Bantam Live, a user can search Twitter and find new prospects and partners for biz-dev and sales purposes. Importing a new contact profile into Bantam from Twitter is just a click and you can even assign a task, share this activity with your team, and respond to this new contact via Twitter. We'll soon be improving the interface of this "social CRM" Twitter-integration functionality, but you can begin right now on finding and engaging new prospects on Twitter for lead generation and business development purposes. Sign up here.

The new Email Dropbox feature allows you to attach and store emails to contacts within Bantam Live. For example, if you receive an email from a contact, you can forward that email to your Email Dropbox Address and it will attach itself to the associated contact.

When sending an email to someone, you can "Bcc" this Email Dropbox Address which will also attach the email to the associated contact. If the contact name doesn't already exist in your account, Bantam Live will automatically create a new contact for you.

The kickoff session at last Friday's Real-Time Stream Crunchup (where Bantam Live launched) organized by TechCrunch featured Ron Conway and John Borthwick discussing with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington "The Real-Time Opportunity" from entrepreneur and investor perspectives. Ron Conway (seated in the middle in pic) of Baseline Ventures was a seed investor in Google and, literally, about 500 other startups (recently including one of our favorites, CoTweet) and John Borthwick (seated at right) CEO of Betaworks, has significant investment positions in a host of real-time players, including Twitter.

Ron Conway spoke of building a new industry around this relevant "spontaneously developed content" and two of his "Top 10 Monetization Opportunities" in the real-time stream are "lead generation" and "CRM."  John Borthwick, when asked about just what the real-time web is, said, "In my mind there's this collision between synchronous real-time data streams and social interactions that is creating something fundamentally different." When asked what's the most valuable data passed around in these real-time streams, Borthwick replied, "I think that the social relationships is the most valuable piece of data that relates to the stream." ...These words by Messrs. Conway and Borthwick were music to our ears.

In Bantam Live the real-time stream can capture content from other other 3rd-party streams such as Twitter. For instance, in Bantam a user can search Twitter, import a new contact with one click, initiate task workflows with team members to engage this new contact, converse with the new contact for various CRM purposes, and maintain all annotations and live feeds of this person from a single contact page in Bantam Live. All of this activity cascades in the real-time stream of the Bantam Live dashboard, where team members interact. For lead generation and CRM, Bantam Live makes the filtered and captured "spontaneous content" of Twitter transformative and valuable for sales and biz-dev people. Thar's gold in them thar tweets!  ...Update: See a video demo of this.

- photo credit: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com

Analogy: Hunter-Gatherer societies have mostly faded from the scene of food sustenance with the advent of the agricultural revolution, but the hunter-gatherers in business teams who forage for prospects, seek partners, and hunt for deals working in entrepreneurial ventures, small businesses, and nimble business units of larger companies are alive and well in the jungle of the market economy. The hunter-gather social structure remains intact for business teams. These hunter-gatherer types - sales/biz dev people, startup entrepreneurs, small business managers - are the prototypical customers of Bantam Live, and they're distinct from the social CRM "farmers" of big advertising and public relations departments in larger companies who cultivate a brand and tend to the existing customers by monitoring and responding to chatter in the Twittersphere. Bantam Live is for hunter-gatherers and the social CRM applications from a range of other vendors pursuing brand monitoring and customer service functionality are for the farmers. Both of these types of social CRM apps have great value in the increasingly broad spectrum of social CRM.

The construct of this analogy is set against the backdrop of the emergent term of "social CRM" and a blog post on TechCrunch by PR/social media whiz, Brian Solis. I replied to his excellent post he contributed to TechCrunch yesterday about Virgin America's use of Twitter - and Brian responded in kind to my reply. The community of vendors, analysts, writers, and pundits are all trying to define this market, but what we find fascinating is that the truly "social" element of CRM exists more with the hunter-gatherers engaging in personal business relationships than it does with the farmers fleetingly engaging in transactional ones. Read Brian's post on TechCrunch and scroll down to see my reply; here are some teaser nuggets in my reply:

"...I dare say that deeper social "relationships" (in the human bonding sense of the term) between two people will increasingly flourish in small businesses (without the restrictions of the large enterprise) in the sales and biz-dev end of the social CRM spectrum, more so than in the ephemeral and transactional nature of a customer service relationship with a brand and its on-duty rep...."

"...I believe it will turn out that the sales and biz-dev end of the social CRM spectrum is the most richly social of all. Thar's gold in them thar tweets..."