Bantam Live

TechCrunch article:
> "Bantam Live: The Ultimate Social, Real-Time CRM"

Photos:
> Bantam's John Rourke and Alex Turnbull demo'ing Bantam Live onstage

> See all TechCrunch event photos

There never seems to be a perfect time to publicly launch a new web application, but for us there are two reasons to launch the public beta version of Bantam Live on July 10th, 2009.

The first is that the beta version of Bantam Live is ready to be tested widely so we can get feedback on its features which will determine for us the product development plan. And of course we'll be making design tweaks and doing the inevitable bug fixes along the way. This beta version of Bantam Live is just a taste of what's to come and we're well aware of the deeper, extended features that we'll be quickly adding on based on customer feedback and requests. There's a bunch of obvious feature enhancements and new integrations we're working on right now with the social networks and we'll be adding more elementary things like email connectivity, mobile apps, advanced search, CRM customizations, analytics and other automation workflows in the future. It's a balancing act of what we know we need to develop and what our customers want and we're hopeful these interests will align during the beta period. Oh yeah, maybe we'll actually get a logo, too.

The second reason we're launching on July 10th is that we have a nice soapbox upon which to announce our launch. Actually, it's a stage... We have been selected by none other than TechCrunch to appear onstage at their "Real-Time Stream Crunchup" event held at the historic Fox Theatre in Redwood City to demo and launch Bantam Live. (Amusing: Our 5-minute presentation is followed by Salesforce's 5-minute presentation.) Being selected by TechCrunch is a capstone in our trajectory that follows Bantam Live's being selected by tech judges as a Winning Finalist at O'Reilly Media's Web 2.0 Expo last April in San Francisco, and also being named by popular vote a Winning Finalist at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston recently in June amid some other buzz. Launching at the TechCrunch Real-Time Stream Crunchup to publicly debut Bantam Live's real-time stream app for business teams follows development work that began in August of 2008.

The beta version of Bantam Live. Just a taste of what's to come.

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.

When there's an event with a title like "Rockstars of Social CRM" you know people are trying to take the lead in creating and defining an emerging space and all the power to them. We had the pleasure last week of attending this event after a day at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. It was organized and MC'd by social media writer, consultant and impresario Chris Brogan and co-hosted by Radian6 and its CEO, Marcel Lebrun. Radian6 provides a social media monitoring and analysis solution for PR and advertising professionals. It was a well done event that mixed insight with fun and featured other "rock star" guest speakers like CRM experts and authors Brent Leary and Paul Greenberg, Frank Eliason of Comcast, and Michael Thomas of the CRM Association. (Social CRM Association, anyone?)

Pictured above, Chris Brogan interviews Bantam Live's John Rourke about duck hunting at Red Sox games social media and Bantam Live during the event, because, ya know, we're all rock stars now with our control of social media, and in the future, everyone will...

How's that title for alliteration? We're sponsoring and hosting a CRM Magazine meetup at our offices in SoHo on June 18th. Entitled "The Social about Social CRM" it continues the dialogue of this white hot sector. Organized by the editors of CRM Magazine, there will be a round table discussion with Lon Safko, co-author of the Social Media Bible, Warren Sukernek of Radian6, and John Rourke of Bantam Networks. CRM Magazine publisher Bob Fernekees and editor David Myron will be on hand to moderate.

Register now for this CRM Magazine meetup at Bantam Networks.

Similar to optimizing our last press release  where we inserted trending Google search terms like 'Phish tickets' and 'Kim Kardashian cellulite photos' (for some light-hearted commentary) here's an excerpt from our latest press release issued on the anachronistic "wire service" pertaining to Bantam's being chosen as a winning finalist at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference:

Said John Rourke, CEO of Bantam Networks, "We're honored to be a winning finalist in another industry competition and to maximize publicity I'll obey the instruction of the press release builder tool on this wire service and now insert the keyword 'CRM' a few more times in the copy to improve search engine optimization."  He added, "CRM was, CRM is, CRM will be great."  Mr. Rourke then went on to copy and paste the boilerplate 'About Bantam' words below and prepared to go out to eat at Arturo's Pizza in New York's Greenwich Village. "Pepperoni and CRM,"  he concluded.

Read the June 15th full press release entitled: Web Startup that Merges "Social CRM" with "Real-Time Stream" Functionality Chosen as a Finalist Winner for TechWeb's Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Bantam Networks won its second major industry award in as many months in being chosen by popular vote to present and preview Bantam Live onstage at TechWeb's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston on June 24th. Bantam was the top voter-getter of the 15,000 votes that took three rounds for the "Final Four" startups to reach the stage in Boston. It's another nice feather in our cap after having been a finalist winner at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Franscisco in April where we launched the limited private-beta version of Bantam Live.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference is the largest worldwide conference and demonstration pavilion dedicated to exploring how Web 2.0 and social technology is dramatically changing the enterprise to make businesses more agile, efficient and adaptable in today's market.

Press Releases: TechWeb's | Bantam Networks'

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.

"Information silo" is a pejorative term in enterprise software, and it's something that everyone says must be eliminated through "connectivity" and "data integrations." Maybe it's some of the bulky, dull (gray comes to mind) enterprise software itself that ought to be eliminated. How fitting that a towering silo from a farm is the metaphor.

When we think of modern web application software, connecting lumbering silos doesn't come to mind. In Bantam Live, for instance, native integrations in various modules (with permissions) allow users to see and interact with information from within and outside their organization or workgroup and connect with people across the web, as well as third-party services. Outside is in, inside is out. It's as open and fluid as the airy design created by some of the great Modernist architects in homes with walls of glass. 

Ed Thompson is a distiguished CRM analyst at Gartner. On May 5, 2009, SiliconRepublic in an article entitled "The Future of CRM is Social, says Gartner Analyst" published this quote from him:

"Collaborative CRM, or social CRM as it is becoming known, is effectively traditional CRM attuned to a world where customers and businesses live pretty much face to face. ...In the past 10 years, less than 10% of CRM budgets were invested in the social aspect, but the rise of services such as Twitter and Facebook are hard to ignore. Traditional CRM budgets are shifting towards social CRM applications..."

As we noted in the last paragraph of a previous post, we're hesitant on labeling Bantam with "CRM" because it goes well beyond that functionality with its communication, collaboration, other apps for business teams. However, the "social CRM" aspect of Bantam does indeed reflect a significant part of what we're bringing to market, and we think some CRM players with their legacy rooted mindsets systems built for closed enterprises will be challenged to join the social future.