Google Wave

If you haven’t yet seen the Google wave video demonstration google, it is a must see for anyone interested in the future of the internet technologies.  In summary, Google wave is a new application that brings together email, instant-messaging, and document collaboration in a harmoniously, fully-interactive, real-time platform.  So what does this mean and why would it be better than the current tools we know and love; email, text messaging, online chat.

Before answering that question lets discuss a number of the features in order to better understand the tool.
 

• Wave is a real time email, text, and chat tool but it is more than that.  You can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and document.  When you type a message, drag an image, the data is instantly transmitted to the recipients character by character, image by image.
• It is a collaboration tool that extends the functionality of email, text and chat by provided a fully threaded conversation, a recorded conversation and the ability to bring people in and out of the conversation in an instant.  It also allows real time interactive document collaboration.
• It is a coherent record of the conversation which will be easily searchable.  It will provide the ability to playback or  rewind the wave to see who said what to who.
• It will allow real time language translations allowing you to have a conversation around the globe with somebody who does not speak your language.

No doubt this is just the beginning of the functionality that Google will deliver however this in itself will have major impact on how we work.  So why does it threaten to replace what we currently use.  Well, it is unlikely to replace our existing methods of communication just yet, but it will start to permeate into organisational communications over the coming few years.  It will do this because it solves a number of business needs:
 

• It will promote open communication and sharing of information
• It will create a repository of knowledge that will be more easily searchable and more enduring than our email box
• It will allow knowledge workers to more easily and better collaborate with the co-workers , partners or clients where ever they are. Imagine finalising a contract in real time rather than the much more time consuming back and forth between a lawyer, your client and the deal team.

Google wave is still in beta and whilst it is an exciting development, it is still immature and will have some time to go before people start asking you to join the wave trend.  But stay tuned.  This is an exciting technology development.

Important web trends
The web is never short of innovation and continues to change at breathtaking pace. Check out these web trends that are destined to change the way we work:
 

• Open Source.The shift away from proprietary systems to open source  will continue to grow strongly.   It is now widely accepted by governments and businesses alike.  When it comes to you next software decision you should be considering the opensource alternatives.
• Web video.  The growth in web video is exploding.  You only have to look at www. Youtube.com.au as an example of the popularity of video.  Now days integrating video into a web site is relatively easy and can be a powerful enhancement to you marketing message.  Futher, if appropriate and you are successful,  get some viral happening and you are on a winner.  There are many examples of successful video viral campaigns, but check out Fosters’ “The big Ad” and Blendtec’s “Will it blend” campaign
•  Richer web site interfaces.   Advances in plugins such as flash, Silverlight and Flex, not to mention the new HTML 5 standard, will all provide greater design flexibility and richer user experiences.
•  Business collaboration tools.  Tools that help you communicate and collaborate in a more efficient real time environment will become more wide spread.  Wikis’s and Forums are just the beginning.  Have a look at Aconex, a successful entrant into the the Australian market design specifically for the building industry.    But perhaps the one new application that will really change the way we work will be the new Google Wave.

Telstra’s 1300 Australia Virtual Rep
Loaded has just completed stage 2 of Telstra’s 1300 Australia’s web site.  There are a number of interesting features incorporated into this release.  The site is built in DNN’s latest version 5.1.   With DNN’s latest version comes a host of new improvements around performance and security but also has the added features of workflow approvals and an audit trail of changes.
Loaded to develop functionality within the web site to provided 1300 customer with online assistance around purchasing phone words.  This included a database search of possible words and numbers that a customer may choose from, providing results and suggestions.  To keep this information up to date Loaded integrated the website database to the company’s internal CRM system, Salesforce.   Using the Salesforce API, Loaded was able to provide two way synchronising of data between the web site and their CRM.
In addition, Loaded created a fully interactive multi-media virtual rep to help customer who were not so familiar with  phone words.  You can see a demonstration of the virtual rep here.