Trends in social commerce

I enjoyed presenting Social Commerce Trends to Social DevCamp Chicago last week to an awesome roomful of audience.

here is the presentation as I promised to share! Let me know any other trends, companies shaping social commerce.

Trends in social commerce

View more presentations from PayPalX Developer Network.

First 25 hour summary of IOSDevCamp - awesome community innovation!!!

I am very thrilled to bring a quick summary of the awesome energy and excitement of Iphone and Ipad developers from IOSDevCamp, a project my team has been involved to foster community driven innovation.

Iosdevcamp is the 5th in a row of IphoneDevcamps organized by a non-profit group of four community leaders - Raven Zachery, Dom Sagella, Christopher and Whurley. It is hosted at PayPal campus (where I proudly work) this weekend Aug 20-22.

300 developers are charged with amazing ideas, forming teams and working hard to build 40+ awesome applications with 55 hours to launch tomorrow night.

Here is a montage of the kickoff from friday night kickoff!




Today I hosted a BlogTalkRadio show with Raven Zachery of IOSDevCamp, Naveed Anwar and Edwin Aoki of PayPal and met a flow of developers who stopped by and shared awesome ideas they were working on! Daniel Bru who is the most inspiring teenager I've met ustreamed the show live too!




Come join us tomorrow (Sunday Aug 22nd) 2 to 4pm as the IOSDevCamp opens the door for friends and family to join us for free to watch and support the launch of the awesome applications to show a sneak peak into awesome future apps and startups in the mobile world!!!


If you are far away, you can watch the live stream on the iosdevcamp.org site or watch the twitter stream here.

Team Power and F8 Virality at Facebook Meetup June2010

Last night was my 33rd Bay Area Facebook meetup event since July 2007 and I am amazed at the transition of F8 platform and was thinking about the facebook team people who have shaped it and changed it and my amazing volunteer team who run this group for the last 3 yrs.

Hiten Shah of Buzz metrics talked about metrics and people came from everywhere to hear him and plan how to measure and tweak their apps for growth. Steve Meretzky and Matthew Davie of Playdom shared their experience on creating viral play and monetization for games.

See John Lin's ustream of the evening:



As I sat and watched this intense group of 120 geeks, I realized how Facebook has come from starting with unlimited notifications, to restricting notifications (quoting Zombies app) to recently dropping notifications. FBML to FQL to Facebook Connect to now HTML for fb apps.
Ben Ling lead the platform to scale it first, then Dave Morin scaled Facebook Connect and Josh Elman went on connect it to every ecosystem - IBM, Adobe and everywhere on the Web.

At the facebook meetup, we started with Lawrence Sinclair, and then came Shuchi Rana, and Abbas Zaidi. Then Perrine Crampton brought her personality to the group and made sure we organized the meetup with google docs and John Lin became the silent force to ustream regularly every month. Now we have Robert Schwentker who brought his unique touch with indepth content and has made last night a huge success.

I am thankful for my team, their dedication, creativity and love of geek developer energy which bonds us all. Thanks for all your hard work!

Social Media Strategies Conference Day 1 summary (includes my social commerce panel video)

I attended Social Media Strategies conference in Santa Clara and started blogging live select sessions I get to attend and the nuggets of wisdom I find worth sharing!

11am Keynote: The True Drivers of a Successful Social Media Strategy by Francois Gossieaux @fgossieaux

1. Be real people, passionate with reciprocity helps companies on socialmedia.

50% of community members are active lurkers. Companies treat their facebook fan page as coupon centers. Success comes when the people engaging on social media are human. Someone in audience put it well "It is the difference between being and doing". So the lesson is to be real and engage with your customers.

2. Turning Business Process to Social Process

Social Media can get your employees to help in areas that was not in their original job responsibility, this is when your have a business process becoming a social process.

I can relate to this as I focus on events and social media for PayPal from their Developer Network whose charter is to foster community driven innovation. I get help from multiple teams inside PayPal who are excited to participate in events to meet developers wherever they are and get feedback and help them disrupt payments industry with their innovation. I see a fundamental shift in our internal process as I hear from across our global offices to engage with us with local events and for social media outreach.

3. Department that are easy to become social enabled

Many departments are adopting social media:

• Customer Support
• Employee Communication
• Lead Gen
• Market Research
• Marketing Campaigns
• Product development
  

This is because they engage with customers in some form and are ready to speed that engagement via social media.

Two departments that the speaker hasn't seen adopt social are financial dept to social because they are focused on corporate entity, not customers directly.

1pm: New Paradigm in Social Commerce (my panel)

I moderated this panel and the panelists were:

Laura Peile,head of mobile, PayPal
Katie McMahon , SoundLoud
James Dellisanti CEO of ilikelist
Gordon Liametz ,CEO, Revenue Performance
(Thanks to Mary Vincent for the entire panel video)




The panelists started out by describing social commerce as -

1. shopping with friends,
2. customer reviews from trusted social graph that influences purchase,
3. bringing customers from top of the sales funnel where they go look for comparison shopping to a friend referring a product to buy online similar to an offline social setting and
4. focusing on reviews and community to influence positive referral of your product.

Nuggets I got from this panel from panelists and audience questions:

• Audience were hungry to learn about real experience in making social commerce work for them as entreprenuers, startups and businesses.
• Mobile Commerce is overlapping with social commerce and there is so much room for innovation.
• Social media feeds are about people wanting to create an inclusion experience for their friends who are not with them at a game or a store , and is the core of social commerce recommendation
• Privacy is important, people will want to each share certain type of information.
• Identity of who is making the word of mouth referral is key to its value to a friend, so facebook with its social graph makes it very powerful for social commerce
• Interesting possibilities of social commerce was brought out, one was for a lady to share a picture of her dress from a store to get friend's recommendation as she tries out new clothes from Macys (I'd like this one)
• Lot of discussion about negative feedback in a community setting and how to differentiate the intention of the user, how to distill the feedback into your product, how to respond to negative comments, how to manage the balance to negative comments

Other Observations from the conference:

I met a variety of interesting people and some products.

1. Position2 is a new Brand monitoring tool, looks new fresh UI. I hope to check it out and write further.

2. Met many of the local valley influencers - Shirley Lin from APWT Women in tech group, Mary Vincent of Green Strategy/Greenappstore, several followups from Santa Clara Alum social media panel at PayPal, several cool social media strategy types each with different flavor of experience and expertise.

3. Ed Terpening of WellsFargo,

4. Richard Brewer Hayes of Ebay, awesome speaker and blogger.

5. Ofcourse I met couple interesting people who wanted to switch to PayPal, gave feedback about PayPal APIs and some who had attended Innovate09.

Awesome work by Daya and Rashmi of WebGuild with another successful show. Nice detail on a sit down lunch, excellent speaker, good workshops, crowd, mixer and care for detail on content.

I look forward to Day2. I am participating in a social media metrics panel at 2pm. Hope to see you there!

Tweet away, the conf hashtag is #smconference or some are using #sms

A Cone of Ice Cream leads to Community Innovation, How Sweet!

Friday night I joined StartupWeekend mixer at PayPal to pickup a cone of icecream from @treatbot (yes a tweeting ice cream truck).

I had been privileged to work with the StartupWeekend team to host them at PayPal campus and was ready for icecream, and ready for 150 geeks to come together brainstorm ideas, form teams and build and launch cool apps within the weekend.

Naturally, I asked Ryan who was at the icecream truck why he was asking for cash and not taking PayPal. He said he was waiting for the Ipad with 3G and wanted a point of sale app to accept Payment and would love it to be PayPal. What I did next led to a cascade of activities and here I am!


What did I do, I did what comes to me naturally!

I tweeted!


PayPal has a team of people who had volunteered to support the event on campus and got excited by the energy and decided to build their own app and were brainstorming ideas.

They saw the tweet and decided to build it. If a customer wanted it that is what they would build!

Here I am sitting at the final day demos. The PayPad was born here and here's the demo.

The team came together, learned Ipad programming, and built and thought through how to get a storefront for a customer on the Ipad.

Here's to you @treatbot!!! Are you ready to beta this?

IpadDevCamp takes over my world

I have been lucky to be working with the organizers of the IPadDevCamp as they planned to bring 400 awesome developers to PayPal campus for a community driven innovation this weekend.

We got started 6 weeks back and I spent time building out the PayPal team supporting this event optimized to get our campus to support 1000 concurrent wifi connections, to make 400 geeks feel comfortable for hacking and our Mobile team and evangelists plan a session about PayPal Mobile embedded Payments.

On friday Apr 16th, 400 developers arrived, brainstormed ideas, formed teams and began developing apps.



All Saturday they coded and built app. The team energy and raw brainpower was amazing. We could see the hope of new ideas forming.




Its been fun, *lot* of hard work, very humbling to learn and to be surrounded by such smart minds and inspiring to see such amazing creativity all around me.

We had good keynotes. Among the logistics running around, I got to hear only Larry Tesler. He said something that seems to resonate well as I see the demos live now.

The Ipad is not a big Iphone and the developer aware of the difference can build different applications for each and become a winner of this space.

I am sitting now watching the demos live. They have been 54 new apps that are launching now.

Awesome apps ranging from social games with multiple users using 3-4 Ipads simultaneously, eg. Ipad Slot Machine, Whack a mouse, unique use of Ipad for variety of disabilities, and lots of opensource code on github.

So much legacy as people built upon their work from past IphoneDevCamps. Nice!

List of apps that launched this weekend:
Photo Buffet HD
Kidney eGFR Estimator
P.A.D. = Personal Armour and Defense
FACEAGE
Relay
LoopTek Morning NewsPaper
ChessFlock
Netflix Actors
Calculator Paddy
b3wm
iPad Slot Machine
Safewaters
Magic Window
DesignScene
Tank or Die
iConcessionStand
Autumn Gem
Timelines
Robin
Whorl'd Champions
SpOT - Specialized Optical Tool
AQGridView
Executor
Tick Tock Push
Shopkeep
TinyRacer
iUiPad
FanConnect
Popic: Web Images in Spotlight
West Seattle Herald
iApples
DicePad
DevScope
Seller Dashboard
Drift
Un-Bored Game
Whack A Mouse
Muse messager
Blackboard
AppInvaders
Pondlet
DyslexicMath
Malen21
British Accent Training
AirHawk
City Church
ClipDocs
CoffeeTable
MediaShower
muse ontology tr3
Readability Browser
CodeBlade
Whack A Mouse


Congratulation everyone! I work for this feeling of hope with community driving innovation, bonding and building out a full conference and solve real problems and sharing to create giant shoulders for others to build more solutions!

Thanks to Dom, Colin, Christopher, Colin, and their volunteers for the long hours, planning, mentoring and passion for the I

Chirp Twitter Conf Roundup - Day2

I am here Day2 of Chirp, Twitter Conference, hackday.

Ambience - Open letting developers rule
Chirp is organized by Carsonified who organizes FOWA and is the king of the event experience - All geek, open, free setup to hack and network!

Cool Developers from All Around the World

Twitter celebrities Parr, Scoble, Jodi Dell, Laura Pistachio of @oneforty ...

Event @jot of Devnet Uk, @vanriper of SVJUG, Steve Broback @broback ....

Top developers Twittelator Andrew Stone, Twitpic Noaheverett, @twitsnaps, @Rodney Rumford of Tweetphotos, Adarsh Pallian of NY, from Philly, Fb developers with cool apps all hacking on twitter apis, Jodi of Peoplebrowser, cotweet @kyle ....

Evangelists from PayPal, Linkedin, British Telecom Kevinmarks are all hobnobbing here.

There are about 500 geeks here, about 250 have been hacking head down.

Creative release:

One guy decided to gather together to draw something for creative release. Wait till you see the picture of video (will update once its uploaded)

Finale Demos:

117 demos were launched within this hackday, 7 are demoing on stage to Merissa Mayer, @blippy @pg Paul Graham critiquing them.

1. @mhp on stage demoing Tweet AGORA Iphone app, all abt filters mute hashtags

2. @Twitterlator shows top Ipad App demo, here from Alberque, NM

3. Twitpic Noaheverett, @twitsnaps, @Rodney Rumford of Tweetphotos are all here from twitter photo companies and here launched crowdreel a new app hacked and has 19Mil photos within 2 weeks.

4. Tap11 - Google Analytics for Realtime web.

5. Sonicliving - started all at 2am last night and build app integrating music from everywhere shared by your social graph.

ps: I have videos and pictures which I'll upload and update here later , folks.

Enjoy!



Twitter team everywhere and accessible

They did sessions on OAuth, @Anywhere, Scala, Streaming API, but most important is they listened chatted and engaged with developers all day long. That just summarizes it.