What are you working on?

UPDATE: September 12 - The just-launched, Charles River Ventures-backed Yammer.com, referenced below, won the top prize award at TechCrunch50. We're mildly astounded about that - and wildly validated in the functionality we've built in the upcoming version of Upswing. The Yammer product represents just a basic group messaging feature that we have built similarly in the purposeful CRM/virtual workspace application for business teams that is Upswing 360. We agree with Dennis Howlett of ZDNet and his view about Yammer when he writes that the "Enterprise won’t come kicking and screaming into the enterprise 2.0 world unless content, context and purpose are aligned." ...That's Upswing 360: focused and relevant content for a specific business purpose among a working group who share the same mission.

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Facebook combined navel gazing with oversharing in the ability for friends in a social network to publish the answer to the question, "What are you doing right now?" Do we really need to know what a random sampling of remotely located friends are doing at any given moment? To be sure, it's been a popular nugget of voyeuristic information for Facebook users, yet this status feature gets a lot more interesting - and useful - in the realm of business.

The new question (or some variant thereof) that business team members will be answering and reading of others in Upswing CRM is, "What are you working on?" Code-named "Upswing 360," this radically new version of Upswing CRM will introduce our advanced on-demand CRM service integrated with social networking techniques for sales and biz dev teams to stay connected and collaborate more productively. Essentially, it's CRM combined with purposeful social networking within organizations - for "colleagues." It'll have features like profile pages, personal status, tagging of content, commenting, notifying, sharing data, permission settings, mobile integration, etc.  We'll be unveiling this new Enterprise 2.0 web-based app next month, but we figure we'd reveal this small feature of "What are you working on?" ...Why? Well, it's been recently validated with LinkedIn using this technique. And yesterday at TechCrunch50, an entire Twitter-like startup was born around these basic updating and group communication functions - without any other purposeful, integrated business application, and certainly not CRM!  Amusingly, and evidently without any irony, none other than Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of on-demand CRM pioneer Salesforce.com (compare to Upswing) said of this new startup called Yammer, "I really like this company the best." (Yammer was founded by former executives of PayPal, eGroups, eBay, and Tribe. It is backed by venture capital firms Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures.)

What are we working on right now? The merging of group communication and social networking tools with on-demand CRM. This new version of Upswing launches soon. Stay tuned for more specifics.