Sphere Knows Now how to work with enterprise customers

Lost in the shuffle the past few weeks is a little deal Sphere entered into with KnowNow to bundle our Sphere It! application into their dashboard market intelligence offering. This is a really smart deal for us and has the potential to drive a lot of value to our customers. We’re in the process of deploying at a few very large, prominent sites (I can’t tell you yet but look forward to sharing the news).

We chose KnowNow because they’re in the best position to help us get our product into the hands of a wide spectrum of Fortune 1000 enterprise customers. The main reason we feel they’re the best is because of their leadership team, led by Todd Rulon-Miller. Todd took over KnowNow about one year ago and he has made a significant impact on their business model and prospects for success. He is without doubt one of the most impressive leaders I’ve worked with in the past ten years. I’m a believer in betting on people. I once made a huge mistake, working with someone I didn’t wholly believe in and I learned a painful yet nice lesson from that experience. In Todd and his team we trust and as a result, we’re very bullish about what we can accomplish together.

You can read a little bit more about this relationship in an excellent article wirtten by Paula Hane at InfoToday - Enterprise Solutions and Mainstream Media Get Into the Sphere.

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spam farms of the social web

Good post at Niall Kennedy’s blog about spam farms.

Sphere integrated into Forbes.com

It’s a big day for announcements. We’re live as a search tab on Forbes.com. Forbes is using our XML API to power a tab of search results. Rather than search for Tony Bennett, I thought I’d try tax shelters. Yeah, we know who reads Forbes Our logo is a bit squeezed, we’ll get that fixed.

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Sphere feels the Vibe

I just got an email from Tariq KRIM and Franck Mahon at Netvibes indicating that Sphere has been added as a blog search button in their site. Netvibes is a relatively new company that’s getting a lot of great buzz and user base in the make-your-own-newspaper space (what do you call that space, the My Yahoo 2.0 space?). Anyway, here’s a screenshot with one of our hot searches (what is Tony Bennett up to that he gets into hot searches??)

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Virtual Pizza, Anyone?

End of September, Om Malik asked me to share Sphere’s experiences (on his new, very popular blog Web Worker Daily) of what it’s like to build a virtual company. Everyone of our key team members are living in different areas - the four founders are based in San Francisco, Seattle & Denver. We have team members living in Vancouver, Portland, Phoenix, Denver, San Francisco, New York, and Boston. Our Advisors are based in San Francisco, Connecticut, New York, Boston and Atlanta. In the post, we talked about the tools we use to keep everyone on the same page, working toward the same goals.

We also talked a little bit about the challenge creating a culture that serves as a foundation for success. The culture piece is a little less straightforward. In fact, I’ve never met five of our key team members. Here are a few obvious things we do to develop a feel for each other:

• we make sure we talk multiple times each day, EVERYDAY
• we do a group call every Tuesday (Tech team) and Friday (Business Team)
• we engage people on a series of projects before signing them on as team members
• the founders meet physically at least once a quarter

We’re also trying a few new things. We’re opening our internal blog up to our Advisors and Investors who have a vested interest in Sphere - we hope this will foster a stronger bond between our team and the people most supportive in helping us pursue our dream. Another example, last month we had a pizza party - the idea was that each team member would receive a pizza at their homes for a group call and mini celebration of our accomplishments to date – it kinda worked and kinda didn’t. Everyone was excited about it but it was logistically a bit hard to pull off. A couple of our team members did get their pizza (see below photo from our SysAdmin Mike) while the rest of us were jealous to hear their greasy hands on their keyboards. I think we’ll try it again as everyone liked the idea.

If you’re building a virtual company, we’d love to hear your thoughts on what does/ doesn’t work in your virtual environment.

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Spherementing with PodTech

A few weeks before we launched our contextual widget, I had a chance to show a working version (more like a rough draft) of the widget to Robert Scoble at PodTech. This is an early version that shows it working in a live site via a cool little Firefox grease monkey app we hacked together. Anyway, here is the video .

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Sphere Contextual Widget

Matt Mullenweg (and several others) gave me a heads up that the below post was password protected, sorry about that rather clueless mistake. Here it is again
Last week Sphere presented as part of the Web 2.0 Conference’s Lunchpad. One blogger who was there has a brief writeup here. The focus of our presentation was our new Sphere It Contextual Widget for blogs (Tim O’reilly’s Commentary on the widget). There was a coordinated launch of the widget on 50+ of the top tech sites today. You can see it here.

• ZDNet Blogs
• Market Watch Articles
• GigaOM
• O’Reilly Radar
• Techcrunch
• Techdirt
• John Battelle’s Searchblog
• Venture Beat
• Infectious Greed

There are several more large publishers and prominent micro publishers who will launch the contextual widget in the next few weeks or so - :). In the meantime, please take a spin and let us know your thoughts.

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Got Sphere’d?

Data Mining is a blog written by Matthew Hurst, one of the founders and core technologists of the company behind the blogpulse blog search engine. Here’s what he posted yesterday about our widget and site relaunch: Data Mining: Sphere Update

After he posted that, it turns out that he “got Sphere’d” from our widget running in You’ve been Sphered. Here are all of his previous posts on Sphere.

Matt correctly points out that there is a network effect that can occur with our technology - this should serve the blogosphere well in it’s goal of reaching a larger audience.

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US News and World Report names Sphere “One of Five Internet Stars To Be”….Nice!

This is a pretty cool article written by a U.S. News reporter who saw our Web 2.0 Launchpad presentation. Sphere is mentioned along with four others as one of Five Internet Stars To Be.

Suzanne

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We’re launching at Launch Pad

The last bit of big news is that we’ve been selected to demo the contextual widget at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. This is a real coup as it’s invitation only to a very limited and select group of companies. You can read more about the Launch Pad session at Web 2.0 where we get to show off our widget wares.

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Doing our part to help the blogosphere reach a much broader audience of readers.

Since we first start playing with the Sphere It! app we sensed the potential. Not only are we delivering a tool to help bring the blogosphere to a much broader universe of readers, but we’re doing it in such a simple and seamless way that it’s just one click for the reader (and as little trouble for the publisher to hook in). When it quickly took off at Time.com we knew we had a winner. So, we started showing it around. And, everyone who saw it loved it. It couldn’t be easier to install (1 line of JavaScript!) and the results make for an enhanced reader experience. How our engine can do what it does so quickly and effectively never fails to amaze me. So, doors have been opening and eyebrows have been raising … lots of publishers are taking an interest and signing up, which is great news for readers and bloggers alike.

How it works is that a reader clicks on a Sphere icon next to a story they’re reading. That click brings up a small box of content and links to bloggers talking about that topic as well as related articles from the publisher and other blogs worth checking out. As a blog search and discovery engine this is where the discovery comes in and you can really dig deep into stories or get a broad overview of what bloggers are buzzing about.

We may be jaded (heck, we love this thing) but the feedback we’ve gotten to date tells us we’re not just blowing smoke when we say this is a superior strategy for integrating the blogosphere into mainstream media. In addition to the immediacy of what’s being delivered the results are also more comprehensive and less prone to spam. It’s a real win/win. The reader gets a richer experience and the publisher gets opportunities to expose the reader to additional related content (and get more page views in the process).

Check out the Sphere contextual widget by clicking on the web sites linked from our home page. And, let us know what you think. We love to hear from our readers.

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Sphere’s new home page

We’ve been really pleased with the traction our site has gained in its first five months, much better than we imagined when we launched. Users really like the high quality results and the intuitive, simple web site design. We appreciate all the support and great feedback we’ve gotten. Today, Sphere is launching a new home page design as well as revamping how blog posts and related media items are integrated and displayed. Our goal is to create an even better, more intuitive experience.

What you’ll see is that we’ve moved some of the discovery tools from inside the site onto the home page, so it’s easier to get to blog posts, featured blogs and related media right from the start as well as change course on what you’re looking for from whenever you are in the site.

For example, on the home page, type Politics into the search box and choose blog posts. Wham! You’re on the results page in a flash with blog posts, related news and top-notch blogs focused on politics right there in front of you. Click away on what interests you or go back up to the search box and type in Gadgets or Chicago Bears. In an instant you have another set of comprehensive results ready for your discovery.

The other thing you won’t help but notice is the spotlight on Sphere’s contextual widget. While we’ve always felt the Sphere It! app was a way-cool-tool more people needed to know about, we couldn’t have guessed at what a runaway success it would be with bloggers as well as online publishers.

The contextual widget takes the Sphere It! app one step further to help online mainstream media and micro publishers tap into the blogosphere as well as promote their own articles and pull in their own blogs or make recommendations out to related blogs. Check out the sites rolling out the Sphere contextual widget to see it in action.

What may seem like small changes are expected to have a big impact on how quickly readers can get to what interests them. We think this is a better reader experience and we hope you will too. Special recognition to the AWESOME team at Mule who helped us navigate to our new site. Let us know what you think about the home page, display changes and the widget when you get a chance. We thank you for your feedback to date and for helping Sphere evolve.

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