Sphere for AppExchange

Jaime at KnowNow has a nice post on work we’re doing with them - you can see his post title “Sphere of Influence” here.

We’re big fans of extending Read more

Sphere: Related Content

Cisco Roundtable

Inna Politseymako pulled together a roundtable discussion about Web 2.0 last week at Cisco. I participated along with Matt Mullenweg (Automattic Founder), John Toebes (Cisco) and Daniel Wedge (IBM).

We spoke about Read more

Sphere: Related Content

Sphere and Wallstrip Discuss The Next Big Thing In Frozen Yogurt

A few weeks ago, the Wallstrip crew stopped by our Pier 38 office - while here, they had a chance to speak with Toni, Matt, OM and myself - my conversation with Lindsay Campbell is here, including my education on Pink Berry. It was a lot of fun chatting with the Wallstrip crew, great energy.

Sphere: Related Content

SmartBrief & Sphere

Most of our users know Sphere as the company that makes the Related Content Widget. It’s taken on it’s own momentum, and not unlike a band known for a hit song, we have a lot of other interesting non-widget partnerships in place we’d love to share with you.

As an example, Read more

Sphere: Related Content

Forrester Knows Now Too

As if you didn’t already know this, Forrester has validated that consumers aren’t the only ones overwhelmed with too much “irrelevant stuff.” The analyst firm just released a new report indicating that RSS used within the enterprise is an effective solution. The message is consistent with what we see with our Sphere.com users and publisher partners who have deployed Sphere Related Content. People need Read more

Sphere: Related Content

Chumby Sphere Widget

The Chumby is a compact device that displays useful and entertaining information from the web: news, photos, music, celebrity gossip, weather, box scores, blogs — using your wireless internet connection. Always on, it shows — nonstop — what’s online that matters to you.

If you Read more

Sphere: Related Content

Bloginar February 13th

Automattic/ WordPress (Toni Schneider, Chief Executive Officer), KnowNow (Todd Rulon-Miller, Chief Executive Officer) and Sphere (Tony Conrad, Chief Executive Officer) are getting together February 13th at 10:00 PST (12:00 CST & 13:00 EST) to talk about some ideas for marketers to maintain continuous awareness of, and communication with, the markets they serve. Anyone can join the Webinar which is free and graciously sponsored by the AMA. Some details can be found here. This should be a good event for:

• CMOs and VPs of marketing with responsibility for brand and category success
• VPs and directors of corporate communications and media programs
• VPs and directors responsible for market and competitive intelligence programs
• Individuals responsible for driving measurable metrics such as market share, share of wallet, products per household, and customer defection/churn
• VPs and directors of e-commerce who are looking to leverage Web 2.0, enterprise RSS, enterprise social software, and/or publish-subscribe technologies to gain competitive advantage

Hope you can join us.

Sphere: Related Content

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.

Sphere: Related Content

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??)

Sphere: Related Content

Sphere and Cymfony partner to enable marketers to understand bloggers impact on their brands

With so many people reading, writing, and commenting on blogs, leading brands realize they need to better understand how the most influential voices in the blogosphere are impacting the opinions of their customers. Identifying those voices on a timely basis is difficult.

Sphere and Cymfony, the leading innovator in combining traditional and social media research and analysis, are announcing a partnership that will expand Cymfony’s service offerings. By being the first to draw on Sphere’s advanced blog search and relevance technology, Cymfony will provide its clients more data and better analysis to gain a deeper understanding of how the messages in social media can change and amplify messages delivered via traditional media. As a result, Cymfony clients can more accurately measure the effectiveness of their communications, identify ideas for new products, isolate issues around service quality and discover emerging trends.

Cymfony will first integrate Sphere’s data about blog link structures, quality, as well as who is linking to whom, and perform analysis of the relative influence of blog posters within an existing conversation. Second, Cymfony will use Sphere’s technology to analyze meta data and establish baselines, including posting frequency, lengths of postings, and other data. Third, Sphere’s advanced spam elimination algorithms will ensure that Cymfony clients get all of the most relevant blogs without the spam. Cymfony will provide an additional layer of semantic analysis of each blog posting to help Cymfony customers identify the most influential voices in the blogosphere.

We’re thrilled to be working with Cymfony with whom we have a shared vision of how the traditional and people media worlds are evolving and converging. Stay tuned as we announce several other partnerships in the coming weeks.

Sphere: Related Content