BETTER COLLABORATION

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BCSocial’s unique service brings social collaboration benefits to all generations of workers

London, April 16, 2013 – BCSocial, an innovative business social collaboration platform, today announced that it has secured £750K in funding from leading cloud investor, Notion Capital. The funds will be used to drive the company’s UK expansion and invest in marketing and sales.

BCSocial is a business social collaboration platform that connects users to the knowledge, ideas and resources they need to transform how they work together. It allows teams to collaborate instantly, in context, and get more done. The service provides a secure cloud-based workspace that connects users to everything they need for their business from any location and any device.

Unlike other social collaboration tools, BCSocial was designed to engage even the most ‘anti-social’ users by allowing them to choose work style options that suit more traditional paper, email and document file work styles, whilst still ensuring everyone works together as one team.  This means that nobody gets left behind and everyone enjoys the productivity gains and empowerment of this new way of working.

 “Social collaboration and document sharing in the workplace is a huge growing market that we had been looking at for some time,” said Jos White, Partner at Notion Capital. “What attracted us to BCSocial was the strength of the technology, a simple, intuitive user interface and their adaptive work views to help drive adoption. Social collaboration is easy for people who already use Facebook and other social networks but for those used to more traditional ways of working, BCSocial will gently ease them into this new collaborative world. Creating a solution this inclusive and engaging is a real breakthrough in the market.”

Leading industry analyst IDC estimates customers spent US$767.4 million on enterprise social collaboration products globally in 2011, and will spend almost $4.5 billion in 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate in spending of 42.4 percent (IDC's Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012-2016 Forecast).

 “We are delighted to be working with Notion who have a wealth of expertise in the cloud space and as entrepreneurs understand the opportunity we have to build a large global business. Many businesses want to move to a more open, collaborative work style but are wary that some of their team may find it challenging. We designed BCSocial to be easy for all types of workers to adopt and we’ve centered everything around the content - unleashing the knowledge that gets lost in so many businesses,” said Bostjan Bregar, CEO and co-founder at BCSocial.

BCSocial is available to try for free today and as a cloud service is scalable to work with all business sizes and models.  For more information about the product please go to www.bcsocial.com.

About BCSocial

BCSocial is a business social collaboration platform that connects users to the knowledge, ideas and resources they need to transform how they work together.  It allows teams to collaborate instantly, in context, and get more done. All in a secure cloud-based workspace that connects users to everything they need for their business from any location and any device. Founded in 2005, BCSocial is a privately-held company with headquarters in London. For more information, go to www.bcsocial.com.

About Notion Capital

Polycom Announces Availability of Polycom RealPresence CloudAXIS™ Suite

The system works by essentially tapping into a series of always-on webcams, which are positioned in different areas of your office. The telecommuter’s display is then filled with different nodes that stream images from every webcam attached to the service. The telecommuter’s home webcam is also on all the time.

Ambient Communication combines videoconference capabilities, speech, gesture and touch interfaces, facial recognition and machine-to-machine communications for an entirely new experience.

Ambient Communication began in the minds of AT&T Labs researchers Gregg Vesonder and Thomas Kirk. The two, along with many others working in the Labs, were inspired by spontaneous, yet effective, discussions they had while taking breaks at work or sitting in the Labs’ common areas. They sought to create a system that reflects these casual discussions. The resulting innovation, Ambient Communication, is designed to take the hallway conversation and expand it beyond the people that were involved in that particular discussion. In essence, they designed a digital common area for people from all around the world to brainstorm, have ongoing discussions and monitor selected areas.

A working prototype of this technology is currently being used in AT&T Labs, and researchers are planning for expansions in additional facilities. In the future, Ambient Communication will be able to connect users with enhanced features like:

Facial and Vocal Identification. This system will automatically identify users through facial recognition and voice identification, and then adapt to accurately capture their conversations. Users will also be able to set personal visibility preferences for user access.

Ongoing Conversations. Ambient Communication will facilitate conversations in multiple locations, allowing users to pick up wherever they last left off in their discussions.

Key Quotes:

At American Express the BlueWork program has delivered not only improved worker productivity but also saved between $10- $15 million annually in real estate costs, the company says.

Insurance giant Aetna is another company that uses flexible workspaces to boost its bottom line. Of Aetna’s 35,000 employees, 14,500 do not have a desk at Aetna, a move that the company’s top executives, CEO Mark Bertolini and national business chief Joseph Zubretsky, have said goes a long way to cut real estate costs.  Another 2,000 Aetna employees work from home a few days a week, meaning that a total of 47 percent of the company’s work force uses flexible workspaces.

Thanks to those policies that impact 47% of the workforce, the company has been able to get rid of 2.7 million square feet of office space. At $29 a square foot, that’s given the company savings of about $78 million per year, once you add utilities, housekeeping, mail service and document shredding.

When Aetna’s CEO Mark Bertolini does his quarterly company-wide address, Aetna’s employees don’t dial into a conference call, they watch a video conference. That way, everyone is connected– whether they are working from headquarters or from their home office. By injecting this flexibility into Bertolini’s landmark address, the company sends employees a signal about its culture and priorities.

This is a great overview of the telecommuting challenge!

Forbes interview with David Heinemeier Hansson, who is a partner at the web-based software development firm 37signals.

His latest book called Remote: Office Not Required, is now available for pre-order and will be published in October. 

Book Description:

No, Better Collaboration does NOT agree with Professor Sullivan. But we want you to be aware of his point of view. While he claims to represent "data", the only proof he has for the 'co-working equals innovation' theory is that Apple, Google and Zappos believe in co-working -- and since they are successful companies, then it must be correct. Oh, and he mentions another 'scientific' proof that banning telework by Yahoo will add to its innovation -- since the announcement of the ban, the stock went up by almost 20%. 

By that logic, we can poof the opposite simply by showing few unsuccessful companies that mandate co-work. :-)

Clearly, the "informed" professor ignores the many case studies and academic research that does show the effectiveness of telework. Including by successful companies such as Accenture, IBM and Cisco.

Cisco Desktop Collaboration Experience DX600

You’re invited to the April 8th ‘Learn-Share-Network’ Videoconference about Telework Productivity.

Yahoo’s work-from-home ban raised again the discussion around telework productivity. Is it true indeed that workers should be physically at the office in order to boost productivity?

In this live videoconference we bring together experts and thought-leaders from both the academia and the corporate worlds to share different perspectives about telework productivity.

Our featured expert is Dr. Jenny Ying from Stanford University who will present insights from her research study on this topic: DOES WORKING FROM HOME WORK? EVIDENCE FROM A CHINESE EXPERIMENT

You will also learn about other research studies in this field, case studies, best practices, and technology solutions that can help organizations implement telework without compromising productivity and sense-of-belonging.

Note: This is not a typical webinar in which you can only text your questions and comments! This is a live multi-party videoconference in which everybody can be seen and be heard (this is optional — you may stay invisible and muted if you wish to).