This is a fairly new direction for us. For the last 10 years, we have been busy working behind the scenes as a tactical design team building user experiences for a variety of software and hardware companies. By definition, it’s our job to make our clients shine, create a compelling user experience and then move on to the next project.

We took a bit of a different approach with the PlayBook OS to start to move out from behind the curtain. I can understand how this may have caused some confusion and would like to respond to some of the questions posted among the comments.

“Just a simple question looking for a simple answer – anyone know if RIM owns Teknision or not?”

 

“Did it say anywhere that Teknision is owed or was bought by RIM? Or are they still separate?”

 

The simple answer is that Teknision has not been purchased.

When people talk acquisition, we think it needs to be about the “right fit.” We have been courted in the past a few times and we are always open to talk but when it comes down to it, we love that we have the ability right now to work with many great brands like Intel, Adobe and RIM and help them come to the front of this new embedded industry. We really have been focused on growth and building the better product. So to answer the question, we are focused on new projects and new partners for now but never say never. I do think Teknision is going to be one of those companies to watch.

As for our work on PlayBook, we saw the project from a technical demo to an almost ready for prime time OS. We have been working with the QNX team for a couple of years now and this is the project that is getting the limelight but what they have under the hood with that platform is going to be something to keep an eye on. PlayBook needed to own and build a full-time dedicated team around its platform and it is now under the guidance of RIM’s newly acquired UXD team – the former TAT.

RIM’s acquisition of TAT is a perfect fit for the project. TAT designed the Android interface, they have extensive experience taking an OS to market. The acquisition also removes TAT from offering their services to the Android OS market – a very smart strategic move in my opinion. We left the project in very capable hands.

So where does Teknision fit in? We are working with dynamic companies like QNX, iControl, and Radian6 ( whose recent acquisition by Salesforce was another great success story) to create great embedded applications and user experiences on all types of screens. We believe that the tablet revolution is really part of a bigger movement towards embedding valuable, connected and beautiful experiences anywhere you can find a screen.

One of the goals of our company is helping our clients succeed. Sometimes, we help out a shooting star. Radian6 has been a premier client of Teknision for quite some time and it has been incredibly rewarding to hear about them being acquired by Salesforce.com. (See the press release here.)

In many ways, this really puts the last piece in place for the first seamless modern toolset for sales and marketing.

We live in interesting times for marketers. Often, the first thing someone does when making a purchase decision is head to the internet. They look up reviews and want to know what people are saying about the product. The power of a personal recommendation has never been stronger. Brands can make a presence and try to interject into the conversation, but they risk being seen as ingenuine – a curse online. The best goal now is to try to influence the words coming from the mouths and keyboards of others.

Today, these recommendations, these conversations about brands are happening in a medium that is both disseminated and insular. Discovering where the conversations are taking place, what is being said, the sentiment of the conversation and the urgency of a request is an incredibly complicated task. This is exactly what Radian6 does well, and it’s why social media monitoring has become essential to business intelligence.

Ultimately, this intelligence should be linked to sales. The way to sell today is to become engaged at the point of conversation. Instead of picking up the phone to make a sales call, you now grab your keyboard and become a contributing part of the conversation – become engaged. In order to facilitate this, Radian6 (with our help) created the Engagement Console. Engagement teams are now coordinated and following a proven process that lead to results.

Radian6 has been able to turn the noise of social media into an actionable stream of information. The next step is to connect this to an organization’s sales and customer relationship management process. No one does this better than Salesforce. Salesforce CRM fuels lead volume, sales conversion rates and revenue growth through tools that coordinate customer relationship activities.

This means capturing the phone, email and in-person activities to be able to get strategic data about your sales process. The missing tool was social media. Integration of your social media activity into your sales process is no easy task. In fact, it’s much more complicated than integrating any other medium. It only makes sense to integrate the best and create a seamless product offering.

This is why I think Salesforce purchasing Radian6 makes sense on so many levels. Purchasing a social media monitoring company was a logical move. Purchasing Radian6 was a very smart move.