As the video shows, PowerInbox users can now not only accept LinkedIn connections directly through their email, but also view mutual connections.

The company also unveiled “PowerEmbeds”, functionality to embed videos and other media in email just like most of us are used to doing in blog posts and on websites, as well as SideBar apps, to add things like your Twitter feed to the side of your inbox.

PowerInbox launched an API to integrate apps with PowerInbox in February, and launched an API for email clients to utilize PowerInbox in April.

I sat down with Ali Riaz, CEO and founder of Attivio at their headquarters in Newton, MA to learn about his experiences. What I thought would be a discussion about how Attivio remained laser-focused on their market and adapted to changes in customer demand with speed and diligence, quickly turned into something much more interesting.

We ended up talking mostly about culture. From the earliest days, Ali put in place a very straightforward goal: make 100% of Attivio’s clients referenceable. He and his founding team proceeded to hire, execute, and reward in line with that goal.

My takeaways from our conversation were:

1. Hire people that care about customer success
2. Keep them focused on solving a difficult problem
3. Engage customers early and innovate as partners
4. Build collective patience that feeds off market success
5. Learn all the time

It’s hard enough to build a compelling product that fills a need in the market. What I am starting to appreciate after my conversation with Ali is how powerful it is to build a company culture that does this as an organizational habit – where the “compelling product” is a natural output of the way you work with your customers.

What follows are portions of my interview with Ali structured around the lessons I learned during our conversation.

Hire people that care

The founding team of Attivio was “tried and tested,” having worked together at companies like GetConnected and Fast Search & Transfer. So there was already a culture of trust and teamwork. But to extend that team, Ali sought a very specific type of employee.

“I hire people that care, that are enthusiastic,” says Ali. “People that feel like their best days are ahead of them.” There is no place for cynicism at Attivio. Continued Ali, “I used to be a buyer, and when I bought from someone who cared, I trusted them more, I relied on them more, I gave them more slack.”

“If you genuinely care about your customers’ success, and you are consistent about it, and you don’t let go of that… that is the spearhead into productivity. Clients feel that.”

Solve an unsolvable problem

The Attivio team engaged their market within 6-9 months of founding the company. And they were in with major players – Fortune 500 companies like GE, UBS, Motorola, Cisco, and more. They went to these companies and asked them, “What’s the biggest information problem you have that you can not solve?”

Ali describes one of their early projects, a company with “1100 SharePoint servers and no unified view – with all the cost and compliance problems that come with that. In two months, we created a unified layer with all the security considerations in place. Attivio did a proof-of-concept, and once that was successful, they purchased. After the delivery of the first product they made the platform a standard. Now they have fourteen applications, including an iPad App.”

The idea of solving a really hard problem was of critical importance to Attivio. Obviously, this is how you create value in a company. But beyond that, challenging the team to focus on unsolvable problems solidified a vision for the company, and built tremendous credibility among Attivio’s early customers and the market.

Customer-Driven Innovation

When you take employees that care about customer success, and set them loose on unsolvable problems, you get what Ali calls “customer-driven innovation.” He describes this as when you are “not just listening to your customers, but you are living with them, you are walking on the path with them.”

“These customers don’t lack money, they lack credible solutions,” explains Ali. So what Attivio has built is a way to continually validate its vision through demonstrable proof points. In Ali’s words, it’s a “risky, but very measured go-to-market.” Risky because you are working hand-in-hand with very large and very demanding customers on problems they can’t solve themselves. But measured because your people can ensure the best chances of success.

To me, this is the crux of how Attivio’s current vision is so close to its founding vision. The company worked in partnership with its customers to develop product. In doing so, they ensured that they would end up with a solution deemed valuable by their target customers.

Collective Patience

Now, of course none of this would be possible if, as Ali puts it, “somebody is telling you that you need to have a new strategy every six months.” If you change too many times, you end up exhausted.

Ali praises his team for having collective patience – an alignment of vision between investors, managers, and employees that lasts for the long-term. Ali explains, “We created a 45-page document when we first started the company. If you see that document, and you see the product right now, you will say ‘oh my goodness!’” Very few companies remain as true to their original intent as Attivio has.

But I think the term “collective patience” doesn’t do justice to what Attivio has accomplished. The company has actively fed that patience with evidence from the market in the form of customer wins, market validation, working proofs-of-concepts, and client-side champions. Attivio’s collective patience comes not from its belief in a five-year-old vision, but from the continued validation of that vision by a diligent and hard-working team of people.

Culture of Learning

It was apparent to me that Ali takes great pride in the culture of learning he and his management team have built at Attivio. Market strategy and corporate policy can look good on paper, but establishing the right culture comes directly from the top, and Ali pays it appropriate attention.

One of his primary rules is “Be tough on issues, but soft on people.” Ali tries to use every setback the company experiences as a chance to create a learning opportunity. “That means if something goes wrong we don’t spend energy saying, ‘Who’s fault was it?’ We spend all our energy saying, ‘Let’s fix it, let’s learn from this.’ The hardest thing that I’ve done here is to create a culture that will deliver that as a habit, but it is the most important asset we have built apart from our patents.”

“When we don’t get something quite right, we don’t punish the individuals. We go back to rule number one – be hard on the issue, soft on the people.” Ali continues, “We intended to do the right thing. So next time, what are we going to do differently? How do we respond, instead of react?”

It’s all about transparency. “Employees are very smart. They understand if something is being held back, and then they start imagining stories and conspiracies. Once a month I get in front of everybody and tell them the whole truth: this is what we did, this is what we’re doing, this is what’s working, that’s what’s not working.”

What can other companies learn from Attivio?

Today it is fashionable to pivot – to fail fast. But what if that isn’t always necessary? What if it simply takes time to do put big ideas into practice?

Attivio demonstrates an amazing attribute of market validation. If done properly, it can actually prevent you from pivoting by providing your team with collective patience, based on evidence from the market.

If you want to see your vision succeed the way Attivio’s has, get out of the building, engage your market, and build a customer-focused organization that can respond to it intelligently.

The problem isn’t that they’re making this much money, but how. According to Sam Tyler, municipal watchdog quoted in the piece:

For example, an officer called in for a court case gets a four hour minimum, even if he is only needed for a fraction of that. Ditto when working a paid detail. It is all perfectly legal and spelled out in the union contract

If they work four hours and one minute and then leave, they get paid for 8 hours,” says Tyler.

The part that stands out most is that little bit: “It is all perfectly legal.”

At best, this practice is unethical, but doesn’t it just sound illegal?

Scenario:

Cop 1: Four hours is up. Go home, McGarnagle.

Officer McGarnagle: (intently stares at clock with the patience of a jailhouse bird with time on his hands as it counts to 60) Overtime!

The article continues:

“When you see this type of practice and you have 2,100 police officers in Boston, that all adds up to a lot of extra dollars that the taxpayers are paying.”

That’s not to say every officer in Boston is doing this. There are good cops, and we often forget about them because we only ever talk about the malfeasances of a few.

That said, the job is tough. It’s dangerous. A cop knowingly faces the possibility of being killed in the line of duty every single day, yet they show up to work anyway.

But they are beholden to us. They need to remember that. Or perhaps, more importantly, we need to remind ourselves.

Photo courtesy of mlbsluggers.com

Jose Canseco has said some strange things on Twitter, but having a vested interest in becoming a political powerhouse in New England may top the list.

Watch out Governor Deval Patrick and Mayor Thomas Menino, because according to the baseball bad-boy’s latest rants on social media, Canseco is concerned about the lack of Internet connections in Braintree, and the street lights in Danvers and wants to take over.

“I want to run for office,” Canseco said on Twitter on Monday, after initially asking his 472,000-plus followers if a “Cuban-born American” could be a “mayor or governor in New England.”

Immediately after announcing his interest, although it hasn’t been confirmed as legitimate (after all, his tweet prior to talking about running for office talked about how he can see dead people), Canseco started racking up a list of campaign promises for cities and towns in the Bay State.

Among them, Canseco said he would “slap” people messing with teachers in Leominster and “solve the power outage in Fenway.”

Although the outages occurred in Back Bay, Canseco also promised to bring Braintree high-speed Internet if elected for either mayor or governor of Massachusetts.

Here are some tweets from the man himself about his possible run for office here in Massachusetts.

The target for the fund will be $6 billion with a $2 billion “sidecar” — a strategy that will allow outside investors to control where and how the capital is invested. Essentially, Bain will entrust them to  return a profit, most likely through asset classes in which the private equity firm does not usually invest.

Primack pointed out that the fund is markedly smaller than the $10 billion (with a $1.8 bil sidecar attached) that Bain raised in 2010. He attributed the reduction to “the firm’s belief that super-sized leveraged buyouts are becoming endangered species.”

A Reuters report this morning says that Bain Capital Fund XI will ”also receive a $600 million commitment from the firm’s fund managers to demonstrate alignment of interest.”

The fee structure will be similar to that of Bain’s recently-closed Asia fund. Here’s how Primack breaks it down:

• Market standard: 1.5% management fee, 20% carry, 7% preferred return
• 1% management fee, 30% carry, 7% preferred return
• 0.5% management fee, 30% carry, no preferred return

Bain told investors that fundraising for Capital Fund XI could close as early as Q1 of 2013, says Reuters.

With Bain under increased media and political scrutiny as a result of presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s association with the firm, it will be intriguing to see how investors respond.

The non-profit’s mission is to provide transportation in the form of car rides to those over 60 years old, as well as the vision-impaired. Eight out of 10 drivers are volunteers, while the other two out of 10 are paid drivers. Members, who pay a $60 annual membership fee, which gets them $30 worth of credits, simply call the day before they need a ride.

A national organization under the ITNAmerica umbrella, the ITNGreaterBoston chapter was founded on January 23, 2012, and received a $650,000 grant from the Tufts Health Plan Foundation and the MetroWest Health Foundation. In the four months since it started, ITNGreaterBoston has already provided its 56 members with over 350 rides through the work of its 35 volunteers.

“The basic concept is that transportation is the important cementing ingredient that leads to a better quality of life,” explains Bushnell. Drivers not only help out seniors by going into their homes, giving a helping hand with shopping bags and wheelchairs, they provide an ear and a conversation along the way. “It’s like driving with a good friend,” adds Bushnell.

In greater Boston, the rides are a combination of medical and non-medical appointments, including to and from stores, movie theaters and other recreational activities like the YMCA.

“For me, that mix says to me that my members are doing preventive care,” Bushnell says, explaining that those not able to drive aren’t at home, feeling isolated from society. ”They’re engaging in life, and that reduces the number of medical appointments they need.”

The current ratio is about 1.5 volunteers per member, which Bushnell says they hope to steady at a one-to-one ratio. To help, ITNAmerica has a credit system in place in which younger members of families can volunteer as drivers and, in turn, earn credits toward their elderly family members’ accounts. Because ITN is a national organization, miles are tranferable to accounts across the country.

“That’s the beauty of a national network,” says Bushnell. “Whether you’re 22 or 62, you could be part of this mission.”

Looking to get involved? ITNGreaterBoston is hosting their first fundraiser on Sunday, June 17th at the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. For $25, you can walk to  raise money and support the cause.

For more, visit ITNGreaterBoston on Twitter @ITNBoston and Facebook.

For the fifteenth month in a row, the MBTA saw a spike in how many people are using public transportation.

The growing numbers set a milestone for the Hubs transportation system, making it the longest consecutive streak in MBTA history, according to reports.

According to MBTA officials, the record-setting numbers were led by a serious uptick in riders taking T buses to get around.

For the first time, the average weekday bus ridership topped 400,000 in both March and April.

As for overall modes of transportation, the T saw a weekday average of 1.371 million passenger trips, with a 4.4-percent increase in April’s ridership numbers compared to the same time last year.

On the trains, all lines saw an increase over last April’s numbers as well.

According to statistics, April ridership on the Green Line went up 8.2-percent, while ridership on the Orange, Blue and Red Lines grew by 3.8-percent.

Travel by boat also saw a steady boom, according to reports, as those traveling by sea went up 12-percent over the April 2011 numbers.

MBTA officials have credited the state’s “continued economic growth and improved employment numbers” for the record-breaking numbers, as well as customer use of smart phone apps.

“We’re absolutely convinced that the widespread availability of real time bus data is making public transit a more convenient option for commuters,” said interim MBTA General Manager Jon Davis.  “More than a hundred thousand smart phone users have downloaded apps that provide arrival time information for more than 180 MBTA bus routes.”

State Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Greg Bialecki told the Boston Globe, “This is about the realization that big data is a very promising growth area. The state is well positioned to take the lead in this area.”

Massachusetts has more than 100 big data companies, according to MassTLC, and the sector is expected to more than double over the next six years, adding an estimated 15,000 jobs. To bolster that, the state plans to form a consortium alongside MassTLC, which will develop a matching grant program for big data projects.

The Globe reports that no state funding has been designated for the project, but does write that Intel is backing the Center with $2.5 million a year for five years.

Research from bigdata@CSAIL will focus on finance, medicine, social media and security. Researchers at six other institutions, including Brown University, will also be participating remotely.

The announcement’s expected to take place today at 2 p.m. at MIT’s Stata Center, when Governor Deval Patrick announces the new initiatives by the state. Other speakers will include MIT President Susan Hockfield; Justin Rattner, Intel CTO; and Daniela Rus, the new director of MIT CSAIL.

Photo Courtesy of Tendocom

Over the past decade or so, industry analyst firm IDC has regularly conducted research on what not finding information might cost an organization.  

Consider the impact of the following:

• Outdated information.  IDC cites the example of a manufacturing company designed and built a new product based on a part that was no longer manufactured. They had looked in an old parts catalog.
• Missing or incomplete information. Incomplete information, says IDC, is responsible for the year that a major aircraft manufacturer wasted developing a new product that its competitor had already produced 10 years earlier.
• Time spent publishing, sharing, searching for and analyzing information. IDC estimates the average information worker salary of 75,000 USD per year.  In IDC’s most recent survey of over 700 knowledge workers, the analyst firm asked respondents about the types of tasks they perform and the time spent performing those tasks:
• 13 hours per week spent on email (cost: $21,000 per year)
• 9 hours per week spent searching for information (cost: $14,000 per year)
• 8 hours per week analyzing information (cost: $13,000 per year)
•  6.5 hours per week communicating / collaborating with team members
  (cost: $10,000 per year)
• 6 hours per week creating content (cost: $10,000 per year)
• Nearly 4 hours per week publishing information (cost: $6,000 per year)
• Information overload. Between email, journals, presentations, articles, meeting and field notes, reports, social media inputs and more, most professionals are inundated with information.  Knowledge workers, says IDC, spend from 15% to 35% of their time searching for information. And, most people don’t know where to look, how to ask for what they are seeking (or when it is OK to stop looking).  This challenge is exasperated by the explosion of Big Data.
• Inability to find information. With information scattered across an organization’s repositories, directories and intranets, employees cannot easily locate information they need in order to make critical business decisions. The result? Wasted search efforts and decisions made in the absence of information.
• Recreating knowledge that already exists. Knowledge workers, says IDC, spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out information that does not already exist. Some studies suggest that 90% of the time that knowledge workers spend in creating new reports or other products is spent in recreating information that already exists.

Knowledge and the Innovation Impact

Product innovation is knowledge-intensive and characterized by iterative phases of opportunity or challenge analyses, problem-solving and decision making. Repeated success comes to those organizations that approach a challenge (such as fixing a product defect or circumventing a blocking patent) or opportunity (entering a new market with an existing technology, for example) with the right questions and then access relevant and actionable knowledge in a timely manner.

Sophisticated semantic research technologies do just that – giving knowledge workers access to existing sources of relevant knowledge including best practices and lessons learned.  That information may well lie within an organization’s virtual four walls, though often in geographical or departmental silos. Or, it may be found outside the organization, industry or domain – in patent collections and public and proprietary scientific libraries, journals, websites or the ‘Deep Web’.

By arming engineers, scientists, and other product development personnel with semantic question-answering technology coupled with a framework for collaboration and tools to accelerate problem solving, workers are knowledge-enabled. This allows them to make better, more informed decisions to avoid repeating past mistakes, share and reuse proven ideas and expertise, focus on defining and analyzing problems/opportunities and discover high quality ideas and solutions.

Clearly, those organizations that are best able to capitalize on their enterprise knowledge – and also harness the breadth of external information that exists outside their four walls – will have a tremendous competitive advantage over those organizations that continue to allow their information workers to flounder in their quest for knowledge.  You already paid handsomely to create it, you might as well get your money’s worth out of it!

Mistake 1: Not doing research

When choosing an affiliate program, there are several crucial components for affiliates to consider that could drastically impact the overall experience – and it involves some serious research before diving in.

• Highest payout. Sure it is tempting to go with the program that has the highest payout, but that might also mean that finding leads for the product or service is a lot more difficult (maybe overall revenue will end up being a lot lower).
• Time consumption. Think about the time commitment. If the industry is constantly changing, and the site needs constant updates, will the affiliate be able to keep up? Will you have to hold their hand through everything?
• Site visitors. How much do you know about their current site visitors and what their demographics are? What are they interested in? What types of content do they click on most frequently? These are all questions that you should try to answer before getting started. Ideally the product or service being promoted is strongly correlated.
• Level of interest and knowledge. Most likely, the affiliate will be writing the majority of the copy for their affiliate site, if not all. It is important that they are either willing to learn about the industry or already know a decent amount about it. If they have no interest, it could come across in their writing.

Mistake 2: Having an unprofessional or cluttered website.

Sure, it sounds great to cram tons of ads and banners on affiliate sites
- then the affiliate will make more money, right? No, they are most
likely hurting the site by making it look like spam. If the website
doesn’t look trustworthy, why would someone entrust it with their
contact information or credit card information. Simplicity is key.
Affiliate sites should be clean and concise. At first, at least, I
would suggest focusing on promoting one product or service. Then
thinking about expanding, but only if it makes sense.

Mistake 3. Having irrelevant content.

Site content should relate to what you are selling/promoting. Sure, if
you are promoting phone systems, the entire website does not need to be
about phone systems – but it can be. The affiliate site can be about
purchasing managers or office administration – or other topics where the
relationship with phone systems is clear.

Mistake 4: On to the next one.

Once an affiliate has decided on an affiliate program and start
generating leads, it is easy to get carried away with the momentum of
the project. It’s exciting to make money off a website – especially if
they are seeing results right away! But there are a lot of nuances to
being an affiliate marketer and it is important to learn how to optimize
a site before they start creating another affiliate site altogether.
How else can they learn from their mistakes? And it’s much easier to
make adjustments on a smaller scale – especially since the rules of SEO
are constantly changing. Encourage affiliates to give themselves time
to grow the site before jumping to a new project.

Mistake 5: Failing to promote.

Promotion is extremely important for an affiliate website. Use SEO,
PPC, traditional marketing, and content efforts to get the word out
about your website.

• SEO. Make sure that they have optimized their metatags, titletags,
  H1, keyword density, and meta descriptions to improve the page rank.
• PPC. Encourage affiliates to start out with some basic
  pay-per-click advertisements to draw in more views to their page. Just
  warn them to calculate ROI carefully.
• Marketing. Have them send out emails or newsletters to get
  previous visitors to come back to their site. That way, they will build
  up some loyalty.
• Content. Adding fresh content to their site can be a great tool
  to promote. The more relevant information that you have on the site
  about the topic, the more you will prove your credibility.

Can you think of more affiliate marketing blunders that we should have included? Comment below and let us know!