cosinity blog

The current trend in communications is more (and more) communication technologies, providers, mechanisms and buzz words. Social Media, VoIP, Blogs, Wikis, Unified Communications, TelePresence, WebMeetings, SMS, IM, Chat, Mobile, MicroBlogging, etc.

You can hop on any tech site and see daily skirmishes over which technology is the best – or how you should leverage social media in PR and Marketing. But at the end of the day we are doing an awful job creating applications that solve real challenges faced by Small Businesses – which is ironic, because communication between businesses and their prospects and customers is a significant source of pain.

All this technology isn’t making the situation better for small businesses and their customers – it is making it worse. How many ways does a person need to make a phone call? How many “channels” of web reviews, posts, comments and rankings can a small business legitimately afford to monitor and react to. It is a deluge – and for the most part it is noise. And because of that signal to noise gap we are missing the real opportunity – Why aren’t we creating applications that leverage communications to make transactions easier (for both seller and buyer) and more efficient?

We’ve all seen it whether in our own small business or in our transactions (or attempted transactions) with small businesses. Annoying appointment reminder calls, customers who fail to show, unreturned phone calls, calls outside business hours, unanswered emails, frustrated blog posts, bad reviews, etc.

How many times have you attempted to get a contractor to simply show up to give you an estimate? How many times have you (Mr. contractor) shown up to do an estimate to find no one home? How many hours a day does the salon owner spend calling to make sure her appointments will show up… and how many don’t show up anyway?

Improving communications between small businesses and their prospects and customers is a huge problem space that has been largely ignored. It is a massive opportunity to improve both the lives of small business owners, by helping them acquire and retain customers and at the same time make them more efficient; and small business customers, by making small businesses easier to do business with.

I’m not just telling you this – I’m obsessed with it. So much so that it is now the entire purpose of cosinity. It is the whole point of page2call – helping small businesses get better at customer acquisition by making them easier to do business with and allowing them to better track the effectiveness of their online presence.

I’ve spent years (too many years) solving these problems in fortune 500 companies. And while I admit – most of the time large companies use these technologies as barriers to communication – that was in every instance a failure of vision and will. For fortune 500 communicating with customers is a cost to be minimized. For small businesses communicating with prospects and customers is a matter of survival – and when leveraged as an advantage a key driver of growth.

I know creating these applications for small businesses is nearly as sexy as another micoblogging service, or anything you can stamp social media on, but it does have one significant advantage. 25 million target customers who have no problem spending money to acquire and retain customers.

cosinity is sponsoring an Arizona State University Entrepreneurial CAPSTONE project.

From ASU:

Friends of ASU Poly and the Software Enterprise,

The beginning of the Fall semester is 2 weeks away, so we are ramping up efforts to identify Software Enterprise projects for the 2008-09 academic year. I am writing to solicit interest in sponsoring a project this year. Projects go through a 1-year cycle, with the Fall semester focusing on requirements and prototyping, and the Spring semester focusing on building and delivering production-quality software.

For those unfamiliar, the Enterprise is a 2-year upper-division software engineering capstone sequence, where juniors and seniors partner to execute a software project, with an emphasis on deliverable quality.

This year we are excited to announce we are receiving support from a Kaufmann Foundation to sponsor projects with an Entrepreneurial focus; to this end we are partnering with the Morrison School at ASU Poly to include business students who will take emerging technologies and perform market analysis around the projects. Therefore we are very interested in projects that have commercial potential inside or outside your organizations, and will be able to dedicate special resources to these projects. However, all types of software projects are welcome!

We are also excited to announce that we have moved into new buildings at the Poly campus, and our building (Peralta) includes space for the Software Enterprise! This gives these projects a home and provides an opportunity for us to promote your participation with ASU students! We have submitted an NSF proposal to outfit this space for project teams, please let us know if your organization has an interest in sponsoring this space as well. Finally we mention that the Enterprise has been published in the past year in the International Journal of Engineering Education, the Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), and an upcoming book “Software Engineering: Effective Teaching and Learning Approaches” (http://www.amazon.com/Software-Engineering-Effective-Approaches-Practices/dp/1605661023).

cosinity will be – working with ASU Poly and the Morrison School students – investigating an entirely new set of services leveraging our communications applications platform. We are exited about this opportunity to work with ASU to enhance the quality of the graduates produced and at the same time deliver high quality services to our customers.