We are exploring a collaboration with the Holistic Information Security Practitioner’s Institute (HISPI) to create Kerika process templates focused on best practices in security.
The first of these is now available: how to do a security screening for new employees.
This template is available to all Kerika users, of course, and will be improved in the future as we continue to work with HISPI.
In many industries, a small proportion of the users will consume a disproportionate amount of the product, and will provide the vast bulk of a company’s profit.
This is true in the beer business for example: the beer companies have long known that a small percentage of their customers will drink a vast amount of beer every day. (This factoid used to be a staple of marketing classes in the 1980s, when it was offered as an example of the 80:20 rule — 20% of the consumers will drink 80% of the beer. Which actually amounts to about a case of beer a day…)
It is also true for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses: Forbes reported in 2011, for example, that just 4% of Dropbox’s users pay for the service, and yet Dropbox is a growing, profitable company! The other 96% contribute indirectly, by adding to the network effect and recruiting others who have a 4% probability of becoming a paid-up subscriber of Dropbox.
These percentages can seem small, but they can quickly add up when you have millions of users.
Facebook has a similar profile of users: a small number of people are logged in obsessively, and these will provide the bulk of their advertising revenues — not just because they are more like to see the advertisements, but because they are more likely to view Facebook as a trusted source of useful content.
In this context, creating Facebook Home on Android makes a lot of sense: it doesn’t matter whether a very large proportion of your user base never uses it, if you can get the addicted segment to be logged in all the time. These people will drink all the beer you are selling.
When you sign up for Kerika, using your Google ID, you get sent to an authorization screen where Google asks whether it is OK for Kerika to access some of your Google-related information. One part of this involves access to your Google Contacts.
We often get queries about this, so we thought we would clarify something that’s really important: we don’t use your Google contacts to spam your friends and coworkers!
The Google Contacts are used for one reason only: to provide an auto-completion of names and email addresses when you are adding people to a project team. Here’s a simple illustration:
To add people to a project team, you would click on the People button, which appears on the top-right corner of the Kerika application, and this would show a display similar to the example above, where all the members of your project team are listed (along with their roles). To add a new person, you would click on the +Member link at the top, and then start typing in a name or email address:
As you type in a name or email address, we pass on this string to Google which tries to match it up with entries in your Google contacts. These entries start showing up immediately, and get filtered progressively as you type in more characters:
This matching of names and emails is done by Google, which means Kerika never has direct access to your Google Contacts!
This auto-completion is a handy feature: it eliminates a major source of errors, which is mistyping email addresses. This means that the chances of you inviting the wrong person to your project are much lower!
We have added a new template for our users: The Business Model Canvas.
The Business Model Canvas is an increasingly popular tool for startups to systematically analyze their proposed business model by identifying:
Using this template is easy: when you start a new project, you will find “Business Model Canvas” among the choices for Task Board projects:
You can also access the template directly at https://kerika.com/m/GFXC, and click on the “Use this template” button on the upper-right corner to get started fast.
Once you start your new project using this template, your task board looks like this:
Each of the main sections of the Business Model Canvas are presented as columns on this task board, and you can customize this as you like:
Individual cards on this task board are setup and ready for you to fill in; here’s an example:
The card shown above, as an example, can be used to identify one of your key suppliers. For this supplier (and for all of your other key suppliers), you should identify the motivations of this supplier: why this supplier would want to do business with you? Motivations could include:
For each supplier, you should identify the key activities that will be performed: this can added to a simple Google Doc, and attached to this card. (We have provided Google Docs templates for individual cards.)
And, finally, for each supplier you should identify the key resources that will be acquired; this can be added to the same Google Doc, or listed separately.
In this way you can easily work through the business model canvases various steps.
Using a process template like Kerika’s is vastly superior to simply printing out a large poster of the canvas, because the cards in the Kerika process template can be used to support conversations, manage content, track status, and collaborate across multiple locations: and that’s just not possible with a paper canvas!
The Business Model Canvas is also gaining popularity within larger organizations that are seeking to adopt (and adapt?) lean startup principles, so we expect that this new template will be of interest to a wide variety of users. And, by the way, creating this template is just part of an ongoing process here at Kerika, to capture and present best practices for a variety of professions and industries!
There was a debate recently, within the Seattle Tech Startups email forum, about the pros and cons of offering a right mouse-click option within Web applications.
The right-mouse click is, of course, a desktop paradigm, so the question is: when, if ever, is it a good idea to supersede the browser menu with your own right-click menu?
Here’s where we stand on this issue:
What do you think? Let us know…
We are trying to get back to a faster rhythm of releases. Our goal is to have releases within 3 weeks: we want to complete our development and QA within 2 weeks, and then use the third week for “dogfooding” the software.
(As you might expect, we are fervent users of Kerika! Everything related to our business is done using Kerika project boards, and to make sure we are putting out the best possible product, we use a daily build of the software on a test server. This keeps us firmly on the bleeding edge of our own software development: it means that we get to try out our software in a real-life scenario — one that is absolutely mission-critical for the company! — before we pass it on to our users.)
Our newest version, released today, contains a number of under-the-hood fixes that will help us manage our growing number of users. And, we are happy to report, our users are indeed growing: we are adding new users in March at twice the rate we did in February!
From your perspective, it’s mostly some styling and minor user interface changes that will be visible. We have a better way to expose the Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete functions for cards, having heard from too many users that they couldn’t easily figure out how to delete projects, we have more uniform use of colors, and there is a right-click menu for dealing with project cards as well as task cards.
The more uniform use of colors is a step towards a larger update/refresh of our look-and-feel. We have been hearing from users that our user interface is “too grey”, and we are working on that issue. We are also looking at improved notifications, both onscreen and through emails. Stay tuned!
Our next release is mostly about improving our Google Drive integration: we are making it a lot easier for you to manage your Google Docs from within Kerika itself, so that your content has a very useful “contextual layer” on top! Here are some of the improvements we be rolling out this weekend:
We are also improving the Kerika experience on iPads and cellphones: as before, you can access Kerika right from the Safari browser (or Chrome, if you prefer), without having to download any special apps, and we are adding:
General improvements to the user interface will include:
And, a final note: this version has taken quite a bit longer (4+ weeks) that our previous versions, largely because we allowed “feature creep” to happen… We kept adding usability tweaks to the release, particularly with respect to the iPad experience, and that chewed up a whole week. We need to guard more closely against feature creep for our next release.
Coming up: we are adding tagging as a new feature, which will make it easier to create quick filtered views of large projects!
Vimeo is really nice: great UI, much less cluttered than YouTube.
We are putting up our videos there now.
Cool! We just got our application approved, and now you can download Kerika from the Google Apps Marketplace.
The process was relatively smooth, and we are particularly impressed by the responsiveness of the Google team that deals with feedback from users — turnaround to our questions was just a few hours.
We will have a longer blog post soon with details.
A great article from the Wall Street Journal on which social media channels have the most potential to help small businesses: a survey they did resulted in just 3% picking Twitter as the most effective tool.
41% picked LinkedIn, 16% picked YouTube, and 14% picked Facebook. Google+ came in at 7%.
This matches our own sense for what works, and doesn’t, although the 7% that Google+ grabbed seems surprisingly high. Is this because of the increasingly tight integration that Google is enforcing between their search engine results and your usage of Google+? We haven’t seen any benefits at all from our Google+ efforts, and remain frustrated that we still don’t have a custom URL like plus.google.com/kerika…