GoBuzz Product Blog

We realize we have been a little stagnant in terms of news, but don’t fear, we have been really busy developing out our core contact and industry media monitoring solutions to which we have received rave customer reviews. As a tenant of our existence we are continually searching for ways to make service professionals more knowledgeable of their customers and better prepared for any meeting. As a little treat for your patience we decided to see what we could build for simple distribution. The culmination of our work is meant for anyone who uses Google Calendar and likes to be prepared for meetings.

Introducing Fready.

(Fready means “Fresh and Ready” from urbandictionary.com)

How it works:

1. Fready – looks for upcoming events on your Google Calendar
2. Fready – extracts entities (People and Companies) from your upcoming events
3. Fready – Runs a Google Search, a Google News Search, and a Twitter search on said entities
4. Fready – injects the search results back into your Google Calendar notes. Receive those notes on your smart phone before upcoming meetings!

That’s it. Now you are prepared for your upcoming meetings with relevant customer specific information! There is nothing to download. Just sync up Fready with your Google Calendar and you are set to go!

You can get setup at:
http://www.getfready.com

Thanks!

Max, John, Aidan, Dan

P.S. As a side effect of rapid development, it is not polished. If you have ideas for improvement, let us know.

Does anyone know the most expensive piece of clothing in your closet?

It’s the clothing that is never worn.

The same goes for expensive enterprise software in a large organization. Our competitors software options have tons of bells and whistles which often go unused. They are meant to be centralized for the marketing department to deploy out to the ground forces but they often go unused and mis-understood by the majority of the company. At GoBuzz, we have taken a different approach, we work directly with the  ground forces (bankers, accountants, lawyers) to give them the tools they need to succeed. We make sure they know how it works and they know who to call when they need intelligence for any occasion.  

GoBuzz, the “Levi’s” of business intelligence.

Yesterday, I was excited by a Forbes report which proclaimed that Madison, WI was ranked the 7th most innovative city in the country. While I don’t normally take too much stock in these types of reports (except when UW-Madison is ranked the #1 party school) I have a feeling that this report was pretty close to the truth, give or take a spot on the list.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend 3 events, Accelerate Madison (“Cloud Computing 101″), University Research Park (“What every growing business needs to know”), and Capital Entrepreneurs (for drinks). Here were my findings:

Greg Lynch, a prominent attorney at Michael Best in Madison and a wonderful resource for local early stage companies, started out his University Research Park panel discussion with the following statistics. When he moved to Madison 12 years ago there was basically one Venture Capital Fund in the form of Venture Investors (with $20M+ in managed funds) and no formalized angel networks. Today we have one Large Venture Capital Fund in the form of Venture Investors (with $200+ in managed funds), Calumet Venture Fund ($10M+ in managed funds) which is 20 feet from my office, Peak Ridge Capital AgTech Fund, the recently formed Capital Midwest Fund II in Milwaukee, and Kegonsa Capital Partners.  We also have 8 well organized angel groups. These advances in our innovative city are due to lots of hard work, creative minds, as well as legislation such as the ACT 255 investor credits.

For lunch I went to Accelerate Madison, a community of entrepreneurs, educators and established businesses, dedicated to sharing successful business strategies and sound business fundamentals, founded on a common need for information technology. The group is headed up by Mark Gehring of Sharendipity. Greg Hyer, the Associate Director for the University Research Park, graciously hung out with me since I am fairly new to this community. While there I ran into Bryan Chan of Supranet and Vic Ranczynski of Venture Marketing who are GoBuzz’s outstanding mentors and who we found through the MERLIN Mentors group in Madison.

Back to our office at the Metro Innovation Center I get to walk by the open door offices of:

• Calumet Venture Fund
• Propov
• Local Dirt
• PosiPair
• Northstar Economics

For a night cap, I went to my first Capital Entrepreneurs meeting which is organized by Nathan Lustig of Entrustet. I spoke with a plethora of up and coming startups such as:

• PerBlue
• Door-6
• Hardin Design and Development
• GeoHuddle
• Sweet Impressions
• Y-Innovation

Speaking with Nathan Lustig I found out that Entrustet was recently featured on the BBC and in Wired. This made me think of other Madison start-ups recently featured in the news. Companies like Networked Insights which was featured on Tech Crunch,  Sharendipity who was a Tech Crunch 5o company and had a chance to meet with Mark Zuckerburg, Alice.com is mentioned all over the country, Local Dirt which was in Inc. and Entrepreneur among others, Brazen Careerist in the New York Times,  and Shoutlet recently receiving $2M in funding.

While I don’t always believe in subjective rankings, I can say that the opportunity to share with and learn from so many intelligent start-ups within a short distance and time frame puts Madison within the top tier of innovative cities. It might even deserve to be ranked one spot above Boston.

Also, before my day even started yesterday, I went over to the Union Terrace for coffee and snapped this picture on my phone, how can you beat this?

GoBuzz is constantly looking for ways to improve our search processing algorithms. Today we will be rolling out two new features:

1. The ability to search for derivatives of a name. If your contact is named Dan Voell, GoBuzz will search for Daniel and Danny as well as Dan. We know it’s just a little thing but little things can make a big difference if your contact is mentioned with a formal name in the New York Times. Similarly if the company you are looking for is GoBuzz Inc. we will look for GoBuzz as well as GoBuzz Inc. (Great work Larry!)

2. The ability to add “qualifiers” as a means to boost the GoBuzz Search Ranking. Let’s say you sell your product to University Bookstores. Your contact might be Dan Voell at UW-Madison. You can add bookstore, book resale, text book as a qualifier to your contact list search. If Dan Voell OR UW-Madison is mentioned with bookstore, book resale or text book, you will receive an alert. (Great Work Max!)

These are just little things, but combined with GoBuzz’s proprietary noise filtering system, they combine to create a cutting edge media monitoring tool for busy executives.

If you have suggestions or tools you would like us to add to our search, please let us know.

By people, I mean Microsoft. Below is a video about the history of Business Intelligence prepared as part of a promotional campaign for Microsoft’s BI solutions for Office 2010.

Larry and Sergey invited us by their Madison pad. Just kidding we ran by really quickly and took a picture before the police caught us. We were there for a webcast with Requisite Video

This should be interesting.  It looks like Salesforce must be infringing on some of Microsoft’s business.

Bloomberg mentioned: Some of the patents cover how the software operates, such as a way to determine which version a person is using to see if it needs to be updated, or features that make the software easier to use, including tool bars and navigation of menus.

These sound very vague and something that Microsoft could have gone after a variety of people for. My guess is that this relates to both Salesforce.com and it’s recent release of Chatter in relation to something that Microsoft might have in the wings, Outlook 2010?  I see this as a ploy to derail Salesforce a little as it looks to make a larger push into CRM with Outlook and Dynamics and a push into social company conversation with Sharepoint or a new product.

GoBuzz will track your top 100 Clients, Prospects, or Competitors in the news like a fly on rice. We will *call, email, or text you whenever they are mentioned in the news, in a blog, or on social media in a meaningful context. We will **not contact you when they mention what they ate for lunch on Twitter. You can use our propietary website to dig deeper for information about your contacts.

* Whatever is the most convenient and effecient for you the customer
** We have actual human beings monitoring the news for you the customer

Hi everyone, Max and I will be on Requisite Video’s Live Show next week, please tune in. 

Please check out the following links -

Blog: http://requisitevideoknowthis.blogspot.com/
Facebook Event Page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=126413544039607
Livestream Channel for day of show: http://www.livestream.com/requisitevideohq

For the umpteenth time I was asked by someone today why he should use GoBuzz instead of Google Alerts. This is a great question and one I love to answer.

Me  ”do you currently track all of your customers and prospects with Google Alerts?”
Other Person “No”
Me “why not?”
Other Person “It would take too much time”
Me “You can set up GoBuzz in a minute and be tracking your contacts in the news in 2 minutes. Also, we work with Outlook, Gmail, and Linkedin to track additional relationships as the arise”
Other Person “Wow, that’s convenient”

Me “Does anyone at Google know your business and look for articles you might be interested in? Have you ever actually spoken with anyone at Google? Is anyone there interested in providing you intelligence to help your business grow?”
Other Person “No”

Me “Does Google look for alternative spellings of people and companies in alerts (JPMorgan Chase vs. Chase)?
Other Person “I’m not sure”
Me “They don’t”

This isn’t exactly how the conversation went but you get the idea. I’m not trying to pick a fight, Google Alerts is an amazing tool for tracking keywords but if you have a large contact list, are a busy service professional and are looking for a networking edge, GoBuzz is your tool.