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	<title>Amiweb</title>
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	<link>http://amiwebpartners.com</link>
	<description>We turn business information from a mess into an asset</description>
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		<title>Elaine Brant joins Amiweb as an independent advisor</title>
		<link>http://amiwebpartners.com/2013/03/elaine-brant-joins-amiweb-as-an-independent-advisor/</link>
		<comments>http://amiwebpartners.com/2013/03/elaine-brant-joins-amiweb-as-an-independent-advisor/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:53:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Amiweb</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Our Company]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://amiwebpartners.com/?p=2347</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We are pleased to announce that Elaine Brant has joined Amiweb as an independent advisor. She brings with her an immense wealth of experience gained in a myriad of roles that span various sectors. Through my client work on managing business change and performance improvement it is clear that users want simple intuitive tools to manage information for their strategic and day-to-day activities and decisions.  They need to be empowered to harness the right information to work effectively.  Information access and sharing tools are therefore critical for managing corporate knowledge. Elaine has over 30 years of experience in strategic/business planning, business change management, interim management, programme/project management, information systems strategies and implementation, for multi-million pound organisations and projects in the private and public sectors in the UK and overseas. She held a non-exec role on the Steering Board and Audit Committee of Companies House for 8 years.  Elaine qualified as an accountant (FCMA) and PRINCE2 practitioner. Working at a senior level, as a management consultant with KPMG for 6.5 years and then as an independent, her clients include: UK Civil Aviation Authority, France Telecom-Orange, manufacturing and financial services organisations, the Treasury, Cabinet Office, House of Commons, UK Atomic Energy Authority, United Nations Geneva, the Accountancy bodies, UK and overseas central government departments, executive agencies and trading funds.]]></description>
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		<title>Reducing a key cause of email overload &#8211; sharing links</title>
		<link>http://amiwebpartners.com/2013/02/reducing-a-key-cause-of-email-overload-sharing-pointers/</link>
		<comments>http://amiwebpartners.com/2013/02/reducing-a-key-cause-of-email-overload-sharing-pointers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:00:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Amiweb</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[AmiLinker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Thinking]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://amiwebpartners.com/?p=2070</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[For most of us, a day of work begins by confronting our bulky inboxes. Reply here, attach there, forward, and delete &#8230; a repetitive, but indispensable process that can sometimes take entire mornings to wrap up. It is impossible to give up on our email, which makes this love-hate relationship one that&#8217;s in desperate need of counselling. The need to share documents, discuss projects, meetings, is indisputable. Link sharing via email is one of the easiest ways to provide others with information, and to remind ourselves of important pieces that we find here and there. Link sharing helps us to broaden the horizon of information we can count on, to be sure. If effectively used &#8211; link sharing will help us deliver more accurate reporting and will help us to better use the specialised knowledge that most business problems demand. The main issue behind link sharing is undoubtedly &#8211; to manage the myriad of links that we get in our inboxes. The reality is that for all the potential that much of this shared information can have, most of it will simply end up in the same place &#8230; our junk box! Email overload can distract and affect your productivity Have you recently had a day of work in which you discovered that you spent most of your day replying to emails? If this has happened to you then you are familiar with email overload. If this happens to you frequently then, like many of us, you need to get email overload under control. Making matters worse, much of the email correspondence is composed of cc’s, bcc’s, notifications, rectifications, attachments, and so forth, all of which is meant to be managed and organized but not necessarily read and replied. In case we need to add a comment ourselves the situation becomes nightmarish as recipients here and there will be added to threads that soon become exponential in their growth. Managing our emails has become an overwhelming task that affects almost every office worker, regardless of industry and company size. A quick Google search on ‘email overload’ gives us a long list of authoritative articles discussing the main issues that cause and are cause by email overload &#8211; among others Inc.com, TNW, and CBSnews. Is it the right person? It is often the case that we need to discuss a project with our clients, but are unsure about the person that should receive it. ‘I have forwarded your email to the person in charge of &#8230;’ is a common phrase that usually ends in a snowballing process, where most of the recipients included in a thread are wrongly there. Those few relevant people will, in turn, have to scroll down through puzzles of unmarked information and unrelated comments. Multiple recipients, multiple replies? Sharing updates and attachments with several co-workers and clients can become a messy experience, because email is not meant to support conversations between teams, but between individuals. Multiple recipient emails end up quickly in trash bins or at best lost between innumerable messages. Few things can be as annoying as knowing that you received an email at some point with key information, but are unable to find it within the ocean of your inbox. When it comes to team discussions, comments and feedback, the best solution is to avoid trusting your email with the task. Limitations for setting your own email preferences Most email platforms come with complex personalisation options, which can be helpful to filter your incoming mail. Making categorized folders, flagging, and prioritising are helpful tools. The problem with email preferences is that they are not readily-accessible and will many times not allow for the refined archiving that you need. After all &#8211; an email was not designed as an archiving system. Dealing with an overflow of emails is therefore a task that takes a toll on productivity. Peter Bregman says that email has actually become a distraction, because it interrupts a smooth workflow and transforms into another break from daily activities. Checking and responding to email is surely not the &#8220;ideal break&#8221; for anyone, and nobody wants their workers spending their breaks answering emails. The nuances of email overload have driven companies to take drastic action. Bloomberg reports that some companies like Nielsen are even close to abolishing &#8220;reply all&#8221; altogether to eliminate &#8220;bureaucracy and inefficiency&#8221;. For most specialists the answer to email overload lies in taking advantage of social collaboration tools like AmiLinker, which can help you share, organize and archive links and information in a more efficient and intuitive manner. The key to AmiLinker’s success is that it can be adopted, without harming the productivity of your business, because it seamlessly integrates with your current devices, including tablets and smart phones. In all this &#8211; it&#8217;s important to make an intuitive observation that this problem (created by humans) is not really one that machines can solve. Tools to automate and manage emails sometimes contribute to the problem, and leave something highly flexible (like email) fairly inflexible &#8211; because they often assume emails are part of standard processes. The root cause of the problem is much more interesting &#8211; it&#8217;s an &#8220;email culture&#8221; and the mindset of &#8220;email me&#8221; to make something real. However, despite these largely human problems &#8211; there are ways that tools can nudge humans into new behaviours and cultures which actually help to solve the problem at their human root. Switching from email to social collaboration tools The idea of using social collaboration tools rather than email to avoid many of the messy complications of bulky email boxes is not new. The issue, however, is to find a social software that is convenient for business, which is not the case with the big social media players. During the Enterprise 2.0 Conference held last year in Boston, Formicary Collaboration Group (FCG) Vice President, Daanish Khan, responded when asked about the current solutions to email overload that &#8220;traditional email and social networking technology tools have fallen short in the enterprise in delivering business [...]]]></description>
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		<title>The most valuable annotations are human-generated</title>
		<link>http://amiwebpartners.com/2013/02/the-most-valuable-annotations-are-human-generated/</link>
		<comments>http://amiwebpartners.com/2013/02/the-most-valuable-annotations-are-human-generated/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:11:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Amiweb</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[AmiLinker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Thinking]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://amiwebpartners.com/?p=2039</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Sharing personal classification of content, editorial notes (when content is shared), comments, testimonials, reviews, and feedback has become part of our daily working lives in ways hardly imaginable just a few years ago. What started as photo tags and sporadic links have today become massive databases of information which, if transformed into practical and accessible communication tools, will not only connect individuals &#8211; but will potentially give any company a competitive advantage over those who remain stuck with endless emails and thousands of search results. Human annotations versus automation via semantic/NLP approaches We have all become used to analysing data, managing documents, and workflows with the aid of automated tools that simplify our work greatly. What in the past used to be a task that could take hours, can now be done in minutes &#8211; thanks to things as small as a filtering or flagging tool. Our ability to individually handle vast amounts of data, however, is limited, despite the many smart tools that live in our smartphones and laptops. The advantages of having an almost unlimited resource pool are dwarfed if we are unable to access it, analyse it, and use it in practical ways. Automation, which allowed individuals to be more productive, has been shown to fare poorly when we need to come up with innovative solutions. Unmarked sources of information, regardless of their content, fail to encourage engagement, and to help us choose the best solutions to common business problems. Managers facing this reality on a daily basis find themselves constantly asking the same questions: what is it that we need to regain some control and to encourage cooperative solutions? How can our company be sure that we are implementing the best solutions out there? If we take into account that Social Networks amount to 22% of the time we spent online, it would be obvious that the sharing tools should be able to answer these business needs. But, shouldn’t the time that people spend on social media be regarded as leisure? Well it actually &#8211; should not. A study by the Aberdeen Group focused on mid-market companies reported that those, who have taken advantage of Social Business deployments, were able to increase their revenue by 28%, with a 108% return on investment on collaborative technologies. What these companies seem to have gotten right is being able to recognize the value of the human analysis over the automated one. Humans are able to empathise, gain perspective, identify gaps, and propose new ideas in ways that automated tools cannot, because they cannot readily communicate with each other as human beings can. This is an advantage that has real and quantifiable value, an advantage that is essential for businesses today. Advantages from human annotations that your company may be missing out on There are key identifiable advantages from harnessing the value of human annotations, which all businesses big or small can profit from: Encouraging participation and critical thinking Today it is often argued that file sharing and social collaboration presents great opportunities for productivity. The reasons behind this have to do, mainly, with how sharing thoughts and ideas with others, in real time, can spring true networks of cooperation based on the opportunity that we gain to share our own ideas as well as to gain from the ideas of others. Human annotations encourage critical thinking by raising questions and proposing solutions. More than information, human annotations create engagement from all parties involved—from managers to interns—and motivate employees to stay on their feet by knowing that others will read whatever they post. AmiLinker is a social collaboration tool that will allow your employees to know that people with shared interests and known skills are reachable. AmiLinker’s intuitive interface encourages people to share projects, to invite collaborators who they know are interested and can add valuable ideas. With AmiLinker there is no need to adopt a new way of working or to stop using other social software. AmiLinker is easy to use, it naturally moulds to your current working practices making collaboration easier and communication more effective. Create real-time contact with employees and customers Social collaboration tools present a real opportunity for organizing campaigns or generating awareness. Internal communications can be boosted and highly improved with the use of social collaboration tools like AmiLinker, which will allow you to identify reputable internal sources, cutting, in turn, the often exclusive reliance on external ones. Human annotations will prove to be invaluable tools that spark conversations and motivate employees to participate beyond their immediate scope; in broader company goals and projects. In addition, having the chance to connect with your consumers easier and faster, to involve them more, and even to reward their participation, will make your business appear more approachable, and certainly more human to your clients. Use and generate expert opinions Any business needs specialised knowledge. In today’s environment of hyper specialisation and niche markets, it is essential for talent managers to be able to count with the right skills and know-how at the right time. Being able to make sense of all your information sources is crucial to identify valuable opinions and innovative solutions. It is a practical advantage that makes part of any business strategy today.  An effective communication strategy will translate into greater employee productivity and an enhanced customer experience. The role that AmiLinker’s tags and human annotations can play here makes all this too easy. By allowing people to easily and transparently share their knowledge, AmiLinker’s comments and tags wills encourage expertise rather than gibberish. What about efficiency? Thinking about social collaboration can quickly bring to mind images of idle employees spending countless hours checking Facebook, updating their LinkedIn profile, or chatting through Skype. All that social collaboration would seem to take a hard toll on efficiency. Experts, however, argue that putting too much attention on efficiency can be misguided. The reason for this is that the real risk comes precisely from focusing too much on efficiency. By putting their complete focus on efficiency many businesses [...]]]></description>
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		<title>AmiLinker &#8211; founding principles</title>
		<link>http://amiwebpartners.com/2012/08/amilinker-founding-principles/</link>
		<comments>http://amiwebpartners.com/2012/08/amilinker-founding-principles/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 04 Aug 2012 07:58:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Amiweb</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[AmiLinker]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://amiwebpartners.com/?p=1833</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Management problems You have invested significant time, money and effort in establishing and maintaining information repositories. You have implemented significant internal platforms and yet: Your people are still complaining that it is too difficult to find what they are looking for. You are not seeing the expected uptake of new information repositories implemented. They still keep using bespoke working practices. They still store links and attachments in their e-mail client. They are still using external sources where there are more reputable internal sources available. If this is you, AmiLinker can help you make a business impact without the need to move to a new platform or the prerequisite to implement a new enterprise wide solution or the need for “everybody” to adopt the new way of working. AmiLinker allows you to leverage your existing investments and allows the innovators to forge ahead without being held back by other parts of the organisation. How we approach the solution with AmiLinker Problems like information, email and attention overload are industry-wide and well acknowledged by many stakeholders. According to a report by McKinsey, email overload in particular has become a huge drag on the working professional. This is impacting the bottom line significantly, and the problem is increasing in size. Our thesis for helping to alleviate the problems above is logical &#8211; we have four “macro” themes that guide our product development: Focus on individual productivity. Our tool must do simple things well for the individual &#8211; it should be part of day-to-day work and alleviate very simple burdens for accessing, storing, communicating and discovering resources. It should also be agnostic &#8211; overlaying all current systems, both inside and outside the enterprise. In addition &#8211; it should be proactive &#8211; giving precise control of notifications and alerts back to the user, unlike broadcast mediums like email which are uncontrolled. A large part of the ideal user experience is what to exclude from the core solution. Complexity has always been an issue with enterprise systems, and we must aim for an enterprise-class tool with the appeal and usability of popular consumer services. Organising and browsing. We must offer an assured, future-proof way of finding and discovering resources through free tagging and taxonomies. As a tool that encompasses the whole enterprise, this would be the only solution which is agnostic to vendor and easy to use with all other systems through open data access. Sharing and collaboration. The essential themes of the moment are information and email overload, and social networking is part of the solution to that problem. Embrace existing systems and new devices. Part of the integration of our tool must include using emerging devices (like tablets and smartphones) that exist to make productivity and reading exquisitely simple and enjoyable. Secure integration with existing systems like social platforms and Outlook is also paramount &#8211; which makes the user experience far simpler and more familiar, assuring the highest returns on investment in our tool. As a whole, AmiLinker aims to leverage your existing systems to make them more usable. It’s a tool that excels in specific use cases, rather than a large suite of software &#8211; which tends to confuse users with complexity, and doesn’t excel at any particular use case.]]></description>
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		<title>Amiweb &#8211; founding principles</title>
		<link>http://amiwebpartners.com/2012/08/our-founding-principles/</link>
		<comments>http://amiwebpartners.com/2012/08/our-founding-principles/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 04 Aug 2012 07:34:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Amiweb</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Our Company]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://amiwebpartners.com/?p=1823</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We believe that almost all business tools today are missing a beat when it comes to considering the simplicity and ease of the user experience. Many complex, feature-packed tools look good on paper &#8211; but when a user lands inside of them &#8211; they are faced with hundreds of &#8220;features&#8221;, buttons and options. We intend to attack the simplest problems of all &#8211; the root of everyday work. This includes reading in an easy and enjoyable way, as well as being able to point to, find and discover any resource &#8211; no matter where it sits, or what it is.]]></description>
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		<title>Gerard Bredenoord joins Amiweb</title>
		<link>http://amiwebpartners.com/2012/07/gerard-bredenoord-joins-amiweb/</link>
		<comments>http://amiwebpartners.com/2012/07/gerard-bredenoord-joins-amiweb/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Jul 2012 08:59:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Amiweb</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Our Company]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://amiwebpartners.com/?p=1620</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We are very pleased to announce that Gerard Bredenoord has joined Amiweb as an Advisor. His experience is gained at the highest level in some of the worlds&#8217; leading professional services firms. We are pleased that he shares our vision for Amiweb. He will be instrumental to us when we intend to launch publicly &#8211; around mid-September 2012. This appointment seals and energises our core proposition &#8211; which is built directly from the many fantastic, private conversations we&#8217;ve been having with decision-makers at blue chips, law firms and corporates. We are very excited about the future, with very solid confirmation that many firms share our vision. Our time in stealth has enabled us to build out and refine our team, platform and products to be exactly in tune to real market needs. This is what Gerard had to say on his appointment: I have taken up a role in Amiweb as I inherently believe social technologies can significantly add to enterprise competitiveness Gerard is the director and owner of the boutique firm Knowledge Innovations Ltd. Gerard’s focussed on providing insight and expertise to help organisations manage their knowledge more efficiently and cost effectively. Having work at PwC for 16 years, where he had been specialising in knowledge management for the past 9 years, he has spent the last 3.5 years at Linklaters as the Head of Knowledge. His core competency (speciality) is managing global and multi-disciplinary teams focussing on changing ideas into real solutions that can be rolled out and utilised. His methods are grounded in collaborative design, development, and implementation. Utilising the cultural diversity inherent to global organisations to ensure solutions are representative of the organisation. He strives to understand cultures by living in those cultures and being able to respect the differences while finding common grounds to build teams in a short period of time to deliver organisational value. He has practical experience in providing advice and support on knowledge strategies (specialising in multi-jurisdictional networks), financial investments and metrics, implementation priorities, implementation roadmaps and organisational structures.]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://amiwebpartners.com/2012/07/gerard-bredenoord-joins-amiweb/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
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		<title>Link shortening for the enterprise &#8211; the well is much deeper</title>
		<link>http://amiwebpartners.com/2012/05/link-shortening-for-the-enterprise-the-well-is-much-deeper/</link>
		<comments>http://amiwebpartners.com/2012/05/link-shortening-for-the-enterprise-the-well-is-much-deeper/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 19 May 2012 08:05:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Amiweb</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[AmiLinker]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://amiwebpartners.com/?p=1158</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[According to bit.ly: It doesn&#8217;t sound like a large organisation might want internal or other URL&#8217;s associated to the org to be &#8220;crawled and classified&#8221; for a public index. In fact, if employees in an organisation are generating these links as representatives in any capacity &#8211; there could be large consequences if the resulting links could be seen publicly. Outside of marketing and outward-facing people, employees could also generate &#8220;internal&#8221; links within the firewall to share with colleagues. Clearly, if those are public &#8211; they reveal the internal (private) information structure of the organisation. What remains of most interest to us is that URL shorteners in the cloud only came about for one reason &#8211; to make a large link short so that it can fit into tweets, etc. It was an artificial use case. In the last couple of years, we have realised that there is far more significant value to be had in the enterprise than this simple use case, which only applies to the public web. There&#8217;s many business reasons that short URL&#8217;s need to work and be hosted behind the firewall, we&#8217;ve expanded on this idea very elegantly with AmiLinker. More so &#8211; we have mapped what else can be done with this concept. The vision is extraordinary. We believe the business value we have generated for it is very significant. Watch this space for much more.]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://amiwebpartners.com/2012/05/link-shortening-for-the-enterprise-the-well-is-much-deeper/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
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		<title>Item in Portfolio</title>
		<link>http://amiwebpartners.com/product/item-in-portfolio/</link>
		<comments>http://amiwebpartners.com/product/item-in-portfolio/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 16 May 2012 15:47:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Amiweb</dc:creator>
		
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://amiwebpartners.com/?post_type=portfolio&#038;p=1122</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Something here. More text here.  Something here. More text here.  Something here. More text here.  Something here. More text here.  Something here. More text here.  Something here. More text here.  Something here. More text here.  Something here. More text here.]]></description>
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		<title>Welcome to Amiweb Partners</title>
		<link>http://amiwebpartners.com/2012/04/welcome/</link>
		<comments>http://amiwebpartners.com/2012/04/welcome/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 29 Apr 2012 22:42:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Amiweb</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Our Company]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://amiwebpartners.com/?p=1</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[More about us is on LinkedIn We&#8217;ve only just started talking to people we know in London about our products. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Please watch this space for much more. We aim to write a lot more about the problems that we think about.]]></description>
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