Hive Live Podcast Transcript - Social Publishing for the Enterprise

Greg — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 21:18:10 +0000

This is a pseudo transcript I took of the Hivelive podcast from ColoradoStartups.com. When I read about HiveLive I was really curious because they are basically a hosted provider of a "social publishing platform" and it just so happens that I'm a developer who uses an Open Source "social publishing platform".

John Kembel's history:

design consulting firm (like ideo)
dodots - thin client browser/widgets before Dashboard was cool
hivelive: "enterprise social software"
- tap into power of social networks
- marketing communication vehicles
- amplify lead generation, insights, support
- flexible, cost effective, on demand, platform

2006 Founded Hivelive

Existing solutions are social software packages (blogs, wikis, forums)
They were either overly generic or inflexible
They didn't allow sharing
HiveLive is a unified platform - permissions and content richness "not just blogs/wikis/forums" for sharing

Existing Solutions vs. HiveLive

One common approach is to stitch together lots of technologies
People take a blogging platform, a separate wiki, a separate forum, social networking and try to build build unified package
The results are not good
So, don't staple together a bunch of solutions
HiveLive: Start with social networking, add on "hives" to share information

Why is social networking important to businesses?

humans are social
communities where socialization is part, but rather than being the focus, the business is the focus
tie business to customers - delivers lead generation, loyalty, insights, support all in one trust based relationship

HiveLive Competitors?

Hivelive is different in that they use building block rather than integrating point solutions
Configuration is via "clicking not coding"
Note: he basically dodged the question by not naming any competitors - in fact there are hundreds if not thousands

What about hosting?

It's completely on-demand

HiveLive's VC Funding:

Gruntech - east coast VC
The money is used for sales/marketing (launched at defrag)
Will also continue R&D in software

Who are the target users:

High tech - shared knowledge or practice around technology
Consumer brands with "depth" [i.e. Patagonia] where customers share values with company

The value proposition isn't all that strong, in my opinion. I think he ignores "social publishing" platforms like Drupal which not only enable a very similar feature set but do so in a way where you can have it hosted, or host it yourself, but most importantly there is no vendor lock-in and your data is always yours. I'd love to be able to see more about how the hives actually work, but the demos are kind of hard to get into.

In a review from November 2007 Anne Zelenka of GigaOm points out:

HiveLive claims to be “the first community platform to seamlessly integrate social networks with information networks” but they’ll compete in that space not only with Jive’s ClearSpace but also with Drupal, Ning, and even Microsoft (MSFT) Sharepoint. But Drupal requires coding for customization, Ning doesn’t offer the fine-grained permissions that HiveLive has, and Sharepoint will be mostly of interest to those with Microsoft-based infrastructures.

I'm not so sure about the "Drupal requires coding for customization part". Perhaps now that the GigaOm folks are using Drupal for OStatic they'll get more experience with it to know just how much you can do with so very little coding.

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