THE BLOG

Hey, We have totally missed the last couple of weeknotes. Mainly due to new work that have started up and projects that have had more work-intensive phases kicking in, but in my case it have also been due to travelling. Two weeks ago I went to Spain to walk parts of the Camino de Santiago de Compostella. I ended up walking the last 125 km and spend a week in the Spanish countryside. I can highly recommend it if you’re into more physical forms of vacation. I liked and while walking I decided that I’ll be back to do the full 800 km someday. The last months our research on the future of education have evolved and have been concluded this week – now we move in to the next phase of discussions and strategic decisions on which directions that look most promising. It’s obviously one of the hotter start-up areas right now, so decisions on how to move forward will be both bold and careful. Meanwhile – and as mentioned in our last weeknote – we have

Last week I presented at the Community Conference 2013 arranged by Seismonaut and the research based consortium CBI (community based innovation) which we are a part of. I presented a bit of thought provoking point of view on the topic of Community. Quite a lot of the presentations and the debate currently in community management and community making industry revolves around “engaging” customers through social media, and how to handle this through social media management. Often this is dealt with as if communities where something entirely new and unchartered territory. However, my thesis and statement, is that a lot of attention curretly given to this space – by marketers and communication professionals are handling this as “new” marketing and thus not able to leverage the true potential of communities in business. I raised the idea, that we need to have a deeper understanding of communities, before we can have a profound business based on communities.

Silence is gold as they say, the last couple of weeks we have been over our head in shipping some deliveries on our current projects and writing proposals for new ones. Good times indeed. The research is progressing on our project for Saxo.com where we are talking to a lot of people and taking lots of fieldnotes on what is happing in the educational sector. There is a lot interesting platforms and technologies emerging in the educational space obviously one of the hefty trends is MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Courses) like Coursera.com, udacity.com, Edx.org. The interesting part is not the technology or the platfrom as such, but the “un-institutionalization” that is currently happing. Education is moving out of the classroom. Again this is a telling example of how the internet is disrupting or reinventing the traditional institutional layers – allowing more people to access more content easier. The “job to be done” is constant – people want

Right now, easter holiday is approaching fast. And that is a very, very good thing. Last week and the working days in this, have been more busy than in several months. We are starting up a new project in the e-commerce sphere next week, and we have begun planning of a larger research/marketspace project related to digital traveling and tourism we will work on until the fall. We also work with on a very interesting project regarding the disruption of education in a digital and social world. In this project we spend a lot of time talking to teachers, providers of tools and platforms, producers and distributors of educational content and services and students. Actually we would like to talk to even more students – so if your a student on any level and are interested in sharing your thoughts and tell us about your use of digital content and tools, please get in touch. Before you leave for holidays, you should check out cphstartups which – as the name implies – maps

A couple of weeks ago we hosted an event about: Social Design – The building blocks for creating business on the social web. This was during the Social Media Week in Copenhagen. Our focus on the event was that social is a lot more than just social media. The event was very succesful, including a presentation about yours truly – we had great talks by Anders Pollas (Podio) and Martin Ferro-thomsen (Conferize.com) – One thing that stroke me was the lively discussion afterwards, everyone was really curious and very willing to think outside the frames of the social media context and acknowledge that the web is bigger than social media. Everything counts in large ammounts Today, Marketers and communicators are hard at work looking to social media as a great new way to engage users in massive numbers. In social media numbers quickly gets big, because everything can be counted. So followers and likers are incresingly become the end goal in of itself. The current best

Two weeks ago Google announced the launch of Google+ application sign-ins, which at a glance is the same as what Facebook and Twitter have been doing for a while. It basically lets Google+ users sign-in to apps using their Google+ profile information and allows users to share their user data from a service directly to their Google+ profile page. Much like Facebook Connect, it also allows them to sign in to web and mobile services and apps without having to create new user profiles while giving app developers the option to bring in these users social graph to make their service more relevant to users. So, Facebook and Twitter is already doing this and its pretty logical that is makes sense for Google to do this as well. But what do they add in addition to the stuff we used to – and more importantly where can it take them strategically? What it means for users and developers Apart from the stuff mentioned, the addition of application sign-in to the Google+ platform enables users to

It’s been a busy week for all, including Thomas who has been traveling overseas to San Francisco and headed out to Austin for SXSW 2013. This week we have been busy starting up our new project for SAXO.com. We are happy to continue the collaboration with SAXO.com and we are currently founding a team, where we will be working closely together with people from SAXO.com on the project. Working closely together with our clients is really a boon for the project and we are looking forward to get going. A lot of details cannot be disclosed at this time, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t the last time you’ll hear about this project around here. Also we in the midst of doing anaylsis and desk research on our project for DI (Confederation of Danish Industry) where we’ll be having a couple of meetings and workshops in the coming weeks, carving out a actionable strategy for DI’s use of social media. Also another great project landed on our desk a larger

Its been a while since we shared a weeknote. Last week we were too busy discussing new projects with collaborators and clients and finalizing some larger projects we mentioned earlier. And the week before that, we were off on a few days of holiday. Now, we are back. Last week was Social Media week across the globe and in Copenhagen we did our best to talk about what matters most IMO; social products and services. Martin was busy presenting monday and tuesday at events initiated by others and on wednesday we had 65 people at our office to discuss social products and services. Martin laid out the approach, perspective and skill set we have been building since 2005 and then Anders Pollas, co-founder of Podio and Martin Ferro-Thomsen co-founder of Issuu and founder of Conferize talked about their experiences. It was a great evening and from the response we got it seems that a more knowledge-based and systematic-yet-agile approach to building digital stuff that works is needed. I think

It’s now a month ago since we did our x-mas research on startups in which we interviewed 24 interesting startups and posted the videos to our blog. The purpose was to learn more about how startups work in comparison to established companies and what it means to be a startup in the midst of digital disruption. It was also important for us to get beyond the buzzwords of the lean startup movement and learn how the startups out there get their hands dirty with customer involvement and agile product and business development. Our research in startups will continue, but this blogpost will serve as a reflection on the 24 videos so far.  We’ve gotten tremendous feedback on our videos from you all. It really proves the need to open up the black box of startups and innovation. We hear a clear need to explore the essentials of how digital startups conduct market disruption, and also a need to further networking and knowledge sharing amongst this set of very diverse actors. This blogpost will

Time for our Weekly weeknote. This time it’s a weekendnote to be precise. It’s Sunday so I’m gonna cut it a little short. At Socialsquare we are really happy to see people excel in our work, but we certainly encourage everyone to make their work a passion or visa versa, make passion work. Beside kicking butt as a researcher, an dedicated student at the , our man Jonas has a passion for coming up with ideas and with entrepreneurial talent trying to get them to grow. He and 3 freinds has teamed up to make a project that enables construction inspectors to quickly make documentation on the construction by making an application for iPad that utilizes that iPad has a camera, GPS etc. to move a tedious task into a really seamless workflow. This idea was awarded at the Venture Cup finale 2013 with a first prize in the Mobile & web category. This goes to show that entrepreneurs are everywhere and more important find a real problem and solving it meaningfully makes a