X.commerce Innovate Conference: will you be there?

Carolyn Mellor, who we met at Jono Bacon et al's Community Leadership Summit, is the rockstar behind X.commerce, the PayPal+eBay+Magento commerce platform. At CLS, she told the Causeit team about the upcoming X.commerce Innovate conference coming up October 12/13/14 of this year, which has great tracks and an impressive speaker list.

Check out their innovative use of their conference-promo site crazy-brilliant, too—they've looped in a simple hashtag-scraping tool in a slick interface to prompt conversation and a thumbs-up/down about the emerging ideas of commerce which people are tweeting about.

Plan to see Matt, Jeremy and MJ at Innovate, and check in as we'll likely be blogging and tweeting a lot at the conference. We'll put our intended schedules up as we get a bit closer.

Divisive Language

Of the ten virtuous act spoken of in Buddhism, 
four are verbal: not to lie, not to engage in divisive talk,
not to speak harsh words, and not to engage in frivolous conversation.

 —The 14th Dalai Lama

In business, it's often easy to focus on what we perceive to be broken or wrong. Instead of focusing on what's wrong, try looking at what works and what could work better. From that lens, what might transform in you conversations with other team members? What could you acknowledge them for producing?

There is a value of the Causeit vision which seems quite apropos to His Holiness' comments. In a recent retreat, we declared: 

Our conversations are about works or what doesn't work in servive of profoundly important visions; we don't dwell in the old paradigms of right/wrong, good/bad, blame, fault, guilt or shame.

What could you adopt in your organization to build consensus around a value of generous, compassionate communication that also produces the results you're committed to?

BlogHer BET

Kaplan University's Jacqueline Jones (Executive VP of New Product Development, and a Causeit client) speaks about "managing up" in your organization at BlogHer | bet

I'm here at BlogHer's blogher | bet 2011 conference. It's been great to see the amazing speakers talking about being a woman of power in business, how to "Manage Up" and how to deliver a pitch which is both effective and authentic. Here's the conference concept: 

If you're a woman who has a big idea that involves technology, the Internet or social media, we have an opportunity for you. With the leadership of 50 pioneering entrepreneurs, technologists and business leaders, BlogHer is hosting a special event for women who want to start something. Whether you're considering a start-up of your own, or innovating from inside a company, we invite you to join BlogHer's 2011 Business, Entrepreurism and Technology conference on March 24-25 in Silicon Valley.

Check it out by following @causeit and the hasthag #blogher or #blogherbet on Twitter.

New Vision, New Communities, New Offerings

Matt and I just spent the day in retreat to do what we always ask our clients to do: work on our business, and not just in it. 

Our new vision:

Causeit, Inc. is committed that human beings realize their full potential.

• We cause loving, powerful teams. 
• We work with technology which amplifies and 
extends human capacity.  
• We help humankind experience higher consciousness through awareness of our profound connection with others. 

Through our life-long work, we contribute to a world where people are loving, connected, effective and peaceful.

Our Values

• We are committed to the transformation of the individual in all aspects of their lives. 
• We live lives of service and work with people who contribute to the world. 
• We are committed that our clients and their teams 
are unstoppable. 
• We are committed to individuals being responsible for their lives. 
• Our conversations are about what works or doesn't work in service of world-changing, important visions. We don't dwell in the old paradigms of right/wrong, good/bad, blame, fault, guilt or shame. 
• We know that our clients are able to cause any result they want for themselves, their communities, and the world. 
• We are committed that people know themselves as 
perfect just as they are. 
• We love all people.

In the coming year, stay tuned for great new changes: 

CauseTalks

Causeit will be hosting CauseTalks, a showcase series of powerful, succinct, community-sourced meetups about everything from the architecture of teams to diversity to transformational communication. All that cool stuff we're always telling you about? We'll bring it to our new community space in Southeast Portland and will podcast it (and maybe even vodcast it) for you, as well as provide whitepapers online.

New offerings

Causeit will be unveiling new offerings in the realms of team development, cyborg anthropology, content strategy and community-building. They're top-secret for the time being, but we'll tell you more soon.

First Round Capital's Fall Party: Who's-Who

Causeit, Inc. had a blast at First Round Capital's [@firstround] Fall Party at 230 5th in NYC. We met a lot of great folks—and enjoyed showing off our project company Fliptography's event entertainment. 

Our first sampling of the many interesting companies we met:

Socialbomb

Socialbomb provides an API for the social web, and helps companies engage their audience, advocate their brand, and measure their social success. Read more on their site.

Knewco

Knewco's KnowNow! is a Content Discovery bubble that delivers semantically relevant links from your website to your readers, along with rich related content, video, and shopping choices, all without leaving the page.

CJ Jouhal

CJ is a bright and engaging entrepreneur and technology strategist. He works with companies needing direction and expertise when selecting technology solutions. Are you an e-commerce-dependent business but know little (or care little) about e-commerce? CJ can help you. Find out more at jouhal.net

Tag Man

The crew from Tag Man was there for the event—all the way from the UK—and excitedly explaining their tag-consolidation software. If you create dynamic, data-driven and higlhy-analyzed sites needing a container supertag to decrease load times while increasing efficiency and reliability, check them out. If not, you'll probably end up using a site powered by their software without knowing it. 

We're running a million miles an hour today with all of the great contacts we made, so we'll add more to the post later!

Black tea: networking drink of champions

Before I forget: I love black tea when networking. I just do.

• It freshens your breath, quite unlike its darker counterpart. The tannins make the bad guys go away. (This trick only works if you don't have sugar in it). 
• It has lower caffeine than coffee but enough to make your eyes track a little clearer. 
• It's cheap and everywhere.
• You can have it as zero calories and it is uniformly better than tap water in just about every city except Portland.

Economist: Reading Online Reviews, and Why They're Important

Just saw a great article on the importance of online reviews for products. According to the author, there are a couple of interesting bits of info for those new to the process:

• After about 20 comments, search engine rankings and click-throughs increase.


• Retailers needn't be afraid of a few bad reviews if they are confident in their product: "...a handful of bad reviews, it seems, are worth having. 'No one trusts all positive reviews,' [Google's retail industry director John McAteer] says. So a small proportion of negative comments—'just enough to acknowledge that the product couldn’t be perfect'—can actually make an item more attractive to prospective buyers."


• For products with a large volume of reviews, a ranking system for the helpfulness of reviews increases trust and allows for a blend of 'most recent' and 'most relevant' reviews to be aggregated into a glanceable area.

Read the full article in The Economist's 5 Mar 09 print edition "Fair Comment" column, or here.

The Importance of Asking About the Contract: Our 29-Page Lease

In my work with clients, I often remind them how important it is to carefully review documents before signing them—especially as it relates to inserting yet more provisions.

For a while now, Causeit has been searching for a new office space. After a round or two of false starts, including one we were almost ready to sign on, we found the perfect spot. What has the new place work so well is that we carefully crafted a list of wants (negotiable) and needs (non-negotiable) before we ever saw an office. We even came up with a one-sheet of what it might look like and a list of our needs and wants:

Our mini-floorplan and wishlist
This meant that when we looked through the lease (a generic and exhaustive document covering almost every industry and largely, of course, favoring the landlord,) we were able to quickly identify potential sticking points. Some of the changes we made:

• Negotiating a less-restrictive clause about bringing material in and out of the building (we have a lot of loading and unloading to do)


• Clarifying use of the office to include our deskshare concept for business incubation and network-building, so that no confusion would happen in the future regarding whether or not deskshares qualified as sublets


• Finding out exactly what we were permitted to do with the space regarding subletting and assignment (the process of handing off responsibility in the lease to another party) so that we know exactly what will happen when we go to expand

These are just little things, but, left unchecked, they can become a laundry list of little anxieties for the tenant as they attempt to conduct normal business without being in standing violation of their lease. As an added bonus, our new landlords were very impressed with our attention to detail in the lease, and knew that we were committed to open and honest communication—a bit of social capital (relationship) which could help, perhaps, in the selection process if we are in competition with more-established businesses when we next choose to expand to larger space in the building.

First Look: Comapping: Shared Mind Maps

At Causeit, we often use outlines or other organizing tools to help process the huge volume of information and brainstormed ideas in staff or client meetings.

comapping.comWe've struggled to find a solution that works to meet the needs of our clients across the board, though. Simple solutions like word processing documents are often too limited, graceful desktop apps cost money and/or are platform-specific and may not share easily, and web apps online only work with a good internet connection and often have limited features.

In a blog entry from GTD Times we may have found a solution in Comapping. It's not 'battle-tested' yet, but seems to be an affordable software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for sharing thoughts, collaboratively authoring outlines and mindmaps, and even beginning the work of coming up with task delegation. It looks like it will work both online and offline (using Adobe Air), and the interface, while not the sexiest, is a good blend of power and entry-level accessibility.

Jury's still out, but you can check it out at Comapping.com.

Posterous—One Email is All You Need to Have a Blog

Found on Guy Kawaski's How To Change The World

My favorite company of the day: Posterous. If TypePad is blogging, and Twitter is nano-blogging, then Posterous is mini-blogging. Or, blogging for the rest of us. You send an email to post@posterous.com with pictures, PDFs, video, etc, and voila! you have a blog.

The implications are awesome: anyone with an email account can have a blog—no server, credit card or even ability to remember logins required.

Steps:

1. Email your blog entry to post@posterous.com


2. That's it.