Radio Interview and Elevator Pitch

I recently "elevator pitched" OpenTeams at the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship IT/Web 2.0 Forum. If you'd like to hear the two minute pitch, they recorded it here. I'll admit I was a little rough at first as I tried to avoid using my notes much, but I soon realized I was running out of time fast (they had a 90 second countdown timer), and smoothly finished out by reading straight from my notes. Not great speech etiquette, but I had to hit a lot of their checklist items in a very short time.

The pitch caught Russ Capper's attention from The BusinessMakers Radio Show, and he very generously asked me to participate in a longer interview at their studios about OpenTeams and my background. I'm used to communications where I have ample editing time (email, blog, documents, Powerpoint, even speech writing), so real-time, live-recorded Q&A was a bit nerve-wracking. But it went surprisingly well, and they did a fantastic editing job, cleaning it up into a very tight 18-minute segment you can hear here, or even download it as a podcast.

OpenTeams in 100 words

The Enterprise 2.0 Expo (see below) asked us for a 100-word company and product description for their web site and printed materials. It was an interesting exercise trying to boil down our essence into 100 words (a word count we somehow managed to hit exactly), which you may find a helpful shorthand for yourself or trying to explain OpenTeams to others.

OpenTeams is web-hosted collaborative software specifically designed to enable the agile, innovative Entrepreneurial Organization. At the business level, in addition to project collaboration, blogging, and knowledge management, it’s an "innovative initiative development environment" where employees collaboratively seed and mature new ideas for additional revenue, productivity, and cost-savings. At the technical level, it reinvents the wiki with an intuitive 3-pane interface similar to email and newsfeed readers, making it far easier for non-technical users to create, organize, and navigate content while transparently tracking changes. This dramatically shrinks the learning curve and ensures adoption while ramping up productivity, payback, and employee engagement.