The Much-Needed Makeover for Communities and Forums!

With the surge in social networking web sites, it is almost like a norm to be connected to each other through these sites. Logging in to a site and being updated with everything connected to your friends’ lives is like an addiction! Timely updates help us to keep a track on what’s happening in town or the hippest party for the weekend. There are many like me, who use web sites like these to find and interact with likeminded people on the web.

I am a member of various web design communities which I often visit to be updated about the latest trends in this field. Last week, I was reading an article on web design tools and I had few questions about the points mentioned in that article. I was very anxious and I felt it would have been good if I could have a community on this very page itself so that I could ask my questions and get instant feedback! I knew that there were many people at that very moment who were reading the same article. It would have been great if I could interact with them directly rather than going to other web sites and forums and posting my queries there. This usually translates into an endless wait that lasts for days or maybe even months, to get my queries resolved.

This is a common problem with most of the communities and forums. Most of the communities are not in context with what we are reading. Hence, I still feel disconnected with the people who are interested in reading the same article which I am reading at that moment. Many communities serve as a good meeting point to share information rather than discuss and interact on the topics. This creates the need to have an easy solution where people of similar interests can discuss and share things easily with one another on the go.

Thankfully, there is a tool named TeemingPod! It allows users to interact and share information online through various activities. Keeping the needs of the users in mind, TeemingPod is engineered to make social interaction much easier! Once you float TeemingPod on your page, you can begin a discussion, generate a poll, gather diverse views, post important links on various subjects and much more! Use it on your own web site and see an increase in the engagement factor amongst users. Allow users to interact on the topic on that page itself to get faster and better results.

The complete answer to online social interaction…TeemingPod. Bring about a new wave of innovation online!

Online Shopping Just Became an Interactive Venture!

We all know how shopping is amongst the most favored activities and this is evident with the number of boutiques and shopping malls that are mushrooming every where. Retail therapy is very much in vogue and companies are doing their best to woo customers! From up-market shopping areas to classy service for esteemed clientèle, companies are constantly trying to upgrade their approach towards the way they handle their steady clientèle.

Websites are often the face of the company as it gives information regarding the company, products offered and services etc. Online shopping is often considered to be an easy option by people who do not find the time to browse through stores. It’s a must therefore to have a web site that portrays the company in the correct manner and creates interaction amongst the users and even with the web site owner.

As a web site owner of any clothing brand or designer label, you must bear in mind that you need to attract users and interact with them. Trusted customers can interact with other customers too, sharing their experiences about the site and products. The addition of such types of interactions gives an added boost to a well-designed layout.

You can let customers share their views about a product through a discussion. How about answering queries put forth by customers through FAQ where the answers are provided by other customers, who have used the product or service. This proves to be a better solution rather than waiting for a support representative to answer such questions! Customers are more comfortable while purchasing certain things once they know that some another customer with a similar requirement has purchased it earlier and the product has fulfilled its requirements to the fullest.

Set up a poll for your customers to know their priorities, like’s and dislikes. You can involve customers to create various new product reviews. Let your customers experience that your web site allows them to interact with other customers and that their inputs are valuable for you. With social interactions, you can’t really go wrong with your business goal. Fret not! All this can be done through one single social interaction tool named TeemingPod.

TeemingPod allows you to embed social interactions right inside your web site. A user does not have to leave your web site to know more about the product. You can enjoy interacting with your customers using FAQ, Spot Polls, Debates etc. in a structured way that gets rid of the clutter. TeemingPod will thus provide a space for people who share similar interests to get together and interact in one Pod on a web page. Now, watch that do wonders for your business profile!

I think you sure do need to check out the free trial to know what TeemingPod is all about! I am sure; you will not be able to resist the temptation to float your own Pod on the web site!

Click here for a free trial.

Online Meetings Made Engaging Through TeemingPod

Meetings and conferences, these are a part of a professional life. Be it any profession, meeting together for brainstorming sessions or conducting conferences with clients who are overseas is a must for any business. This is when we have conference calls or webinar sessions to discuss, solve, disseminate information or even conduct polls to gather majority opinion. I am sure everyone of us have already faced such situations on the professional front. 

A typical day in any professional company requires one to interact with team members and conduct group discussions for a given task. With the teams going global, all of these team members are never in the same premises to book a conference room and resolve the matter. Also, due to busy schedules, it becomes difficult to gather all of them under one roof. Hence, most conference meetings or webinars are conducted online. During the call if a decision needs to be made, the message is sent via chat to which the members reply using the same chat window. The chat window displays the views of all the members in a very unorganized way making it very difficult to take a decision immediately.

So, how does one probably ease such situations at work? It is necessary that one finds an easy way to organize information and make use of a fixed structure to make faster and timely decisions.

TeemingPod is a tool which helps to organize information in a structured way and streamline the whole process. It is a SaaS component which enables you to add powerful social interactions right into your web pages. With TeemingPod, you can interact on any web page without moving from the current page. 

You might wonder how a social interaction tool can help in such online meetings! Well, it's pretty simple. You can create a TeemingPod account and invite all your team members to that pod. Pre-meeting, members can add their queries and concerns in the pod to which others can reply using FAQ and discussion activities. Hence, before the meeting commences, all the members can share information, thus making the calls more fruitful and decisive. During the call, everyone can login to the pod and can ask questions and reply to answers, share useful links etc., thus sharing information in a structured way.

When the times comes to take a decision, all of them can cast their vote and TeemingPod can show instant results in various graphical forms like pie-chart and bar graph. Thus, it helps to take instant decisions.

To add to its advantages, users can take a back-up of discussions in the pod for future reference! To top it all, it can be done in a structured and detailed way. Isn’t this something everyone loves to view as compared to an unformatted text file?

This approach is not only being used by teams for discussions or taking decisions, but also being used by CEOs to make a company wide presentation to share its vision!

Isn’t this just the right tool to be used for making any live presentation? We leave that up to you once you check out the free trial session!

Visionwiz: TeemingPod–Add Powerful Social Interactions To Your Webpage

Visionwiz: TeemingPod–Add Powerful Social Interactions To Your Webpage

Add Powerful Social Interactions, Easily…

A typical day in any professional company is never complete without discussions, meetings, brainstorming sessions and exchange of ideas and opinions. This can include collaborating with larger groups of people and trying to note down everyone’s ideas and suggestions. After all, social interaction is very much necessary if you wish to perform well in any given task. And this is something I first noticed when I began my steps on the professional front. I had to converse and meet many team members to know about the thought process and ways to improve my project.

A simple situation that I faced while collecting data for my project was the need to mingle with different team members. A senior suggested the use of online webinar and conference sessions. I eagerly lapped the idea and the end result – plenty of documents that had to be sorted out and a need to maintain everybody’s viewpoints. With already more than enough work on hand, I had this additional task of taking care of inputs and maintaining all views of people who did not agree with the reports.

Then one fine sunny evening, things changed when the team members yelled ‘Eureka!’ When I did grasp what all the excitement was about, I almost joined in the encore. They were celebrating the creation of a very unique product. This was designed to make social interactions easy and gave a whole new definition to the way a person interacted online!

TeemingPod, the new product on the block, is an innovative idea created by our team of inspiring engineers. TeemingPod surely changes the way a person interacts online. With this product, a user can use powerful social interactions right inside a web page to interact with others. It also provides a structured way of storing information which helps reduce all the discussion clutter stored in document format.

So did TeemingPod change the way I work?! It is a true marvel that now I can start a discussion or a poll required in one go and contact the concerned group through TeemingPod. Within a matter of minutes I can know about a group opinion in a single meeting! The FAQ section is where we post any questions related to the task and receive valuable and genuine feedback from all team members. It helps us to clear our doubts before the meeting. Thus we all are on the same platform and the meetings are much more fruitful.

Further, debate activity is the one which has resolved most of my issues. Through this activity I can review important, contradictory inputs from different sets of people without maintaining them in multiple documents. This also becomes helpful for all of us to refer to in our further follow-up meetings. Through the Link Set option, we can share important work-related links for reviews. The Tag Cloud section is where I can share and search for key words that saves time for the entire team!

Since then, there has been a complete change in the way my entire team works. We no longer have to manage multiple files that contain inputs. Our meetings have become more fruitful as most of the background information is already shared through TeemingPod for all of us to look at. Apart from saving time, TeemingPod added a fun element to the way we work. So, isn’t it time you tried it out as well?

Harbinger Releases Raptivity Web Expert

Harbinger Knowledge Products today announced the release of Raptivity Web Expert, a break-through software product that helps web designers and developers add deep and meaningful interactions quickly and easily to their web sites.

With interactivity, web page visitors stay longer, engage better and return sooner to web sites. Raptivity Web Expert leverages the award-winning Raptivity technology, which is based on Harbinger’s unique Rapid Interactivity approach.

““As a global leader in interactivity software, we believe that interactivity is a giant leap forward from mere user interfaces. Unlike user interfaces, interactivity is about keeping the user engaged on the web page. Interactivity provides a whole experience of doing stuff differently on the web page – using a 3D navigational space, a flip book, an interactive animation or a panning card deck, for instance. Raptivity Web Expert makes it easy to add such experiences to the web”, said Vikas Joshi, Chairman and Managing Director, Harbinger Group.

With Raptivity Web Expert, people can add interactivity to their web pages with minimal learning and absolutely no programming. Licensed perpetually and royalty-free at $99 under a special limited-time promotion, Raptivity Web Expert provides a unique library of rapidly-customizable templates, known as interaction models. Interaction models are, in turn, based on most common ways users interact with web content. The output of Raptivity Web Expert is based on accepted industry standards, easily distributable over the Internet, and does not require any proprietary plug-in.

“Web developers are constantly under pressure to deliver more for less. Raptivity Web Expert makes the job of building interactions quick and easy, in an economical way. The launch offer of Raptivity Expert gets them up and running at a low cost. Converting web sites into interactive experiences is now within everyone’s reach,” said Seema Chaudhary, President, Harbinger Knowledge Products Inc.

To know more about Raptivity Web Expert, visit http://www.raptivity.com/webexpert/

Social Interaction - Way To Boost Your Web Site

Surveys have confirmed that the main growth in the use of the Internet is in the area of "networking". Connecting people is a significant part of the Internet through use of web sites to discuss things with like-minded people.

Until recently, the only way of being connected was via email. That is mostly one-to-one and has inherent delays. Nowadays, you can share text, audio and video using social networking sites. These are not one-to-one, but many-to-many and are also immediate. Groups of like-minded people are getting together, swapping information and passing on useful ideas and products.

But for those people trying to earn money online, it's good to understand the fact that there is this essential human need for people to interconnect when online. If your business web site doesn't have any means of interconnection, you are less likely to attract the modern Internet user, who sees interaction as fundamental. No longer can your business rely on a support email address or a "contact us" form.

These days you need to allow your web site visitors to interact with you AND with each other. That means you need a forum, for instance, or at the very least a blog where people can comment on what you've written. You could also do with the ability for people to add content to your web site, such as articles, images or video clip. Such features in a business web site will help create a sense of belonging, of identity.

In the future a good business web site will be one where a community of people meet together to discuss what the business offers. Internet users in the modern broadband connected world want interactivity. If your web site doesn't offer some kind of interactive feature, you will lose out to competing web sites that do.

TeemingPod is one such a way to allow people to interact with YOU and other site visitors. It is a platform that helps you embed powerful social interactions right inside a web page. It allows people to interact in various forms like discussions, doing a poll, sharing useful links etc. It also has a cool looking user interface to attract more visitors to use it.

To know how TeemingPod helps sizzle up your website, check out this post.
To know how TeemingPod helps add interaction to your site, visit our website or view demo.

Speaking of Eating Your Own Dog Food…

TeemingPod was designed for web developers who want to add social interaction to sites and applications. As someone involved in the making of TeemingPod, I’m quite excited about the platform. So, when someone asked me last week “How do YOU use TeemingPod?” I thought I would reply through this post.

Speaking of eating your own dog food, we use TeemingPod in a variety of innovative ways, and today I am going to describe the most unusual one.

The TeemingPod product team uses TeemingPod to report their daily work activities. Surprised? Wonder how they do it? Read on…

First, the background. Flash back to January 2008. Every Friday, my inbox received weekly reports from all ten engineers in the product team, and my task was to consolidate them in one report. It was a tedious job to get a snapshot of the week’s output from ten different reports. It got worse as the team grew.

There were further challenges: keeping the reports organized in folders, making them accessible during travel, tracking who has not reported, going back and forth to get reports in the right format, and so on. All this consumed a huge amount of my productive time.

Now, the big idea. One Friday, when I was fretting over this weekly chore, one team member came up with a bright idea: Can’t we use TeemingPod instead of these reports?

The objections were immediate: TeemingPod has polls, debates, FAQs and so on, but it does not have a “Reporting” activity. That wouldn’t stop our creative minds, so someone suggested: Can’t we use the Debate activity for reporting?

“How so?” I asked. And the ideas flowed. Everyday, we could create a “debate”, identified by today’s date as the “topic.” Every team member’s work becomes a “view” within the debate. Each team member simply logs into the pod and enters his “view” of the day. The team manager accesses the pod to get a daily report.

That day we realized that creativity has not stopped at the product itself, but it continues on how can we effectively use a TeemingPod activity in our day-to-day life.

The system went into operation in February 2008.

Fast forward to today. We have been using this reporting mechanism for almost a year now. Our team reports that TeemingPod has had over 250 “debates” as of today, which I can scan in no time by simply accessing the pod. I can search for information in a single click. Now searching for information like bug 239 is no longer time-consuming. Nor do I have to worry about reports while traveling. There is no headache of arranging them in a proper format and no back and forth of emails. It is all there in a single pod and a single click away, anytime, anywhere!

Of course, the content of the pod is secured, as only my team members are invited to the pod.

Now for the bonus benefits. TeemingPod has helped me a lot to raise my team’s enthusiasm and motivation. If a team member does a great job or solves a complex issue, I simply give him or her a TeamingPod thumbs-up. This increases their ranking on that day (their view’s ranking in the debate). This has introduced a healthy competition within the team to do their task in the best possible way and become the team member of the day.

This is how we have been using TeemingPod as a daily reporting tool for a year. I can definitely state that usage of TeemingPod is limited only by its users’ creativity!

How Blogs Are Going Social

As blogging evolves, one natural trend that is emerging strongly is making your blog more social. It becomes less of something to simply read, and more of a community destination in which to interact.

How does one make a blog a happening place? How does one involve readers in expressing themselves? How to provide interaction beyond “leave a comment”?

Obviously, you need to provide a space on your blog for your readers to do things together. You want to enable your users to poll, debate, ask questions, leave useful links and perform group search. The idea is to bring community features to life on your blog and stimulate social interaction.

One solution is to add widgets. For example you can add a poll through Poll Daddy. Or add a microblog through Twitter. Or simply throw in a Google gadget – but you want to be sure the gadget goes beyond just providing information. You want social interaction, not just content syndication.

You can use all these disparate platforms or simply use TeemingPod. TeemingPod is a platform that helps you embed powerful social interactions right inside a web page.
TeemingPod not only helps in adding web2.0 sizzle to a blog but also helps the blogger to interact with the readers in various forms like debate, share links, questions and answers, poll etc. It also helps blog readers to collaborate with each other, apart from the blogger, who share the same interest.
To know how to TeemingPod helps sizzle up your blog, check out this post.

For More Info… Please Don’t Leave This Page!

How many times do you go to a web page looking for some information, and find only a part of what you are looking for? Then you have to leave the site and rely on search tools or discussion groups to hopefully serve up some additional relevant material on the topic. Information revolution has made available every possible information just a click away. However, it has had an unfortunate side effect. While it benefits from expanding information availability, the amount of time it takes to find the right answer impedes productivity and drives up costs.

There are various tools which help reducing the time to search for the right kind of information. Like Google blog search, yahoo forum search, Google website search etc. But, still they have their own limitations.

A solution which would give all the related information with the topic we are searching for is desired in this age of information revolution. This knowledge base would be created by users which share same interest and read similar articles. Hence, the information would be relevant.

On the other hand, content owner of a webpage would also benefit by gaining insights of users' thinking, their questions and even their knowledge of the topic.

TeemingPod offers one such solution to maximize business value from information. It provides a flexible platform designed to enhance information sharing and communication in-context (/embedded) with the topic being discussed on that web page. When a user does not find information on web page, one can look for the information in TeemingPod embedded in that page. User can ask questions, reply to queries, leave behind useful links related to the web page, discuss the topic with other readers sharing same interests etc.

Every reader can contribute information relevant to the web page in the pod, thus enriching the web page content with additional information. Readers can streamline sharing of trusted knowledge that can significantly improve content of the web page.