Sometime last year, via automated searches for “Enterprise 2.0,” I found myself repeatedly landing on this prolific blogger’s posts: Bertrand DUPERRIN’s Note Pad (caps intentional; that’s how they do it in France). Although sometimes a struggle to glean the intended meaning from his posts as the translations were a little rough from French to English, I stuck with Duperrin and have found his commentary refreshing and insightful. So, blame it on social media, but that’s how I first discovered blueKiwi– the company that employs Duperrin. I’ve since started following @bduperrin on Twitter and have drafted him into my ITSinsider guild of Enterprise 2.0 warriors.

Last week, the 2.0 Adoption Council kicked off our weekly “Demo Thursdays” with a blueKiwi demo. During the demo there were a number of features that distinguished blueKiwi in crowded field of competitors. As I mentioned the clean, nicely designed user interface makes it easy to figure out what to do fairly quickly. The platform is arranged in a people-centric design that channels content into logical groups. In short, the product has all the bells and whistles, but it has even more than I’ve seen from most social platforms. For instance, it includes a fairly sophisticated ideation feature, as well as support for mobile platforms. While searching around, I found a comprehensive blueKiwi review by Jon Husband when the company launched at Web 2.0 SF. Highly recommend that for further investigation.

Certainly in Europe, blueKiwi is an exceptional contender for your social software business. On our demo conference call, we heard blueKiwi described as “the Jive of Europe.” As I’ve been working with Jive SBS at the Council, and have continued to experiment independently with the blueKiwi platform, I’d have to say blueKiwi has a lot to offer comparatively. Once blueKiwi lands a few large U.S. clients, it will be soon thereafter we will hear blueKiwi’s name mentioned alongside Jive, Socialtext, and Telligent as a top-of-mind category contender.

blueKiwi’s ideation module.

I also enjoyed this introductory video from blueKiwi explaining the basic business benefits for social software in general.

Cross posted from CloudAve, specialist cloud computing blog.

It’s always nice to see something that’s not completely US-centric in technology, this panel included a great cross-section of European enterprise 2.0 visionaries. In the audience were participants from all around the world – South Africa, Canada, Europe (and Australasia believe it or not).

Parochialism – collaboration and community works very differently in different cultures, the example was given of private enterprise social networks working well in Europe, but not in Japan were workplace culture is completely different. There is a cultural chasm within organisations, both departmental and geographical – the best way to bridge that is to bring people together and enable them to communicate. Obviously though language barriers make that problematic - most of the time cultural differences online are rooted in language differences. I suggested that part of the problem is that English speakers tend to have an arrogance that others should default to their language – the panellists pointed out that “English is the Latin of the modern world” – a really interesting discussion ensued looking at cultural context around language, the example was given of the word “rubber” which has a remarkably different meaning in the UK and Australasia from what it does in the US, so that is a socio-lingual issue rather than a language one only.

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Luis Suarez, IBM Knowledge Manager, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist keynoting at Web 2.0 Expo Europe, Berlin 2008.

Let’s free ourselves from the email grip! Use social tools for more efficient knowledge sharing.

See link for NY Times article titled I Freed Myself From E-mail’s Grip: