Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Josh Koppel, Founder of ScrollMotion (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we do a couple of more scenarios and, specifically, highlight stuff that your technology can do that other ways of trying to achieve the same goals cannot deliver.

Josh Koppel: The first thing is paper.

Sramana Mitra: Brochures. You hand out brochures, and brochures are just not engaging and interactive.

Josh Koppel: Also, there’s two other big issues. There’s no analytics. Once you print it, you don’t know how it’s being used and the second thing is as soon as you print it, it’s outdated. Just the amount of money that these companies were spending on printing was outrageous because every time something changed, not only did they have to reprint everything but they actually also have to destroy the material because this is a totally regulated environment. It has to actually go away or there are consequences. Those two things were hugely valuable to pharmaceutical companies. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Ryan, CTO of Mobile Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the question that I want to explore, which is about open problems. You’ve already talked about the hyperscaling of mobile devices and apps in the next few years. If you were to start a company today, what kind of things would you work on?

Mike Ryan: I would look at how these revolutions have gone in the past, just for a little hint. Again, we look at this through the enterprise. If you go back to the days of PC, we had IT, mainframes, and customer databases. Along come personal computers, and along comes database three. All of a sudden, the company has 50 customer databases because departments went off and did things on their own. It’s the empowerment of departments in the enterprise that we think is most interesting in terms of growth. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Ryan, CTO of Mobile Labs (Part 2)

Mike Ryan: The delivery infrastructure is almost infinitely very dated. There are 97 manufacturers of mobile devices and hundreds and thousands of combinations. You have the challenge of supporting old technologies as well as new technologies. If you need to support a mobile phone that is three or four years old, you’ve severe disparity. That’s one segment of the challenge. The second thing is that app stores have empowered users in ways we have never seen before. When users post reviews with low ratings, you can get into some hot water.

The activity in the marketplace is astoundingly large now and it’s going to get larger. It’s expected that in 2017, we’ll see 268 billion downloads, which would represent $77 billion worth of revenue. You’ve this challenge with the environment and then with the users. Finally, you’ve the challenge of how to adopt mobility to your engineering practices. We think there is a need for a device cloud for infrastructure support for those activities. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: At the core, your innovation and what you’re doing with your company is around how the human brain learns. It’s not about mobile. It’s not about social. It’s not about sales. It’s really an innovation on how the human brain works. You’re applying it using mobile and social user interfaces on a specific business problem which is sales training and on-boarding.

Duncan Lennox: That’s absolutely correct. We talk about what we do as science-based and data-driven. That’s fundamentally our approach. It’s quite different from the classic approach to learning or education. You’re right that our technology and our methodology could be applied to anything. We’ve chosen to apply it in the area of sales but I think an important point is it’s true we don’t need mobile to do what we do. It’s also true that mobile turns out to be the perfect form factor to deliver our methodology. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 3)

Duncan Lennox: Another classic case for us would be on-boarding. Like a lot of our technology companies, customers are very fast-growth companies. They’re bringing on board a lot of sales people all the time. They’re also acquiring companies. When they acquire a company, they get a new set of sales people with that as well. The issue is what we would call time to productivity. How quickly can you get those new sales people up to speed on your products, selling methodology, and sales tools so that they can get out on the field and be effective?

Typically, that’s a process that can take eight to nine months with traditional approaches. We’ve been able to do a certain amount of that material up front with Qstream, in perhaps two or three months. Then get you out into the field faster and use Qstream to drive your capability and effectiveness once you’re out in the field.

Sramana Mitra: Is your customer base enterprise customers largely? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of games are they playing when you talk about gamification. I think what you’re saying is the concept of games as a method of sales training, yes?

Duncan Lennox: I think it’s a lot more than that, but that’s certainly a key part. When you talk about gamification, it’s important to drill into it a little bit. Because there’s a lot of people talking about gamification, but they don’t really know what they’re talking about. It’s a marketing exercise because it’s a hot topic. When we talk about it, we mean using proven scientific techniques to engage people and get them to participate in your application. It’s not meant to be cutesy or novel. It’s not meant to be a trick. How do we make the process of engaging in our application fun and interesting for them to participate? If they then participate, with the science and the way our methodology works, we will get the long-term retention and behavior change. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 1)

Qstream uses insights on how the human brain learns to power sales empowerment and training. It’s an interesting concept that could be applied to many other use cases, and it seems like a ripe arena for entrepreneurial experimentation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as Qstream.

Duncan Lennox: I’m the co-founder and CEO of Qstream. Qstream is a spin-off from Harvard Medical School. We provide, what we call, a sales performance platform to help organizations manage and improve the capability of their sales force.

Sramana Mitra: Give us a bit more color on this value proposition. Double-click down on some of your customers and tell us how, specifically, are they using your product. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2015: Twin Prime, Redwood City, CA

Mobile devices have increasingly emerged as the primary way to gain access to content. The average person spends more than three hours per day on a mobile device and 86% of it is spent on apps. But the sad reality is that mobile apps are at least three times slower than their desktop version. Not only does it hamper user experience, but it also results in loss of revenue — a 1% decline for every 100 milliseconds of delay. To solve this mobile performance challenge, Twin Prime was founded in 2013 by CEO Kartik Chandrayana and CTO Satish Raghunath. >>>