Thursday, March 29, 2012

Two More New Hires!

Details below on the new hires, but these are some great folks, and fun to work with as well!


Sentient Services is pleased to announce the hire of Meghan Bazaman as Research Analyst at Sentient Services. Ms. Bazaman has a Master of Arts in Advertising from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining Sentient Services, Meghan worked on the agency side at ThinkStreet, and was an Experience Design/Usability intern at Dell. Meghan brings a unique creative  and research driven perspective to global research clients.

Eric Vo is joining Sentient Services to manage clients and projects on the icanmakeitbetter.com social innovation and market research platform. Eric holds a Bachelor of Science in Music Industry/Business Studies from Loyola University, New Orleans, where he studied business strategies and technologies for entertainment companies. Prior to Sentient Services, Eric pursued his entrepreneurial interests by helping build online startups from the ground up, contributing to market research, coding, and online marketing (SEO/SEM). Eric brings a strong technology background as a coder and site builder combined with online marketing, and social community experience.

We are super excited about these new hires. The addition of Meghan and Eric to the Sentient Services and icanmakeitbetter team allows us to continue our rapid global growth, while maintaining impeccable client service and quality. We interviewed for 6 months before finding just the right fit of market research skills, project management and interactive expertise. It just so happened that we found two perfect fits at the same time – we got lucky!

Feel free to stop by and say howdy to them anytime. Thanks for your continued support and helping make Sentient Services and icanmakeitbetter.com a success!

Monday, March 26, 2012

Lessons from SXSW 2012

A great part of being located in Austin, is that it is known as the “Live Music Capital of the World”. Every spring, we have an amazing music festival called SXSW. For those of you not familiar with SXSW it is a weeklong festival of music, movies and cutting edge technology.  As I find myself in the trenches of SXSW this week, I continue to wonder, how did it all get started? I found an article that breaks down the origins of this well-known Austin festival (complete with nifty timeline and demographics):


The post begins by describing the amazing growth in popularity of SXSW:

 “What started out as a small avenue for 700 participants to share their common interest in music has since grown to more than twenty times its original size. The growth spreads across more platforms beyond music, including film and web tech. Today, South by Southwest Music Conference and Festival (SXSW) is a much anticipated international gathering of fun-loving and business-minded people.”

I believe that what makes the festival continue to grow in popularity is the central idea that people like to gather around and share their common interests. SXSW fosters a community of people that care about music, film, business, technology and emerging interactive trends. With the springboard in place, people will begin to congregate and share.

Looking at the highlights of this year’s SXSW interactive portion, we see buzz around applications designed specifically for improved sharing. For example, companies like Instagram , a very successful app for sharing photos with friends and family, joined in on the SXSW interactive panels, announcing 27 million users and plans to launch a new Android app very soon. There was also talk of a new app called Highlight. Highlight allows its users to learn more about the people in their nearby location. The app lets you look up names, photos, mutual friends and anything they have chosen to share. Meaning when you meet someone, you can see what you have in common with them.

The bottom line is that people will always find ways to connect around what interests them and what they care about. It is merely the changing technology, allowing us to do so, that makes festivals like SXSW so interesting and exciting.

At Sentient Services, we also believe in connecting people around their interests and ideas, just like SXSW and its event goers.

Our idea platform icanmakeitbetter can be used for market research, but more importantly, it’s a community where users can connect around what they care about and have in common. With icanmakeitbetter, members can post, share, follow ideas, participate in online discussions and take surveys with others. The end result of these conversations – help to improve what you care about.

See our platform at work with Dell and City of Austin.  

Monday, March 19, 2012

We have a CTO!


Yes, we, the market research company, now have a CTO! Read below for all the details, but needless to say this is very exciting and huge for Sentient Services and our social innovation and market research platform - icanmakeitbetter.com.


Sentient Services hires best-selling author and renowned developer – Bruce Tate (March 2012)


[Austin, Texas. March 2012. For immediate release.]

Bruce Tate has joined Sentient Services as CTO and will head up all technology practices, including Sentient Services’ groundbreaking social innovation and research platform (www.icanmakeitbetter.com). Bruce is an internationally in-demand speaker (Ruby World in Japan, The Server Side Symposium and other), and best-selling author, including the Jolt award winning Seven Languages in Seven Weeks and From Java to Ruby.

Prior to joining Sentient Services, Bruce founded and ran RapidRed which worked with high growth start-ups to rapidly build genre-leading web applications such as DigtheDirt. Bruce spent 13 years at IBM, including co-authoring several IBM patents and serving on IBM’s certification board for application development.

Bruce will be managing the icanmakeitbetter.com platform – a patent-pending SaaS solution providing crowdsourced innovation, customer engagement and market research in a seamless, scalable and dead-simple platform. Since its quiet launch by Sentient Services in 2011, it has changed the way organizations engage with customers, innovate and conduct market research.  

Sentient Services CEO and icanmakeitbetter founder Paul Janowitz states: “Bruce’s is nothing short of a huge win for us. Bruce’s proven experience with rapid application development for scalable social platforms with leading technologies such as Ruby on Rails will let us move quickly to build the next generation of market research and innovation software. Having Bruce full-time as our CTO changes the game. Expect big things to come out of Sentient Services and the icanmakeitbetter.com platform.”

About Sentient Services, LP
Sentient Services is a Knowledge Studio® - the amalgamation of market research, user experience and information design practices. We leverage these core competencies for our clients in product development, interactive, usability, sales, marketing and branding.

icanmakeitbetter is a patent-pending, revolutionary social innovation and market research platform developed from the ground up by Sentient Services. icanmakeitbetter enables organizations to create, share, and act upon ideas to drive innovation, engage customers and conduct market research.

For more information on Sentient Services or icanmakeitbetter, please go to:

Contact:
Paul Janowitz
512.288.1706

Friday, March 2, 2012

Building a Community around Interests

While surfing the web the other day, I came across a blog post by one of my former professors, George Howard, on his personal blog 9GiantSteps.

The post “Shifting Social Sands” tries to explain the recent phenomenon regarding the rapid boom of Pinterest and other interest-oriented websites/applications and how this boom sheds light on the way emerging companies should position themselves in the “Facebook era”.

Everyone (or at least 800 million people) has a Facebook profile. While Facebook is the market leader by a long shot, social network upstarts like Pinterest, Instagram, Chowhound, etc. are having a major impact (Pinterest share button now on CrateandBarrel.com!) beyond Facebook – how?

According to Howard, it is because social networks like Pinterest focus on object or interest-oriented networking instead of acquaintance-oriented networking (Facebook). The simple way to explain this is that Pinterest connects people through the things/interests they share in common, while Facebook connects people through other people.

This finding gives great insight to how emerging companies should think about building their network and customer base. As Howard says, “There is tremendous opportunity to rethink how we should be conceiving of networks moving forward. As I’ve argued forever, look to objects of interest (in some respects, the more specific the better) that people are passionate about, and give them the tools to better organize. Doing so will lead to far more durable, rewarding, and expansive connections than organizing around existing social connections.

This is what we at Sentient Services and those at other companies should strive to do on a daily basis. We work to connect people around their personal interests and things they care about.

While our platform icanmakeitbetter is a tool used for market research, in its simplest form it is a network that we hope allows our users to collaborate around ideas/objects that they genuinely “want to make better,” and then see the results of their collaboration. We connect people based on the products they use and the ideas they have. Through this they become engaged with each other and the brand through social collaboration. We allow them to become part of the brand/product through their ideas. Our users are able to post their ideas, receive feedback on their ideas from other users, and then see their ideas implemented by the company. This creates a depth of brand engagement that is hard to find elsewhere, and gives our users a sense of accomplishment once they see their ideas at work. We think the future of innovation, research and social networks lies in these shared “objects of interest” and making them better!