Each week we feature our “Friday Top Five” stories, highlighting five things we thought were interesting, notable, or culturally significant. This week we are featuring stories from the workforce enablement focused team Valo Intranet and their innovative product and discussing how Linkedin is launching new capabilities to its core offering. How Accenture has jumped into the cloud business, Google’s all-new WordPress plugin, and how yet another all-in-one services offering has popped up in the fitness ecosystem.
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Story-1:: Valo Intranet Launches New Innovation Capabilities
Overview: Collect, discuss, nurture, and manage ideas directly from the comfort of Microsoft Teams. This is the new feature set that is quickly becoming one of the hottest feature sets from Valo a leader in Workforce Enablement.
Why It Matters: Over the few months you have likely heard me talk more and more about the importance of Intranet to help drive communication, collaboration, and details to the user population. And for many organizations they have started to execute across these areas. But as we get close to year end and need to develop fresh ideas for 2021 planning. Current tools lack the means to enable ideation and empower ideas sharing that will power an organization forward. This new solution from Valo is helping to address this issue and is one of the strongest solutions in the market place to address this issue. The added fact that Valo has such strong Microsoft partner and is so tied to the hip with MS TEAMS and is releasing updates so closely to the upgrades of MS Teams further demonstrates why this solution should be a component of any organizations WorkForce Enablement solution.
Link: valointranet.com | valointranet.com/valo-ideas
Story-2:: Linkedin rolls out new features
Overview: LinkedIn is rolling out its own version of Stories — the popular, ephemeral video and photo narratives that have become a major engagement engine on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. It’s also updating its direct messaging service with several new features like video chat. And it’s rebuilt its search feature to net in a wider set of parameters.
Why It Matters: I am less interested in sharing my stories on LinkedIn, I have Instagram for that. But I am interested in the fact that Linked is looking at new ways to share content. If you are like me Facebook is for random family pictures and connecting with my parents and family. Instagram is for fun, Twitter crosses over business and fun, and Linkedin is completely for business. As sales and personal branding have gone more digital as a result of COVID. It is great to see that Linkedin is starting to provide new feature sets to it, 700Million users. Now if they could only find a way to integrate their SalesNavigator solution with their CRM package in a more complete manner that would be a complete mic drop.
Link: TechCrunch Article Linked Here
Story-3:: Accenture Pours $3 Billion Into Cloud Investment
Overview: Accenture Cloud First launched with a $3 billion investment over three years to help clients across industries become cloud-based businesses. Accenture Chief Executive Officer Julie Sweet appears on “Bloomberg Markets: The Close.” (Source: Bloomberg)
Why It Matters: Most industries are only around 20% in the cloud. Pre-COVID teams like Accenture were eating that it would be another 10-years until 80% of most industries were fully in the cloud, but their estimates are that number will pull in much faster to 5-6 years. Now their bet to pour $3 Billion dollars into the cloud appears to come in two areas. Area one is with hyper scalars (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) or are providing storage at a seeming unlimited scale. The second will be by way of applications providers whose applications are operating in the cloud, I.e., SalesForce, 0365, Netsuite, Etc. From an end-customer standpoint, this approach is smart. Accenture can come into in and act as an end-2-end provider and the customer doesn’t have to manage multiple vendors. At definition, this is the best example of a reseller in the pro-services group I have seen to date.
Link: Article and Video Link
Story-4:: Google Launches a New Web Story Plugin for WordPress
Overview: Google’s new Web Stories WordPress plugin is now generally available in the WordPress plugin directory after releasing in beta earlier this year. Web Stories is essentially a custom editor that allows users to create AMP-powered stories directly from within WordPress which can be used to deliver news and other information alongside photos and videos in a way that site visitors can easily consume. Google’s new WordPress plugin also features a drag-and-drop interface that makes it possible for users to start creating stories in seconds
Why It Matters: Google is the leader in the search of the web, WordPress is the leader in CMS for the web. It was only natural that these two organizations would come together to launch new tools that allow creators, marketers, and brands story tell on their sites. I am signing up for this beta program and will provide more updates on this solution over the coming weeks.
Link: Tech Radar Article
Story-5:: Moxie your all-in-one online studio
Overview: Your all-in-one online fitness studio that allows you to schedule, get paid, host LIVE classes, stream music — all in one gorgeous place.
Why It Matters: The first questions for anyone who has seen this platform will undoubtedly ask; how is this platform different, how is this platform better, what percent of my revenue will this platform take from my bottom line? The answers appear to be 8% of the bottom line and while that might seem a bit high compared to say a 2% of a payment processor. The fact that you have all the tools under one roof makes this platform a one-stop-shop for instructors and allows them to focus on their marketing and delivering world-class performances. I also think that Peloton and Apple’s offering are both extremely compelling, so it will be difficult for individuals stars to get to scale to make it make sense to build a brand on this platform. But only time will tell.
Link: Platform Linked Here
