Spoke Software Website: Spoke.com Summary: Spoke Software is an early leader in the �social network visibility� space, i.e., software that gives visibility into existing social networks and allows both individual users and organizations to leverage them. Their primary initial focus is accelerating the sales process. In addition, people are using their software for job searches and hiring, contact updates, business development, and general networking. Spoke indexes your relationship database and past emails to analyze whom you know, and how close that relationship is. You can upload your relationship database and past emails from Outlook, Eudora, or Lotus on Windows 2000 or XP; or Hotmail, Yahoo!, or a POP3 server for email on any platform (Mac included). You can also update your personal profile on the system. Membership: Over 12 million people are now in the Spoke database and reachable. Of course, the number of people who have actually downloaded and installed the software is much smaller. As of December 2003, on the Spoke public system, there are users from 11 top consulting firms, 17 top finance firms, 32 Fortune Top 100 companies, and over 30 venture funds. 11% of users are CEOs or presidents. 7% are other executives, principals or founders. 6% are general partners or partners. 11% are managing directors or directors, and 14% are general managers or VPs. Founded: Early 2002 Founder/CEO: Ben T. Smith, IV. Previously, Mr. Smith led the West Coast operations of the Kearney/EDS Venture Development Group Corporate Overview: Spoke has attracted a high quality management team: alumni of EDS, Oracle, Sun, Siebel, Kana, Inktomi, Yahoo, Netscape, Peoplesoft and others. It has also raised over $20.9 million in venture capital from US Venture Partners, Sierra Ventures, Partech International, and Doll Capital Management. In addition, the firm has filed over 15 technology patents, although their defensibility and merit are yet untested. Fees: The individual professional version of Spoke is free. In addition, you can search the Spoke Showcase Network (all of their publicly accessible data) from SpokePeople. Spoke Intouch, which automates the process of keeping your contact information current, is also free. Spoke makes money by charging companies for access to the corporate version of their software, which provides a gated version of a company�s relationship database. This allows a client to mine its own relationships without giving the outside world access to those relationships. As of December 2003, 10 corporations have purchased Spoke's software in order to build their own individual networks. Description: Spoke aspires to build the broadest platform in the social network software space. They have or likely will have offerings which compete with almost every other social network software company. Spoke currently has three main offerings: SpokeBook consumer-facing online community (competitive with Ecademy, Ryze, Eliyon (indirectly), etc.): You can manage your own profile on Spoke with your Professional Profile. Your Professional Profile allows you to provide a biography, detail your experience and education, and list interests and affiliations. You can also attach a photograph, and can associate web links and your recent blog entries with your profile. You can also add other relationships to the network. You can have everyone in your workgroup or company use the Professional Profile to provide a "face-with-a-name" directory. From the dashboard or a profile you can search and pivot on matches to company, school or interest. Spokebook gives the broad public access to name, title and employer for everyone in their contact database (except information in corporate walled gardens). To the extent that individuals have entered data about themselves, that information is also searchable. In addition, they strongly encourage users to download and spider all of their relationships. As a result, Spoke gives you access to far more data on more users than any similar company. Spoke social network visibility (competitive with LinkedIn, VisiblePath, and Contact Network Corporation): Spoke allows you to identify a person you want to reach, and request an introduction to that target person through an intermediary that you do know. Spoke is primarily focused on accelerating the sales process, but this tool can also be used for business development, recruiting, and research. Spoke Intouch Contact Update (competitive with Plaxo and GoodContacts): Spoke Intouch is a separate product from SpokeBook. Unlike Plaxo, Spoke Intouch updates your contacts without storing your relationship information on a server. When you use Spoke InTouch to request updates from your colleagues, they respond directly to you using ordinary email. Spoke does not receive a copy. One of the greatest concerns that people have about these automatic contact-update products is privacy, and Spoke Intouch�s model helps to alleviate that concern. With InstantContact, a feature of Spoke InTouch, you can select text in an email message such as a signature block and, with one click, create a complete record in your contact database. Within your email client, InTouch reads text you highlight and updates your Outlook Contacts appropriately. Notes: We have found Spoke�s customer service extremely responsive. Our email to them was answered within 2 hours. This response time may be misleading, though. As a new company with relatively few users, Spoke only has a modest number of users to support. Privacy Concerns As a Spokebook user, all of your relationship data is stored in Spoke�s uber-server. Even if you are just using Spoke Intouch, you may choose to store copies of your relationship information as part of your Spokebook. If you take either of these two paths, you very well may have the same concerns about privacy as Plaxo and GoodContact users. After all, Spoke has far more data about you than Plaxo or GoodContacts, since Spoke knows just how well you know the people in your network. Spoke calculates this by tracking how frequently you exchange emails, how fast you respond to emails from one another, and so on. However, Spoke never shares this information directly, and their privacy policy is reasonably strong. For example, let us say that the U.S. government decides to track your activities, because they suspect you of an illegal activity. They subpoena Spoke (or any of the other companies that we discuss) for Spoke�s data about you. Spoke is quite likely to disgorge very detailed information about whom you know and how well you know them, and even how to reach those people. That could be information which could be used against you. Recommendation: Spoke offers a number of attractive features, and may very well meet their goal of becoming a total social networking platform. To the individual user, though, Spoke's greatest selling point is the sheer size of the public network. If you are looking for a connection to a specific person or company, your odds are better here than in private networks or smaller public networks simply because there are more data points. We do recommend caution in your use of Spoke's InTouch tool and in your approach to inviting people into the Spoke network. While we feel their privacy controls are more than adequate, some people may be put off to find out that their name is in this database without their express permission. We recommend only inviting people you know well and are reasonably sure will be interested. While this is generally good advice for any social networking service, it is especially true with Spoke. Disclosures: Both David Teten and Scott Allen have or have had consulting relationships with Spoke compliments of Scott Allen