The next decade of Spoke - one is silver and the other gold...

Welcome 2010!

At Spoke we’re excited about what’s coming in 2010 and we want to fill you in on what we’ve been up to so you can take advantage of some great new tools coming your way this year.

2009 was a year of growth for Spoke. We took on several large initiatives aimed at improving our overall service and positioning ourselves, and our member-base, for dramatic growth in 2010. Like for many of us in our own lives, 2009 was a year of tough decisions for Spoke. Decisions on the future direction of Spoke and how to bring more value to our members. Decisions on how to bring more value to Spoke members. Decisions on how to deliver a service that can scale to those goals. And decisions on how to give our members a voice in that process.

To our long-time members it may have appeared that our momentum slowed somewhat in 2009, but know that we have been working hard behind the scenes to tackle these touch decisions and come back to 2010 recharged and ready to race forward to bringing you a world class application for managing your networking.

In 2009 Spoke Achieved:
More ways to manage information in Spoke...
1) Remove profile without registering
2) Correct company information

More ways to give us your feedback...
1) Uservoice - giving members a voice in new feature development
2) Spoke Insider Blog - giving members the latest info from Spoke
3) Twitter - follow Spoke using your favorite social media tools

More ways to scale Spoke and provide better information...
1) Moved to cloud computing system – makes scaling really easy!
2) Re-engineered our de-duplification process
3) Dramatically reduced duplicate profiles and wrongly merged profiles

While members may have only noticed the changes from the first two sections mentioned above, the real gold lies in the infrastructure work in the last section. Unfortunately, the process was more resource intensive than we had originally planned. Fortunately we glad to let you know that the hard work for those initiatives is behind us and we are currently reprocessing our entire data set. What this means for you, the Spoke member, is that you are going to see the accuracy of our data improve by an order of magnitude in 2010.

In the first quarter of 2010 Spoke you’ll also see a whole new set of tools for revitalizing your professional relationships. Think about the people you know but for which you don't have the current contact information or the people you have even forgotten they exist. Spoke will bring a new and improved “Toolbar” to the table that will let you access those contacts and help you decide whether you want to rejuvenate your relationship for the purpose of what you are doing now.

It’s going to be an exciting year but we don’t want to give away too much of the cow just yet. So, to help you start to grasp what exactly is coming, we’re implementing a few things to help out:

First, is this blog. You’re already reading it, great! Just remember to check back form time-to-time as we’ll be releasing information about what is coming and how it will impact your professional lives.

Second, is a Spoke contest on Twitter. I can’t say too much about that now, but the details will be available through @spokesoftware on Twitter shortly. So go follow Spoke on Twitter so you can find out about the contest.

In conclusion, I would like to extend a thank you to our members for sticking with us through a “growth-spurt” year as we prepare to take Spoke to the next level and make leveraging your known, and unknown, network easier. We know the last few years have been rough times for everyone and we appreciate your patronage as we look forward to rewarding your loyalty with our hard work in 2010!

Cheers,
Philippe  Cases