This presentation from Guy Kawasaki at Cisco Live last week presents ten steps to great innovation. Innovation Matt Rhodes Required reading Cisco Systems ciscolive co-creation cocreation customer communities freshminds FreshNetworks Guy Kawasaki innovation marketing Mission statement online communities social media Social network Virtual community web 2.0 Image by always13 via Flickr As we’ve written before, right now, in the current economic climate, it’s a great time for brands to innovate .

Over the past several weeks, two Cisco events generated a great deal of media coverage (refer to “In The News” below). For those that have not been paying close attention, for some time now Cisco has actively been playing a grand chess game. While the media stories below fail to provide detailed product guidance as to where Cisco is going, the information does provide interesting insight as to how Cisco’s leadership team thinks about collaboration, cloud computing, The company has already made several moves in terms of acquisitions (WebEx, PostPath, Jabber) and strategy (describing a general direction regarding collaboration and SaaS/Cloud computing via WebEx Connect).

I have long admired John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco. In my various readings of Cisco, I have observed how Mr. Chambers has been able to produce a strong culture of customer satisfaction at Cisco.  In my personal interactions with those working at Cisco, I have found Cisco’s employees (including executives) to be extremely helpful and willing to spare their time to hear you out and share their knowledge. I believe a lot of credit for creating this cooperative and customer-oriented culture goes to Mr.

Highlights of Cisco's press release is below (with a link to the full release). Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory is a Cisco-hosted directory of endpoints, organizations and people with access to Cisco TelePresence endpoints. The directory features a virtual assistant to assist with scheduling meetings between  the more than 1000 rooms and 75 customers on Cisco TelePresence exchanges. Additional blog posts will come out later today (starting around noon PT) that will include my early thoughts. I

The following is Part 2 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco . What is Cisco announcing? To understand and decipher what Cisco is announcing, it is important to break the information down into four distinct areas: Strategic Pillars, Reference Architecture, “Extend Current”, and “Enter New”. Interoperable, Open Architecture: Given the strategic focus on Strategic Pillars SOA, Rest) to enable any device or application to leverage a consistent set of core of collaborative services.

Cisco on Cisco Implementing Cisco Collaboration Framework IntroductionExecutive Cisco on Cisco Implementing Cisco Collaboration Framework IntroductionExecutive Creating a Collaborative Enterprise | © 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. Implementing the Cisco Framework IntroductionExecutive

Over on the Enterprise 2.0 blog , Irwin Lazar discusses whether UC and Web 2.0 Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 The obvious opportunity for UC vendors is to augment Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 Cisco perhaps because they need to do something to disrupt the market and their XMPP asset (Jabber) could play are "friend or foe"? Here are some of my thoughts.

marketing, relationship/community management, app dev, and internal activities that include content, collaboration, communication, process, and analytics) will take time and Cisco will need to demonstrate the necessary non-technology competencies soon. Then there is the question of how this relates to other Cisco SaaS/Cloud initiatives (e.g., From a technology perspective, there are lots of options in this space (in alpha order: Awareness, Communispace, HiveLive, Leverage, Lithium, Mzinga, Sparta and many more). Just having the technology is merely "ante into the game".

My friend John Halamka was on the second in the BusinessWeek/Cisco webcasts yesterday, "Revitalizing Healthcare with Technology," the same series that I was on with another friend, Karen Sobel Lojeski, back in Feb. snapped a couple of pictures from the screen and sent them to him right after the show was over. Not an award-winning photo but just think about it: John's being webcast from the NASDAQ studio in Times Square, I'm watching on the web, taking the pictures with my phone, then sending them to him seconds later. Karen's and mine was called " Boosting Productivity with Virtual Collaboration ," which I also wrote about here .

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