Jeff Nolan

My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant. Home About Venture Chronicles About Venture Chronicles My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant. Along the way to becoming a bona fide blogger I started to understand the implications of user generated content. At the time I was a venture capitalist for SAP, the enterprise software company, and in my travels in the enterprise software market it became evident that blogging would be a powerful communication channel for enterprises to use, what we now call social media, and a powerful information collection mechanism for bottom up corporate intelligence. Combined with search technology, social networking software, and wikis, I was witnessing the inception of an entirely new generation of knowledge management software. I am currently the VP Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction, the simple and effective way to build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. Over 50,000 companies use Get Satisfaction to create a social support experience, build better products, realize SEO benefits, and take advantage of brand loyalty behaviors that results in strong word of mouth marketing experiences in the market. I can be reached at jnolan-at-gmail-dot-com.

Latest from Jeff Nolan

Pocket Data Connections

A couple of nights ago my internet at home was acting wonky and it occurred to me that I could go with plan B… my mobile phone. For an extra fee each month I get tethering on my Evo in the form of a mobile wifi hotspot. I fired it up, which thanks to 4G ...

Gawker Hacked: Seeing Past Your Nose

By now you have probably read that Gawker Media’s password database was hacked and over 1 million usernames and passwords spilled out on to the web. It’s a serious problem because most people don’t have unique passwords for websites they register for, which not only exposes the futility of passwords but also makes a serious ...

A Few Thoughts on Social Media Monitoring

Social Media Monitoring evolved out of the explosion of non-traditional media channels developed in the last decade combined with the increased velocity of information flow as a consequence of viral information sharing. Born of crisis, social media monitoring was initially focused on containing negative news that could quickly envelope a company as a result of ...

SEC Defines Venture Capital

The SEC fulfilled their obligation under the Frank-Dodd financial reform bill and defined what venture capital is. Represents itself to investors as being a venture capital fund. Only invests in equity securities of private operating companies to provide primarily operating or business expansion capital (not to buy out other investors), U.S. Treasury securities with a ...

Locked in Paradigms

Have you noticed that Google looks terribly stale when compared to Facebook? It’s not that Google’s products are weak by comparison but rather the simple fact that Facebook isn’t locked into paradigms imposed by having widely used products that reflect how earlier generations of users see them. More importantly Facebook has a distribution capability that ...

Check in Fatigue

Danny Sullivan wrote up a piece on Foursquare that perfectly encapsulates the issue I have with Foursquare (and their ilk) these days… summed up as “really, who gives a shit?”. I have really made an effort to apply myself to FourSquare and have accumulated a handful of mayorships and a dozen badges in the process… ...

Roadmaps… How Much is Too Much?

One of my favorite services, Feedly, published on their blog the roadmap for their next major release. Obviously this is not a new practice and through various mechanism companies make available for comment their product development process. In recent years the evolution of “ideation” applications has provided companies of all types a powerful capability for ...

Does Paper.li Break Twitter?

I love Paper.li, it’s one of the most innovative and useful services I have seen in a long time. I actually look forward to people I follow coming out with their “The xyz Daily is Out” tweets because they are great information discovery tools. In addition to Techmeme and Feedly various Paper.li editions have become ...

Google, the Wisdom of Crowds and Conventional Wisdom

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about crowdsourcing and whether or not the benefits suggested by proponents are overstated. It’s not that crowdsourcing doesn’t have value, the problem I have with it when applied to generalized questions is that the result often mirrors the conventional wisdom on any given subject. It’s not surprising, we are ...

Is Gap’s New Logo a Crowdsourcing Black Ops?

Here’s an interesting argument… that Gap hoodwinked everyone into signing on to crowdsource a new logo by using their decidedly crappy “new” logo as bait: That’s right. One of the most prominent popular fashion brands is crowdsourcing its new brand logo. So the favorite last-ditch tactic of brands and causes lacking money or new ideas ...