Several users had asked recently if they could embed Insightory documents on their website. We’re glad to announce that now you can!

In order to embed, click on the relevant document. On the right hand side (just below the tags) you will see two options: “Embed in your blog (small)” and “Embed in your site (big)”. All you need to do is copy the relevant code into your blog or website, and that document should show up. If you need help, send us an email (help at insightory dot com). 

This is the current Key Insight on the homepage:

This image will now be available to all of Insightory’s featured experts to use on their blog/ website. So wherever you see this image, stop and listen . . . that person has something important to say. 

Warning: following their advice could make a big difference in your career!

Blogging is an easy habit to break. After creating Insightory in late 2007, I was somewhat regular (i.e. one post every 1-2 weeks), but since late January there was just too much going on! My consulting work picked up suddenly, and I also had several personal things to take care of.

Implication: no blogging for 3 months!

Resolution: must . . . . blog . . . regularly . . . no . . . more . . . excuses (let’s see how long this lasts!) 

The last 4-6 weeks have seen some good progress at Insightory. We’ve made several improvements to the site, including:

- Providing users the ability to manage their own documents

- Better search engine

- Better navigation and help features

Coming in the next few weeks:

- Improvements to the profile page

- Tag-based view and search

We launched a new home page today. All the contest information has been deleted, and in its place, we have added:

1. “Key Insight”: Think of this as the “featured document”. We’re going to keep this up for ~3 days.

2. “Featured Expert”: This section will highlight Insightory contributors that seem to be doing cool work and/or are sharing their expertise with the community. Featured experts will also be rotated every ~3 days.

We hope you like the new look. Your comments and suggestions are always welcome.

If you would like to nominate anyone for the “Featured Expert” section (including yourself/ your firm), please send an email to avneet dot jolly at insightory dot com.

Since we launched Insightory’s Contest in business schools, we’ve seen a large % of user email IDs have business school domains. While there is nothing wrong with that, I suspect many of these will fall into disuse as you get jobs, move away etc. So if you want to stay in touch with Insightory (and I sure hope you do), it may be a good idea to update your email id now.

You can change email ids - and anything else on your profile - by logging in and clicking on the “Update Profile” link.

We’re now ready to announce the winners of the top award for the Management Insights Contest. Although we received well over 250 entries, there were two that really stood out in terms of originality, relevance and presentation. These were:

• Understanding Key Success Factors for Social Web Ventures by Andrew Chen, Joseph Dwyer, Lisa Nagatoshi, Marcin Pietrzak, Deepak Tiwari from Kellogg School of Management
• Wikibility of Innovation Oriented Workplaces by Vincenzo Cammarata, an MSc Graduate from the University of Lugano (Switzerland) and a former consultant.

Andrew Chen et al’s paper stood out because they have put a lot of thought into a key issue i.e. what drives success of social networking ventures. This affects not only those who work at Faebook or LinkedIn or MySpace, but also major companies that are re-thinking hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend.

Vincenzo’s paper looked at another key issue - innovation and collaboration in the workplace - using wikis as a “proxy”. This trend is going to transform companies in ways that we probably don’t know yet. Those of us who claim some expertise in organization design have been talking about “horizontal-ization” of companies for quite some time now. The wiki emerges as a key tool to enable this. If you don’t want to ready Vincenzo’s 100+ page thesis, you can check our the summary deck.

In the end, we couldn’t choose between these two, so we decided to split the $3,000 top award and give each of them $1,500 each. Congratulations - Andrew and Vincenzo!

We would like to make a special mention of a few other other people:

• Neetu Chitkara from IIM Bangalore and Swastik Nigam from IIM Ahmedabad/ Australian Graduate School of Management - who both submitted several well written/ presented and original documents
• Guy Smith of Silicon Strategies Marketing, whose submitted 11 insightful short articles on marketing and branding (the largest number by a single user so far)

We ended up giving out a total of ~$9,000 in awards to all the winners.

Thanks to all those who submitted entries. Even though the Contest is over, we hope that you will continue to post your documents and presentations on Insightory, and continue to create a global brand for yourself.

Two questions that I’ve been getting a lot via email are:

- Are you going to extend the date of the Contest?

- What is Insightory’s revenue model (going to be)?

The first one is easy to answer. At this stage, we will not continue the contest beyond Dec 31. The main reason is that it is time to test our “real” business model and see who and how many will upload a document without the inducement of a Contest. Our page views and site visits are now relatively high (for the stage and type of business), so we can definitely provide a global audience to those wishing to share their management expertise.

We may bring the Contest back - perhaps in a different form - in a few months’ time.

The second question is harder to answer. We are looking at several different models - including (as you may expect) advertising and value-added services. We’ll reveal more details as we finalize the model(s) in the next few months.

Your suggestions and feedback are always welcome. Please respond to this post, or send me an email.

Best wishes for the Holidays and for the upcoming New Year.

Here are some quick responses to the main questions & comments that we got from the TechCrunch article.

Kevin X
“If this is targeted to the top execs, professionals, professors, and graduate students, how much credibility can be given to random documents found online?”

Kevin, our goal is to create “trust in the source”. While the content will be user-generated, we will use a combination of community ratings, appointed review panels and elected/ nominated leaders to ensure ongoing quality. Most in the review panel and in leadership positions will have credibility that is beyond question. We’re still working on the exact mix that will achieve high scalability, low cost and high quality.

The notion of quality is a relative one, of course. If a manager is searching for information on “Salary Structures in China”, then an average document on that topic has higher quality than a well-written piece on , say, “Hedge Funds going Public”.

We’ll provide more specific details as we get closer to implementing these plans.

Patrick Grote:

Most of the contest winners concern themselves with topics regarding India. It seems like a narrow focus.

Patrick, we test-launched the Contest in India, and as a result most of our early users were from India. We got some great content, and we hope that it continues even as we become more global! It was only a few weeks back that we turned our focus to US and Europe. Take a look at the latest content - especially after the TechCrunch article - it is much more global.

Is there a way to edit the documents on the site or do you download them, edit them and then resubmit?

Right now, we don’t have a way to edit or create documents online. It is something we are going to work on as quickly as our resources will permit. For now, we ask you to use the clunky methods: if you want to “edit” some else’s document, please write them a comment. If it is your own, you can upload a new version and notify us to remove the older version.

What about the copyrights on the articles? If I edit a document do I retain copyright on the changes or the new document?

Whew - tough question. Here’s what I can say without referring back to our attorneys: if you want to create a new document based on an existing one (e.g. a new version of some analysis), you’d first have to ensure that your use of the existing work was permissible. If it is, then your new version is subject to the same copyright and general IP laws as any other work.

How is this different than Bitpipe or Information Week’s white paper site?

Right now, there are two main differences.

• We have a management focus while Bitpipe and Information Week have a technology focus.
• Most of their white papers seem to be authored by vendors, whereas most of our contributions will come from individuals or small groups. (Although I suppose you could argue that, at some level, every individual is a vendor!)

As we build out Insightory, two other major differences will emerge:

• We’ll provide multiple users the ability to collaborate, co-create and co-edit some (if not all) documents
• We’ll provide end-users (e.g. corporate executives) the ability to “request” certain topics from the community . . . so we’ll have a pull as well as a push model for content

Suanlafen

They say this site is for professionals, academicians and graduate students. The last two all have free access to http://www.jstor.org/ if they want to search for a paper.

JSTOR (along with private aggregators like EBSCO and entities like SSRN) have excellent sources, decades of experience and a breadth of articles that we cannot - and don’t wish to - match. We don’t want Insightory to be a place to search for academic papers on management. We want it to be a facilitator for connecting corporate requirements for real-time, real-world management knowledge/ information/ data with those who have them.

Some of the key shortcomings of these providers that we wish to overcome are:

• They only follow a “push” model
• Data structure and retrieval is not user-friendly
• There is no community to create a discussion, to add value to a topic (although most good papers do follow the excellent tradition of peer review)
• Almost all “papers” are word/ pdf documents, generally very “dry”, and presented with a rigor that is needed in academia but not in the corporate world. In my 12+ years in the corporate world, I never came across a single manager or executive who used any of these sources. I’m sure there are some, but I’m just saying I didn’t find any.
• In some cases (esp. JSTOR), there may be a multi-year lag between publishing an article in a journal and having it available on JSTOR. This is unacceptable in the corporate world.

Some of you may be thinking: don’t some of the current articles in Insightory look a little “dry”, kinda hard to read? Yes - we’re guilty as charged! We’ll try to change this, especially after the Contest is over on Dec. 31. Help us out by uploading more PowerPoints and easier-to-read Word documents.

Ben Strackany

Tech-wise, search results only return matches on document title and extract — not the actual document contents

That is something we’re working on and should have a solution before the number of documents gets too large.

Ki

What about confidentiality? are you expecting people to share some company ppt with you?

Insightory is a place to share knowledge that is relevant across companies - knowledge that pertains to a function, context, industry or geography, and not to a specific company. We don’t want, and may delete as per US Copyright Law, any company-confidential material and copyright/ IP-violating material. Users are expected to ensure compliance with all applicable laws and company policies.

If you are a tax expert at a big accounting firm, you probably shouldn’t send that “Corporate Structures and Offshore Tax Savings” presentation to Insightory (unless it is a company-approved white paper they wish to share).

If, however, you are a consultant, professor, graduate student or a VP of Tax at a manufacturing organization, and you have the same knowledge (of “Corporate Structures and Offshore Tax Savings”), and you want to share it with your peers, get their reactions, do some topic-specific networking and perhaps educate potential clients, then Insightory may be the right place for you.

We received a great Holiday gift early this morning - a feature on TechCrunch. Read here.

I always knew that TechCrunch has a big impact on a site’s visibility, but I didn’t really know how big, until now. Let’s just say: we had more people sign up in the last ~18 hours than we had in the entire month of November.

We also started receiving some negative press, which I guess is inevitable with a more public profile. There wasn’t a pattern to the negative comments, so we will continue to monitor them. If we start seeing a theme, we’ll know that we need to improve something, and will act very quickly. Most people, though, were kind enough to say something on the lines of “great idea . . . good start . . . let’s see how well you build on this”. THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONFIDENCE.

It’s quite gratifying to see that some prominent bloggers are starting to mention Insightory (even if we are having to reach out to them directly!). Here are the four main ones we’re seen so far:

• Marquis, who writes a blog about MBA/ post-MBA life
• Gautam Ghosh, who writes a blog about HR, organizations and about blogging itself
• Sanjay Lakhotia, whose blog is mostly around personal & professional reflections
• Vijay Poonia, who is studying at Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, and seems to write on finance-related topics

Thanks to all of these guys. As a start-up company, we need all the help we can get to get the word out. YOU BLOGGERS out there - if you’re reading this, do consider writing about Insightory, especially about our Contest. We’ve given out over $3,000 in awards already, so it surprises me that the word is not spreading as fast in US and Europe as it did in India. Perhaps the Thanksgiving break has a larger impact than we thought?? Or students are really busy with recruitment season??

Anyway, do note that the Contest is now open through Dec. 31.