Interface upgrade

  

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Modified the UI based on customer feedback.   Organized the data to make it more accessable and created the ability for users to attach articles to companies.

LinkedIn Groups Integration

  

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We've had LinkedIn® registration and login integration since early on in our beta testing.  It's worked well and is convenient for our users.  Based on conversations with our users, we've added some new functionality which we think will be very helpful for organizations of all sizes.

Via LinkedIn Member's Only Groups, and the LinkedIn API, we enabled companies to share ratings privately.  The groups functionality can be used for companies or associations with an interest in sharing ratings locally.  For instance, one of our enterprise clients wants to anonymously share ratings on his customers with his friendly, local competitors.   Now he can do that, protect his customer data and his identification via the combination of G2Link and LinkedIN.  

Here is how it's done:

1.  You must have at least a "Basic" level plan in G2Link to access this functionality.  Currently, we are charging $10 per month for this level of service.  (Register for FREE TRIAL)

2.  You must either create or be a current member of a "Member's Only Group" in LinkedIn.  

3.  You must associate your G2Link account with LinkedIn.  This can be found in the "Settings" menu in the G2Link Application.  Here is a picture of my settings and associated Member's Only Groups:

Now  you can create private ratings in G2Link that will be visible only to other members of your LinkedIn group.   

4.  Choose a company, rate them and then share privately with the group you choose.

Here is a screen shot of the rating portion of the application:

Small Business Risk: I Wasn't Paid

  

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I'm a little late to the party but a very interesting discussion entitled "I Wasn't Paid," popped up on Hacker News last week related to small business credit risk.  The discussion referenced a web site called www.iwasntpaid.com, which describes themselves as " A collection of crowdsourced horror stories of clients who do not pay."  At first glance the site appears to be a public shaming of bad business relationships and not that far away from posting naked pictures of your Ex on line.  

The discussion took off when a Hacker News contributer referenced a specific post where a vendor claimed to have won a judgement against a customer (http://iwasntpaid.com/post/16819216727/even-after-losing-a-court-case),  yet was still struggling to get paid and was contemplating police intervention.  As usual, the post itself was interesting but the real jewels regarding the perils of small business risk could be found in the comment thread.  

Here are some interesting quotes:

"How long before this gets sued for liable?" 

"Taking someone to court over $1000 is a waste of time."

"When a client's business is entirely virtual, there's a risk they'll simply change their mailing address or otherwise dodge a judgement"

"Ultimately it's your fault as a contractor if you don't get paid."

If you're interested in this topic, please read the comments as there is a lot of good advice and anecdotes related to businesses getting paid (or not) by customers.  The main problem with the discussions and suggestions is that most of them are reactive and very few of them (besides "get a contract") are proactive.  But, like most things, the problem isn't single variable and a simple b2c rating system isn't always capable of predicting business risk.  The dollar amounts are larger, the interactions happen over longer periods of time and losses to both sides can impact multiple parties.

As we discussed previously, B2B credit has its own special problems and a corresponding lack of tools for small businesses to manage these issues.  (http://blog.g2link.com/bid/51259/2011-Review-B2B-Credit)  A good b2b rating system should be open (as much as permitted by law), free to use and leverage peer relationships on all sides of the transactions.  It should also provide a dispute process as well as tools to monitor a customer over time vs. just spot check.

I started G2Link after a similar situation happened to me while I was the CEO of Aria Systems. They are aggravating, time consuming and financially damaging regardless of the ultimate outcome and the tools large companies use, are flat out useless for smaller companies.  

If you're interested, give us a try.  You can do all of the above plus do things like leverage your LinkedIn connections and groups to share private ratings as well.

ALIVE!

  

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After months of server and code toil, G2Link is ALIVE!  

Check out your company, rate other companies and track your risk!

 ow.ly/8O1AW

Image Credit:  markuso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Going Live

  

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In preparation for going live over the next few days, we will be shutting down the beta instance this weekend and it will no longer be available.  Thank you all for your help and support and we look forward to working with you on this in the future.  

PS:  

Image: Sujin Jetkasettakorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

2011 Review: Crowdsourcing and the Wisdom of Crowds

  

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In 2011, we began to investigate the possibility of crowdsourcing risk by taking a deeper look at the wisdom of crowds. In our first post on this series we asked the question "Is crowd wisdom more accurate than peer wisdom"?  

In this first post we delve into the historical thinking around the wisdom of crowds and potential means of enhancing this line of thinking relative to risk management:

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/33408/Wisdom-of-Crowds-vs-Peer-to-Peer

Next we discussed the quality of peers differentiating between random p2p and targeted p2p for the purposes of b2b risk management:

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/33951/Random-or-Targeted-P2P

In our next post we discuss utilizing true peers to generate higher quality business information:

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/34592/P2P-Business-Insight

Then finally, we revisited the whole topic based on an article regarding the wisdom of crowds posted in Wired Magazine:

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/34278/Wisdom-of-Crowds-vs-Peer-to-Peer-Revisited

Please join us in the discussion and considering signing up for our beta test:

 Happy 2012!

 Image Credit:  jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

2011 Review: Peer to Peer for B2B

  

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A series of threads regarding peer to peer and social scale for business was kicked off after reading Clay Shirky's keynote at SXSW titled titled "Why Would We Think Social Media Was Revolutionary?"  We thought this was a great way to articulate one of our core ideas on scaling risk management for small businesses via social technologies.

 Our general thoughts are here:

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/28151/Clay-Shirky-at-SXSW-Sharing-can-change-the-world

In the next post we begin to define how we envision peer to peer risk assessment working and the various relationships.  Can peer generated data be higher quality?   

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/28727/Peer-to-Peer-Risk-Assessment

Next, we delved into the the concept of "bad reviewers" and how to deal with them using the example of Yelp.

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/32192/yelp-vs-b2b-rating

In the same vein we looked at an article by John Dvork regarding the potential gaming of Amazon ratings via "bad actors."  

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/35654/Gaming-Amazon-Ratings

Finally, we wrote about one of the ways we plan to solve the bad actor problem in our software:

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/34953/Managing-Bad-Ratings

All in all, a very interesting topic and a key issue to be solved for all social technology companies.

Happy New Year!

Image Credit:  jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

2011 Review: B2B Credit

  

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To celebrate the New Year, we thought it might be a good idea to review some of the key posts regarding G2Link.  We'll start this series of posts off with a group of posts around B2B Credit.  The main gist is that B2B Credit is broken especially for small and medium businesses.

The first post, The Secret of B2B Credit Middlemen,  delineates the core problem with b2b credit and why it is so difficult:

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/25441/The-Secret-of-the-B2B-Credit-Middlemen

At the end of this post, we make several suggestions on how the problem can be fixed.  The first proposal to fix b2b credit was to eliminate the layers of middle men by collapsing the value chain and freeing the data:

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/25442/B2B-Credit-Part-2-Freeing-the-Data

Another important aspect of this proposal to fix b2b credit is to enrich the data by increasing the number of data streams via social technologies similar to yelp, facebook and twitter.  Getting "social scale":  

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/25444/B2B-Credit-Part-3-Socialize-the-Ratings

Another key component of the proposal to fix b2b credit, is to fix the process small and medium companies use to assess and manage risk.  Monitor, don't check and view your entire business:

http://blog.g2link.com/bid/25445/B2B-Credit-Part-4-Fix-the-Process

 Happy New Year!

Image Credit:  jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Congress Opens Crowdfunding

  

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A few weeks ago Congress pass The Entrepreneurial Access to Capital Act (HR 2930)

This will enable small businesses to gain access to capital and raise up to $1M through Crowd Funding.  This could be an inflection point for entrepreneurs and wealth creation.  

CFO Magazine has a nice  summary of this and other recent legislation:

http://g2li.me/uxx6RK

G2Link in Philly Tech News

  

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Nice mention of G2Link in Philly Tech News last week discussing our participation in the Founder Factory.