Tuesday, Eureos was invited to the CRITT breakfast on the theme of professional social networks. The objective was to see to what extent the new Web tools could be useful to companies.
To be frank, I am never very comfortable with this kind of exercise. Eureos’s mission is above all business development and promoting industrial SMEs. IT and the web are only tools; they are neither a passion nor an end in themselves.
The other speakers, on the other hand, were experts on the subject. We got a complete technological overview of what exists, a promising solution to foster innovation (Planetinov), as well as a community site dedicated to eco-friendly housing (Ecovibio).
In my presentation, as usual, I echoed all those SME owners between 50 and 60 years old who have neither the time nor the desire to play around with Viadeo, partly because they do not want to spend their time on that and partly because it simply is not their thing.
At the end of the presentations, one of the few SME owners present spoke up to say that he felt like he was living on another planet when he heard people talking about all these “Web 2.0” tools. Like many people with the rise of the Web, he was swindled out of a few thousand euros to build a website that never brought him a single contact, and he struggles to see what he can do to change that.
In any case, it reinforced one of the convictions that I share with Jean-Marc: simplifying the Internet and making it available to those who need it most but have absolutely no intention of spending all their free time on it is a challenge with a promising future.
