Developing for a Consumerized Enterprise World
The consumerization of the enterprise is an emerging concept transforming the look and feel and intent of the software we use to run our businesses. It’s lowering the barriers of adoption, flipping the top-down model on its head and integrating consumer-friendly features we’ve grown to know and love in our personal lives. Gone are over-priced and complicated solutions catering to big companies with deep pockets. In are solutions that are based on an uncluttered user experience common in consumer websites, are customized for individuals, adopted bottom-up, can cater to small initial teams, yet scales as a business' needs grows. Salesforce, Dropbox and Yammer are examples of consumerized enterprise products that address small and medium business needs in customer relationship management, storage and internal communications. In this session you’ll learn how we got here, principles guiding new product design and development, and how these products impact your bottom line and culture.
Presenters
George Ishii is Head of Design & co-founder of BetterWorks. An ideas-man who was an early developer of Adobe Illustrator and Acrobat, George turned practitioner in early 2000, joining PayPal as one of the first designers responsible for PayPal's intuitive user interface. He is the co-founder of Geni, a genealogy-based social networking website, which grew to over 20 million profiles in its first year. He is also the co-founder of Geni's innovative spin-off, Yammer, an enterprise communications tool, which won TechCrunch50's Best-in-Show. George is also a strategic consultant and advisor to several early-stage internet companies.
Sizhao "Zao" Yang is currently the COO/co-founder at BetterWorks, Inc., a perks platform for small medium businesses. Previously, he co-created Farmville, and was the CEO/co-founder of MyMiniLife, Inc. (sold to Zynga Game Networks, Inc.). After the acquisition, MyMiniLife became the common technology platform at Zynga and powers 150M monthly users including games like Cityville, Farmville, and Frontierville. He also designed the Farmville iPhone application (top iPhone app), and worked on corporate development deals including Microsoft, Yahoo, Zynga Japan, and Zynga corporate strategy. He is also an active investor with stakes in companies like Hipmunk, GroupMe, Facebook, Zynga (acquisition stock), and SV Angels. He received a B.S. in computer science at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Tuesday, March 13
