Cheese!
Each quarter at Apogee Results we choose a volunteer project. Traditionally, the fourth quarter is always reserved for Coats For Kids. Celebrating its 25th anniversary, Coats for Kids is an annual community project that collects and distributes warm winter coats to eligible children and teenagers in Central Texas. Each year, KVUE, The Junior League of Austin, Jack Brown Cleaners, and KASE 101 partner to bring the community together to ensure that the children of Central Texas stay warm. Last year Coats for Kids distributed 35,157 new and gently used coats. Donations come in from individuals, businesses and groups, and may be in the form of new coats, used coats or monetary donations.
Apogee had a hand in those 35,157 coats last year and we are excited to hear how many Central Texas children are going to be warm this winter thanks to this amazing program.
Having some fun
On Saturday, December 10th, 2011 from 8:00am to 3:00pm coats were distributed at the Palmer Events Center (900 Barton Spring Road) in Austin, TX. In preparation for the event, Apogeeans spent their time sorting and hanging large boxes of coats. There are some pictures below (some of us having fun), feel free to visit our Facebook page for more photos from our other volunteer events and team building activities.
The Group
Over the past 4 years, I have had the privilege of working with many different Apogeeans. During this time, I have been able to contribute to my most favorite thing about Apogee–the company culture. We spend too much time at work to not enjoy our jobs. Let’s be realistic–no one enjoys work every single day. We all wake up from time to time on the wrong side of the bed, and just don’t feel like being there, going to meetings, working, talking, etc.
As managers, we have a lot to say about the work environment that we provide for our employees. And we have a responsibility to do our best to create an environment where the vast majority of our staff truly enjoys coming to work each and every day. I’m not saying we jump on a conference bike every time we have a meeting (although many Apogeeans enjoy our monthly Bikes and Brews events), but there is a balance.
Part of our culture includes an Annual Apogee Costume Contest. Winners included:
Tracy Giesbrecht as our V.P. of Online Marketing & User Experience, Craig Tomlin
Lindsey (me!) as the Honey Badger
Tom Harris as The Cloud
Apogeeans at Halloween
Everyone had a great time and is looking forward to our next company event–our Annual Thanksgiving potluck.
Photos by Alan LaFrance
On January 4th Salesforce.com, an enterprise cloud computing company, announced the launch of Chatter.com to help companies create a free and private social network.
Chatter was first announced in November 2009 and hit general availability in June 2010. Originally it was available to existing salesforce.com customers for a monthly fee, but the service went free in December last year alongside a paid, premium version. This was shortly after a major revamp was announced, which introduced more features influenced by Facebook and Twitter.
Now the company is opening Chatter to the non-salesforce.com customers. On January 31st, 2011, Chatter.com became available free of charge to anyone with a valid business email address. New social network-like features will be introduced such as the ability to ‘like’ a post, @replies and trending topics. The company hopes that new users will be tempted to sign up for other salesforce.com products.
Chatter.com was also featured in salesforce.com’s broadcast advertisements on February 6th during the Super Bowl. The two television advertisements were directed and produced by Will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas, along with salesforce.com’s in-house marketing team.
Seesmic has been working closely with Salesforce.com for the last several months to integrate the Seesmic desktop with Salesforce’s Chatter. The collaboration is being touted as the industry’s first social/enterprise collaboration and will allow Salesforce users to follow people, business processes, documents, and application data as they would a friend or group on Facebook or Twitter.
“Salesforce.com has become a valued partner as we work together to bridge external and enterprise social communication with Chatter. These investments will enable us to reach more enterprise customers,” said Seesmic CEO, Loic Le Meur, in a prepared statement.
So what exactly is Chatter? According to salesforce.com, Chatter is, “The best way to collaborate at work. Collaborate privately and securely. Follow people, information, and groups. Share files and status updates. Work more efficiently and closely with your colleagues on your own private and secure social network — Chatter. Where updates on the people, projects, and data that matter most are automatically pushed to you.”
Salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff, spoke about the similarities between Yammer and his company’s own enterprise social network, Chatter. “salesforce.com Chatter and Chatter.com are our strategic directions for our new collaboration offerings. They are deeply integrated into salesforce.com’s core offerings –Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Force.com, and Database.com platforms — so that as transactions happen in your enterprise they show up in real time in Chatter. It’s not a bolt-on; it’s a core part of our services … it has to be, to be integrated with our customers’ information and databases. For example, when a deal changes, a customer service inquiry occurs, a PowerPoint is customized, a customer comes to your website, a lead matures, a dashboard changes, or even if your employees are talking to each other, it’s all in your feed. It’s amazing; I use it constantly to run my business.”
When asked about Yammer, Benifoff said, “The problem with other Facebook [and] Twitter-like services is that they are just standalone feeds. There is no integrated customer and corporate transaction data. That’s why over 60,000 salesforce.com customers are already using Chatter as their new corporate collaboration platform. These are active paying networks — in use, not trials. That’s 5-10 [times] more than any other Facebook [and] Twitter-like service.”
I have no doubt that the Chatter tool could serve as a useful addition to run Apogee Result’s business. For others, the jury may still be out.
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