Techrigy: Interview with Aaron Newman
by
on May 23, 2007,
Imagine my surprise when I was reading StartupSquad one day and realized that the company behind BlogBackupOnline was right in my own backyard. I recently had the opportunity to talk to Techrigy co-founder and President Aaron Newman about Techrigy and their approach to Web 2.0.
What first caught my eye was Techrigy's BlogBackupOnline, a service that allows you to back up your blog (for free) online. As it turns out, BlogBackupOnline is only the beginning of what Techrigy plans to offer, as Aaron put it, a “stepping stone” to an enterprise app for Social Media Compliance.
What Techrigy recognizes is that many companies fear social media, from blogs and wikis to social networks and beyond. Atlassian has done a bit of evangelizing the wiki with Wikipatterns, but Techrigy wants to take it a step further, giving businesses a way to monitor the legal implications of social media without becoming “Big Brother” or requiring employees to adhere to a policy where no employee can have a blog or participate in a wiki.
What Social Media Compliance Manager will do is give companies a two-prong approach to allowing their employees to utilize blogs and wikis: it will serve as a barometer for a company's online presence, determining how the public views the company, the type of press it's getting, and whether marketing initiatives are working; as well as providing an automated tool for companies to ensure no laws are being violated or confidentiality breached.
Newman started Techrigy with the idea that blogs and wikis are becoming mainstream despite corporate resistance. As collaborative tools, they are popping up organically, and companies need a way to manage them.
In addition, there are a myriad of legal issues, including record retention, that need to be factored into any use of social media tools. Blogs and wikis are increasingly moving into this record retention area, and are also being used more and more for the dissemination of information, both internally to fellow employees, as well as externally to customers, clients, and potential customers and clients. Companies need to monitor their “official” communications, mentions of the company by employees, and also ensure that technology is being updated for security as needed. That's where Techrigy comes in. They want to be able to help companies know who's blogging, where they are blogging, and what the blogs are saying, allowing them to use these collaboration tools to their advantage.
BlogBackupOnline is a very useful service for those of us bloggers who are too lazy or forgetful to do our own backups, but it's also been a valuable development process for Techrigy, giving them insight into what it takes to find and extract information from various platforms which can in turn be parsed for information applicable to each company.
Right now, BlogBackupOnline has over 2000 registered users (of which I am one), and hopes to grow exponentially by year-end.
When it comes to the Enterprise app, however, Newman admits that it's a fine line: Techrigy doesn't intend to enable “Big Brother” to watch over employees' online activities, but rather, give them a tool to monitor in a responsible way, giving employers an automated system to help them weed out potential legal problems while eliminating the “You can't blog at all” mentality.
To start off, Social Media Compliance Manager will focus on blogs and wikis, and hopefully branch out to other social media platforms after that. Techrigy also focuses solely on the development of the app, and may look to a future partnership with an organization that can help businesses learn the ropes of social media and harness it to their advantage.
Techrigy is focused on 2.0 issues without relying on the 2.0 flashiness, which I admit is a breath of fresh air. In doing this, they are using an “old school” programming approach to 2.0 issues and management, which should help them avoid some of the scalability issues that have plagued services like Twitter. They had me at “backup” when it came to BlogBackupOnline, and I'm looking forward to where they are going.
