With over 3 million unique visitors monthly, few would question the AskMe Corporation’s lead in the consumer knowledge sharing market.
Seattle.internet.com has learned that the Seattle-based company has begun marketing a version of their application, which will allow corporations to incorporate the same technology that drives askme.com into their corporate intranets and extranets.
“Corporate America is becoming really big,” says Hossein Mousavi, Director of Sales and Marketing for the Business Solutions Division. “We’re coming out of years of mergers. These mergers have resulted in fantastically huge operations that are pretty effective in every sense except communications.”
The answer the AskMe Corporation emerged with was to offer corporations a technology, similar to AskMe.com’s, which allows question to be routed through search engines, through live experts, and through a database of experts’ previous answers to similar questions.
“Large corporations have been coming up to us saying that knowledge-sharing would be a perfect application for them to have internally,” says Walter Conner, Director of Public Relations.
According to Mousavi, the top-level benefits that companies will see immediately are the compression of time required for searches and the ability to save time because of lack of repetition in locating live knowledge.
The format will be very similar to AskMe’s consumer site. The information return will feature search engine results, a list of experts to ask, as well as similar questions that have been asked and their respective replies.
“We’re effectively converting individual know how into corporate knowledge.”
Both Conner and Mousavi stress that this is the major difference between their approach and the previously-tapped knowledge-management market.
“Knowledge management, as important as it is, is based on the premise that corporate knowledge is captured in a searchable electronic document, which it then tries to bring it to the employee at the exact point in time that they need it,” says Mousavi. “The trouble with that is that a large portion of corporate knowledge is trapped in people’s minds.”
Mousavi notes that this is particularly important in our tight labor market.
“Obviously there is a lot of demand for very high powered individuals. These type of individuals typically have a lot of corporate knowledge in their minds, and as they walk out the door, their knowledge goes with them.”
AskMe’s corporate product aims to effectively acquire a snapshot of these people’s knowledge by using their expertise in a knowledge-sharing environment and recording the responses on a database.
The company’s corporate service, although targeted to large corporations, can be very useful for many mid-size hi-tech companies.
“(The applicability) to a great extent depends on how much intellectual capital is being created in daily operation,” say Mousavi.
In addition, the Director of Marketing and Sales feels that the product is particularly useful for companies with large geographical dispersion.
While there are no other companies currently offering similar corporate knowledge sharing, both Mousavi and Conner know that there will be intense competition in the near future.
“This market is so hot that we are sure that there will be other competition,” says Mousavi.
The AskMe Corporation has received a great deal of interest, and has already begun implementation of their technology with at least one undisclosed fortune 100 corporation.
