Gather your win stories from the field
Story capture is about gathering the stories from the field. There is no limit on the number of win stories per engagement: A Crowdstory engagement can start with 1 and grow to 101+.
- Utilizes a standardized set of interview questions
- Interviews conducted over a recorded web conference
- Selfie interview recording option available through the Cloudbook Reader App
- Crowdstory manages each engagement through a standardized process and project management
Once we've captured the story, we go through a process of transcribing and data cleansing, making the story readable.
Major Deliverable
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| Service | Major Deliverables |
|---|---|
| Story Capture |
|
Story Analysis
Once we've captured the stories from the field, this second phase in a typical Crowdstory engagement involves analyzing the stories to surface the patterns as to why your customers buy your products and services.
Major Deliverables
| Service | Major Deliverables |
|---|---|
| Story Analysis |
|
Consolidate stories and insights into educational collateral for internal and external distribution
Story creation services fall into the following categories:
- Marketing Collateral, including win summaries, market traction decks, recommended messaging per the results from story analysis and external-facing collateral.
- Cloudbooks, which encompasses creating videos for each chapter, readying text for publishing, creating slide images and exam questions, plus the import of content for the actual building of the Cloudbook.
- eBooks, which typically involves translating a published book into the eBook format.
- Printed Books, which involves providing authors a full service to ready their manuscript for self-publishing
| Service | Description |
|---|---|
| Internal and External Win Slides | Summarizes the win story into a single slide, and includes the full textual version of the story as speaker notes. |
| Messaging-as-a-Service | Consolidates story analysis results into an internal messaging deck. Provides overall recommends overall messaging, along with by stakeholder and vertical. |
| Market Traction Deck | WIn stories can also be summarized into a Market Traction deck to guide management and sales on where the wins are by industry, partner and offer. \ |
| External-Facing Collateral | Leverages win stories to create external-facing case studies, 1-2 page At-a-Glances and 3-4 page solution overviews. |
| Video Scripts | By understanding the stories from the field, we can also create scripts to guide the creation of marketing videos. |
| Service | Description |
|---|---|
| Cloudbook Creation from Manuscript | Starting with a manuscript, we can create the accompanying videos, slides and exam questions to package and publish a full Cloudbook version of the overall story. |
| Cloudbook Creation from Win Stories | Much like creating a Cloudbook from Manuscript, we can start with the collection of win stories and create the videos, slides and exam questions used to convert the loose collection of win stories into a published Cloudbook. |
| Cloudbook Creation from Presentations | If an author has a collection of presentations that tell an overall story, we can also turn this into a full Cloudbook by creating the videos, text, slides and exam questions. |
| Service | Description |
|---|---|
| Create a single story eBook | A single story can be packaged as an eBook for download in iTunes bookstore and Amazon Kindle. |
| Create a full book eBook | All chapters of a book can be published as a full eBook for sale on iTunes bookstore and Amazon Kindle. |
| Creation Service | Description |
|---|---|
| Self-Publish Printed Book | We take an author's manuscript and make it ready for publication (including copy edit and graphic design). We then can self-publish the book on behalf of the author. |
Publish stories and insights into corporate, marketing and back out to the field
Once you have your stories captured, analyzed and told in a variety of formats, you can use any to all of your channels to distribute and promote.
One option to collect a number of stories, which especially have a lot of video, is to utilize the Cloudbook App as a publising option. This next generation book format provides an excellent choice for packaging up your stories, especially if they are rich with video, for distribution throughout the world to your employees, channel and customers.
Major Deliverables
| Service | Major Deliverables |
|---|---|
| Story Publish |
|
Publish your book for mobile and online with unlimited video, text, slides, pdfs and exam questions through the Cloudbook App
These days if you want to learn something, you're more likely to go to YouTube to watch a video, versus walking into Barnes and Noble to buy a printed book. However, complicated topics require more than a single video.
Books offer a very simple, recognizable and generations-proven vehicle for educating us on complicated topics, partially because they organize content into chapters. However, eBooks and printed books offer very limited to no video.
Enter Cloudbooks.
Cloudbooks organize content into chapters, each of which can be rich in content:
- Unlimited video so you can learn by watching and listening,
- Text readable like an eBook,
- Slides to assist you in teaching others,
- PDF so reference materials are just a touch away
- Exam so you can test yourself on how well you understand the content
Cloudbooks offer additional features, such as
- Available on mobile and online
- Global content updates, so whenever content in a Cloudbook is updated, everyone around the world gets updated and is kept on the latest version of story
- Ability to operate completely offline via mobile
- Usage analytics so authors know what parts of their stories are getting the most (and least) attention
- Record a crowdstory, offering a scalable way to capture stories from the field
- Gift a Cloudbook to another at no cost
| Feature | Physical | eBook | cloudbook |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structure: Story segmented into chapters | |||
| Text: The ability to read the story | |||
| Unlimited Video: Embed multiple hours of video | |||
| Pictures used to teach others | |||
| PDF: Embed reference material | |||
| Exam: available to test others | |||
| Record your audience's viewpoints | |||
| Updates provided globally as content updated/added | |||
| Multiple platforms: same book on mobile and web | |||
| Usage Analytics: know what subscribers are viewing | |||
| Gifting: subscribers can give Cloudbooks to others |
At Crowdstory, our mission is to help better the planet by enabling the passionate crowd to share their stories and insights.
The previous generation of enterprise software—also known as second-generation enterprise software, cloud computing, and software-as-a-service—focuses on enhancing the virtual world through (among other things) a more agile infrastructure and flexible business models.
The next generation of enterprise software—also known as third generation enterprise software, industrial Internet of Things (IoT), and enterprise IoT—holds the promise of bettering our physical planet. This is accomplished through the deployment of industrial, precision Things generating data about the world around them, ultimately leading to information and insights that enable passionate people to make better decisions toward running a more precise planet.
At Crowdstory, we’re building out a network of people interested in telling their stories and educating others on how they are bettering the world through industrial IoT deployments. Our enabling foundational work is the book Precision: Principles, Practices and Solutions for the Internet of things. In addition, our professional service offering captures stories from the field (such as real world IoT deployments) and writes, films, publishes and promotes them so ultimately the field can learn from the field. We can also analyze these stories to derive further insights into what’s really happening in the field.
Marketing likes us because we capture stories in a consistent fashion, analyze them to understand patterns (for instance, why customers buy) and then give back detailed messaging broken down by stakeholder and industry.
Sales likes us because we capture stories in a consistent fashion, tag them by industry and story attribute (such as business outcome and value proposition) to assist in reference selling.
In terms of publishing stories for the purpose of educating, we still believe books provide a powerful structure for educating on complex topics; however, to educate ourselves these days, we’re more likely to go to YouTube to watch a video than to Barnes and Noble to buy a printed book. And in this increasingly digital world, even eBooks are extremely limited in the amount of video they can contain.
To address this, we created the Cloudbook format and app, which allows us to share stories as online and mobile “books” that are rich with unlimited videos, text, slides, PDFs and exam content per chapter. As such, we sell Cloudbooks that we’ve created on topics such as IoT, cloud computing and negotiations, as well as publish our customers’ story content to provide them with a consistent, mobile and online vehicle in which to educate their employees, channel partners and customers worldwide.
Your Crowdstory team
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Timothy Chou
Advisor & Storyteller
Timothy Chou has been a leader in bringing enterprises to the cloud since 1999, when he returned to Oracle to work for Larry Ellison as the President of Oracle On Demand. He has authored a number of books, including Precision: Principles, Practices and Solutions for the Internet of Things and Cloud Computing Trilogy.
Timothy has been a visible pioneer in evangelizing this major shift in computing. He has appeared in various publications, including Forbes, Business Week, The Economist and The New York Times, as well as on CNBC and NPR. He has also been a keynote speaker for business and technology audiences in North and South America, Asia and Europe.
Timothy holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois. He served as a member of the board of directors of Embarcadero Technologies (NASDAQ:EMBT) as well as the advisory board of WebEx. In 2007 he joined the board of directors at Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB).
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Vince Vasquez
CEO & Chief Storyteller
Vince Vasquez has more than 30 years experience in enterprise sales, marketing, business development and engineering. That said, his deeper passion has always been in the art of capturing stories for the sake of expanding our learning and improving the quality of our lives.
The author of many pieces of collateral for the enterprise, Vince also wrote a book, Relationship Workout for Men, aimed at helping men improve the quality of their relationships.
Vince holds an MBA from Stanford University, an MS in Computer Engineering degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, and a BS in EECS from University of California, Berkeley.
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Jessica Ehlert
Storyteller
With her education in journalism and advertising and professional experience in communications, marketing, and project and content management, Jessica brings a keen eye for process and detail and a love for storytelling.
Outside of work, Jessica is an avid equestrian, reader and grammarian. She enjoys training horses and young riders in the hunter/jumper discipline, perusing Powell's Books for her next story fix, and researching grammar rules ... just for fun.
Jessica holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Oregon.
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Alisabeth Soto
Sales & Marketing Manager
Alisabeth received a bachelor's degree with a focus in business and public health from the University of California, Berkeley. She was a student-athlete for the California Women’s Rowing Team and won a PAC-12 Championship.
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Lizzièe Jeréz
Graphic Designer
Lizzièe is a seasoned designer in the fashion industry with knowledge of complete product development from concept to production. Her excellent Illustrator and Photoshop skills along with her artistic ability and keen fashion sense make her an indispensable member of our artistic team.
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Daniel Viens
Developer & Graphic Designer
Daniel brings a number of years of experience building everything server-side for the Cloudbook Reader application. Daniel is also multi-faceted with experience in graphic design and photo restoration.
Crowdstory is dedicated to capturing the stories from the field and turning them into interesting, educational pieces
Crowdstory utilizes the Cloudbook App as a vehicle to publish video-rich stories. Cloudbook is the next step in civilization’s most fundamental vehicle for education – a book.