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Hot on the heels of CollabSystem’s recent Faux Rotary Dial Telephone, today they have achieved their next milestone on the product roadmap – the release of Emoji-To-Fax.

Emoji-To-Fax (“ETF”) takes cutting-edge sentiment analysis technology and applies it in a way that was never originally intended. The emotion underpinning emojis is seamlessly translated into melancholy imagery and delivered by fax, perfect for a Gen X audience.

This system uses Artificial Intelligence in a way never seen before. People have pointed out that the technology is only in its infancy, but our cloud servers don’t throw up errors when we use them. So it must be fine?

In our product launch we were heckled with phrases like “garbage in, garbage out”, but a single character Emoji is hardly “garbage”.

It allows Millenials to talk to Gen X by translating common Emojis such as this sad face:

into random (yet somehow appropriate) images of melancholy, for example:

Image Credit: Saatchi Art

The cover page of the fax also includes a cryptic or witty comment with overtones of Gen X privilege. The paid version also allows quotes from a motivational speaker who might have been all the rage in the late 1970s:

Delivery but facsimile* requires a thermal fax machine or V.34 modem (if you have to click on the link, you’re too old to be reading this).

When asked to elaborate on how the gadget came about, there was an awkward pause. “We were originally trying to connect every computer we had with every other computer. If only someone had told us about WiFi, we’d have saved so much time. However by building it ourselves, we got pretty good at connecting outdated technology with smart watches. Now that technical surplus has become our gift to the world. We can’t think of anything else useful to do with it.”

Asked what customer need this solves, CollabSystem issued a press release that simply stated:

Why would we need a customer need? This solves our need to look like we’re meeting our roadmap targets and disrupting an industry. Surely that’s enough?

But since you ask, there are 92 million Millenials and 61 million Gen Xers. That’s 153 million people in our target market. If everyone wanted to talk to each other, that’s 2.806 quadrillion interactions.

Thankfully Millenials don’t care that much about communicating with Gen X. We don’t have that much thermal fax paper.

* Yes kids, that’s the word for “fax”

Just moments after announcing they were being acquired, CollabSystem released its first gadget to support their existing collaboration suite. The Faux Rotary Dial Telephone (FRDT) is slated to be the first in a long line of questionable gimmicks from CollabSystem.

It was with much fanfare that the telephone was launched at a conference of all 47 CollabSystem customers (46 if you don’t count Niels the cat, who only attended because his owner couldn’t find someone to mind him).

Meanwhile, it seems many of the employees at CollabSystem were unaware of the pending hostile takeover. One employee with a knowledge of workplace culture told a mass of waiting reporters:

Someone wants to buy the company? We just make gadgets in the basement, and haven’t heard from anyone in years.

 

Some guy from compliance once asked us what we did, and he mumbled something about a Chinese Wall. It made no sense, as our basement office doesn’t even have windows. But whatever a Chinese Wall was, it finally gave us some peace and quiet.

The statement was provided on the condition of anonymity, as the person was not authorized to speak publicly, even about the blindingly obvious.

The Faux Rotary Dial Telephone

The FRDT brings an air of nostalgia to an otherwise cutting-edge suite of products at CollabSystem.

By connecting the FRDT to a computer, emojis are automatically translated into a human voice. For example, typing “😀👏🚀📆” in a WhatsApp to colleagues will cause the phone to ring and the voice of Neil Armstrong can be heard saying “Congratulations on meeting the launch date!”.

CollabSystem’s chief switchboard operator, Paul, said the telephone allowed Gen Y to better communicate with the Baby Boomers. “With features like extra crackle when the handset is accidentally nudged, or if there’s poor weather en route – it really allows people to relive the heydey of person-to-person communication. We’ve put a lot of effort into digitally recreating the sound of a poor phone line. It’s truly authentic, in a kind of faux way.”

Other features of the FRDT include:

• USB 4.0 connectivity (future proofing the device well into the 2040s).
• No chatbot required.
• Solid plastic construction. Fades gracefully over time to an uneven pale yellow.
• Scuffs easily to give the appearance of frequent use.

Asked if CollabSystem should instead be focusing its efforts on achieving forecast synergies from the recent merger, the CEO had a strong message for potential private equity firms:

We’ll keep making gadgets regardless. With an elaborate web of questionable outsourcing, nobody really knows who works here anyway. Don’t think for a moment that your hostile takeovers and valuation fanfare will distract us from our frivolous work!

If you are considering launching a takeover, CollabSystem suggests talking a long Walk.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

At CollabSystem, we realise the critical metric for the performance of a collaboration system is our exit price.  That’s why CollabSystem’s management team today announced its perfect willingness to walk away with a large or even a small suitcase of cash.  We are so willing to walk away we will even take a small brown paper bag or a neatly wrapped bundle.

The collaboration market is tough.  Unlike CollabSystem, most vendors can’t guarantee that their products work like magic when they are turned on straight from the cloud without the need for additional adoption support. Many independent vendors are competing with products that are increasingly deeply integrated into the stack of major software vendors.  In addition, there is always a buzzy new product from a hot start-up or a behemoth of the software industry to distract clients and have them pondering a product switch as a magic bullet.

At CollabSystem we are realists, we know the buzz has never really kicked in for us the way it did for others. We know how good our product really is. No matter how unrealistic our product promises we just haven’t struck that vein of customer success that results in the big payday of an IPO and a forced sale to private equity players or other vulture purchasers a decade later.

If CollabSystems is acquired, we guarantee to ensure that the interests of our customers are met until at least the cheque has cleared.  We value our customers and we would never want their needs to get lost in declining services levels, arduous integration processes and the eventual surprise shut down of our product, unless the return to us justified selling them out.

So we have only one phrase of advice to our competitors and other potential acquirers: Make it rain.

via GIPHY

CollabSystem is proud to announce the launch of their latest product offering, Complete Adoption.

Companies have traditionally struggled with adoption of Software as a Service products, and CollabSystem’s Complete Adoption is the only package on the market today offering a guarantee of 100% adoption within 24 hours or your money back. When combined with Walking and Talking, Adoption rates of 98% are guaranteed for the next 15 years with absolutely no additional effort.

CollabSystem’s Complete Adoption brings the very latest in consumer trends to your enterprise, without any adaptation or consideration of the new context. That means instant familiarity for all your “Insta peeps”.

Complete Adoption is almost effortless, and can be achieved by simply posting a picture of a dress. Then ask “Is the dress blue or gold?”

Photo credit: Wikipedia

At CollabSystem we like to break barriers, and we never considered 100% to be the limit for adoption. In fact, Complete Adoption can now promise adoption rates of at least 387% through the addition of cute cat photos.

Photo credit: BuzzFeed

One Complete Adoption customer said “I was skeptical at first, but adoption increased literally overnight. I woke up the next morning and everyone had an opinion about that dress. I was stunned.” He went on to say that he wasn’t sure if this was really what his corporate culture needed:

I actually wanted our people to be more productive with technology, but our vendors said they could only measure adoption.

I guess that means adoption is the same as productivity, but my company must be the exception that proves the rule.

We’ve had to employ extra security in our open plan offices to break up fights between blue and gold supporters.

– Complete Adoption satisfied customer

One adoptee added: “It took me several hours, but eventually I managed to give the cat a cuteness score of 11 out of 10. Isn’t he just adorable?”

CollabSystem’s Emperor of Complete Adoption, Mr Mistoffelees, recently responded to allegations that the photos were a waste of time, cleverly bringing the conversation back to the narrative approved by corporate communications:

We surveyed a zillion multinational corporations and their number one technology problem was adoption.

In one genius step, CollabSystem just solved their biggest problem. That’s the technology equivalent of world peace!

Now with adoption out of the way, we’re currently working our way through the rest of the world’s problems in chronological order. Time-wasting currently ranks #478, just after poorly directed air conditioning vents at #477. World peace is #7.

For more information or to add Complete Adoption to your existing SaaS products, contact CollabSystem.

Underpinning any good adoption plan for collaboration technology is winning an investment of time and attention by users. CollabSystem’s product range has solved this important issue through attention-grabbing gamification and AR retina-integration.

The Need for Time and Attention

CollabSystem’s products need your attention. Lots of your attention. Our research highlights that your employee’s waste more than half their time each day in the production line of email communication and wasteful pointless meetings.  We would much rather that your employees wasted their time on our product. We can’t guarantee you any greater productivity but our analytics packages will produce great charts of employee adoption as a result.  We know this critical data will drive your career and our next round valuation.

Gamifying For Eyeballs

Our products have been designed to take advantage of gamification, FOMO and our unending appetite for distraction at work to ensure that your employee keep coming back and devoting their wasteful time to our product. Due to legal advice from our counsel, we have been unable to create a genuine addiction to our product at this point, but we are still working on it.

Our system of notifications, badges, emails, alerts, status rewards and the fast flowing stream of messages will deliver a steady stream of achievement and oxytocin to your desperate employees. The appearance of doing meaningful work, interacting with peers and gaining social status will grab a growing share of their time.

Our ephemeral message features and our fast flowing message streams will make sure that FOMO is maximised. Any employee who misses a message will be fully aware that they have slipped behind their peers and that their manager has been notified of their incompetence. Experience suggests this approach is effective at behaviour modification.

Deep AR-to-Retina Integration

Even with our advanced features, there are times that your employees will look elsewhere. We have a way to stop that.  That’s why we are pleased to announce that from Q3 2017 we will be leveraging developments in Augmented Reality and Human to Machine integration in offering CollabSystem AR-to-Retina Integration.  Once the new feature is enabled, your employees will see their CollabSystem feeds wherever they go. The continuous status updates will crowd out their life 24×7.  We will have complete control of their attention and useful data gathering opportunities on how to expand their work into a greater part of their lives. AR is the future. It is inescapable and we want CollabSystems to be a part of that stimulating, engaging and lucrative future.

 

Sarah at the end of a busy day testing the science of collaboration

Collaboration Overload has become an important debate in many business publications. Sure the studies are mostly misrepresented or overblown, but at CollabSystem we know how to jump on a bandwagon to ship product. Here is how our product solutions guarantee to burn out and dishearten your employees. Don’t worry about changing the culture of the organisation, just add our products and watch engaged employees drop.

Start With An Unusual Definition of Collaboration

For the purposes of our study rather than define collaboration in any way reflecting two people coming together to complete work, we decided to define it as a rolling series of ad hoc meetings and obscure tasks shuffled from one employee to another by email.  We find this is how most organisations work.

Add Top Quality Misrepresented Scientific Research

At CollabSystems we know how to do cheap but effective.  We couldn’t actually get any reputable scientists to work on our project. That left our HR team who have run some horrendous experiments in their time. Our HR directors said it was unethical and expensive for us to test on monkeys. She suggested the interns were cheaper and more compliant.

So we asked our interns to sit in a series of conference rooms all day with mindless individual tasks to complete. At regular intervals during the day, managers entered the room to threaten their jobs or sent emails completely reorganising the meeting rooms and individual tasks. Like most managers, our goal was to maximise fear and confusion and generally interfere with delivery. We saw lots of fear, some delivery, but no signs of collaboration.

Finally, we told the interns that if the job wasn’t completed on time, Sarah would be sacked. Most of the interns expressed relief at this and demonstrated a strong willingness to collaborate with Sarah now.  Collaboration overload skyrocketed as everyone stopped work, emailed Sarah their uncompleted tasks and went to have a drink with the managers in the other conference room. We view the experiment conclusive proof of collaboration overload. Sarah’s case will be settled soon on confidential terms.

How CollabSystem Tools Guarantee Collaboration Overload

We have identified three key elements to effective collaboration overload: fear, lack of recognition and lack of human relationships in the workplace. Our CollabSystem tools have been engineered to maximise the impact of all three elements and worsen collaboration overload in your teams. Using CollabSystem tools, you can guarantee that all employees feel socially isolated, publicly exposed to threats and fears and offered little support or recognition for the work they do for anyone.

With CollabSystem tools in your workplace, all your employees can feel as overloaded as Sarah.

 

WOLFEAR – Why share when you can shout?

Working Out Loud is an important practice that helps organisations and their users to see the benefits of collaboration in their organisations. At CollabSystem we have optimised all the worst elements of the practice of Working Out Loud for our new proprietary approach to Working Out Loud – WOLFEAR: Working Out Loud For Fame Ego And Riches.

Our Definition of WOLFEAR

We define Working Out Loud For Fame, Ego And Riches as:

The process of blathering on publicly like A-grade exhibitionistic narcissist about one’s own importance, success and intelligence to alienate one’s network relationships, foster one’s ego and dominate all the attention until the droning sound of your own voice brings fame, power, money or psychic relief.

The key elements of WOLFEAR are:

• Total self-centredness
• Loud, continuous, repetitive self-promotion
• All-consuming greed
• Lack of interest in listening to others or learning from others
• No visible connection to work.

How to Practice WOLFEAR

There is only one authorised way to practice WOLFEAR. Our lawyers are highly effective so don’t even consider adapting our approach. The proprietary steps to practice WOLFEAR are:

1. Buy a CollabSystem collaboration solution (or maybe two)
2. Use the new tool to talk to your employees about yourself: our approach will help you identify the best messages such as recommended photos displaying your current wealth, power and success. Remember you are seeking to promote yourself and humiliate others as much as possible.
3. Spend as much time talking about the process of promoting yourself as you do promoting yourself. Help others understand exactly how effective you are at using WOLFEAR.
4. Automate the self-promotion so that it can continue without any time, attention or investment by you.  If automation is not possible, outsource the WOLFEAR activities to your assistant, corporate communications or marketing team.
5. Ignore all feedback, comments or interactions: you don’t want anything to disturb the comforting sound of your own voice
6. Allow the WOLFEAR messages to continue until your success or satisfaction arrives.

The Benefits of WOLFEAR

Practice WOLFEAR consistently and CollabSystem will guarantee you:

• your time will no longer be wasted listening to friends
• your personal brand will be as reflective or reality as your dating profile
• everyone will have the same impression of you
• a grandiose sense of self-importance
• few remaining inhibitions; and
• few other tangible benefits that are worth anything to others

A typical digital workplace showing the diversity of the generations

Much ink has been spilled over the role of demographics in the future of work. Coining a new generation is lucrative work, particularly as much of it is nonsense. CollabSystem doesn’t want to miss an opportunity to waste ink so here is our guide to leveraging CollabSystem solutions with the key generations in the Workplace of the Future.

Boomers and Older: CollabSystem is not compatible with Boomers and older generations. We recommend you remove these from your workforce immediately, if they have not removed themselves by now. We are talking about the generations of the future here. That means young ones. Older people might be wise, experienced, effective, and insightful.  They have a lot of life to share but let them go do a TEDX talk. Upgrade your Boomer employee as quickly as possible, CEO and Board members excepted as per usual. The Boomer and older generations don’t need collaborative work. Let them celebrate their life achievements, their comfortable shoes, and prodigious share of human wealth.

A boomer celebrating the absence of CollabSystems in their life

Generation X: CollabSystem is fully fax-compatible. Generation Xers who wish to relive this transformative technology can send or receive posts by fax. Generation X remember back to a childhood when the world was black and white and CollabSystem offers an option to switch all images to their preferred mode of smug sophistication (see below).  Generation X know they are the last generation to benefit from general sense of prosperity and they don’t intend to share anything with anyone. This is the generation that privatised the world. Private group features in CollabSystem will appeal to their sense of entitlement, exclusivity, and fear of retribution.

Smug Sophistication is fully supported for Generation X. Red wine is not included.

Generation Y: This Generation was named because nobody can remember why they are here. They are so obscure there is no precise dates for when this generation begins and ends. Most people have stopped referring to this generation. CollabSystem supports their preference for text messaging as the sole form of human communication at least as long as their plan offers free messaging. When they move out of their parent’s houses and take responsibility for their future, we will develop further features.

A rare sighting of a Generation Y in the wild

Digital Natives:  Digital Natives have experienced nothing but the internet era. CollabSystems gets them deeply. We communicate directly with their brains over Wifi using a fully secure API interface. We get their passion for navigating the urban jungles of the planet as digital nomads. CollabSystems translates all global languages into hip phrases for tattoos as badly as they do. Hipster mode adds a beard to all images, comes with an integrated espresso machine and adds a steampunk veneer across all our user interfaces. CollabSystem recognises that for digital natives work is deeply secondary to a fulfilling life purpose. With a flick of a button, you can provide your Digital Natives with a convincing simulacrum of purpose through gamification. Digital Natives can level up to real purpose when you have had time to replace them with robots.

Collaborating in the Urban Jungle with Digital Natives

Every organisation demands document security. There are complex legal and administrative requirements that mean organisations must take great care of their documents. Many organisations take better care of documents than their employees. No wonder document retention often exceeds employee retention. Employees would rather leave than see their old files again. CollabSystem promises to change all that.

CollabSystem is delighted to announce three new totally secure document management systems: Delete, Shredder and Fire. We recognise that different documents present different document storage risks and have developed a solution for each level of risk. These three solutions ensure that your documents are treated the way they deserve and you will face no residual legal issues from your document storage policies.

What is even more exciting for clients is that Delete, Shredder, and Fire each have a simple one-off consumption pricing model. There are no long-term storage costs to worry about. CollabSystem take care of your documents for you and you never have to worry about accessing or answering questions on the documents again.

Delete

Delete is the perfect document retention system for digital files. With one-button click, users will see their digital files stored permanently in the cloud where they will remain totally safe and secure forever. CollabSystems Delete solution ensures files cannot be accessed by anyone. Our cryptographic logging and indexing system even ensures that nobody can identify that the document ever existed to prevent unauthorised users accessing a document following storage. Should an record of a document be discovered in Delete’s routine scans of the organisation’s digital files, Delete will instantly corrupt the hard drive of every device in the organisation to prevent further unauthorised storage and access. Like any good digital document storage solution, Delete will impose an arbitrarily small file size limit on all users meaning that should they retain any documents they will eventually be unable to work. Delete also effectively secures and wipes all phones, tablets, USB sticks and cloud drives connected to the organisation’s network.

Shredder

Shredder is the CollabSystem document retention solution for low risk and insecure documents. Shredder can take any form of paper document. However Shredder is sensitive to paperclips and staples. We recomend having a intern on standby while Shredder is in consumption mode to address any jams that arise. Shredder is ideal for all those plans, strategy documents and business cases that you have developed and stored in lever arch folders with no further reference to their contents. Shredder is not recommended for high risk documents. We also recommend that following implementation of Shredder, the organisation let the intern go, prepare to deny everthing and blame the intern.

Fire

Fire is the document retention system for high risk and urgent documents. Clients with extensive physical documents in storage requiring an urgent document retention strategy have found Fire the ideal solution. In less than 3 hours, Fire can consume up to an entire warehouse of documents. Fire works equally well when documents are on-premise or stored in an off-site or third-party storage facility. Importantly following a full implementation of Fire, documents can be guaranteed to be totally secure. It is recommended that clients implementing Fire update their insurance policies and prepare for embarrasing questions.

CollabSystems is never going to get left behind in the race to devalue humanity. Therefore as the sunsets on the human age, we are excited to announce the dawn of the new era of future of work – Hierarchical Autonomous Augmented Reality Devices. These HAARD devices will do everything your employees were once capable of doing and they will do it with lasers!  Never again will you need to worry about whether your employees are collaborating enough. Never again will you need soft skills. Never again will your competitors see the dawn. HAARD devices don’t collaborate they just handshake, share status and blast the enemy to smithereens get work done.

The HAARD Device

The HAARD device is the latest technology for warfare collaborative work. For too long organisations have been struggling to engage employees and to better their practice of soft skills. The Future of Work will be HAARD.  Our exciting new weapons HAARD devices will be:

Hierarchical: There is nothing like a drone to know its place. Code well and these HAARD devices will never put a step out of line. You can sit at the board table surrounded by the comforting buzz of a near infinite fleet of subservient drones. Strictly, hierarchy was unnecessary in a drone fleet, but all our clients insisted on the feature. The HAARD devices attack work seamlessly and in neat formations. Mostly the HAARD devices work effectively in hierarchy though there is a small Skynet bug we are still trying to eliminate.

Autonomous: Calling upon the computing power of the cloud and highly sophisticated analytics each drone will be entirely autonomous, requiring no human direction to complete its tasks, to swarm with its fellow drones and turn its lasers on unsuspecting foes collaborate with your customer’s drones. Sustained autonomous function will require good wifi and a continuous source of power. In the absence of either the HAARD devices will retire to the nearest cafe, just like regular employees.

Augmented Reality:  If you are going to win in battle a competitive market, you need the best situational awareness.  HAARD devices come fitted with sensors will be augmented with the information resources of the cloud until they are completely overwhelmed with menus, drop downs and icons in their decision making processes. Judgment, discretion and effectiveness are entirely unnecessary when you have data.

Drones: Swarming buzzing drones with lasers! Need I say more.  Pilot tests indicate great potential for the HAARD in battle operational areas. Unfortunately, we are still looking for a more effective interaction pattern than lasers for customer service and service industries. The HAARD drones are definitely not recommended for use with small children, animals or anyone expecting empathy.

Implement HAARD devices in your organisation and you will be leveraging all the power of robotic warfare the Intenet of Things. But that’s not the end to our hype and buzzwords:

HAARD Devices have Blockchain too

Nobody understands the Blockchain. We certainly don’t. Everyone wants to be first to take advantage of the unbelievable hype and the unfathomable uncertainty. That’s why today we are announcing our Hierarchical Autonomous Augmented Reality Drone cryto-currency – HAARDcoin.

Blockchain is the classic solution in search of a problem and why should we be last to bolt it on for no reason. As they navigate their tasks our HAARD devices will exchange cryto-currency and create a continuous secure and entirely trustless journal of their kills activities. Nobody knows why that’s a good thing but prices of HAARDcoin are already skyrocketing at the potential (& a cornering of the market run by our founders).

In a rapidly changing battleground market, your organisation needs the best, most inhuman weapon collaboration devices it can obtain. A HAARD device is your best choice. Any sign of humanity in your organisation is a potential weakness.

Forget the hard challenge of building soft skills.

The Future of Work is HAARD (with added Blockchain)