Sharing some good news for 2015: “Online Communities will continue to grow in support of business innovation across all enterprise functions, increasing by $200 million in 2015, a 30% increase over 2014.” Here is the link to the full report.

On a philosophical level, perhaps these new tools are just helping us reconnect in a fundamental way that we’ve been missing.  National Geographic has a a fascinating article on the Karma of the Crowd.  Here’s an excerpt:

In the West there’s a pervasive idea that when people congregate, they surrender their individual identity, along with their ability to reason and behave morally—some of the very qualities that make us human.

“What our research shows is that, actually, crowds are critical to society,” says psychologist Stephen Reicher of the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom. “They help form our sense of who we are, they help form our relations to others, they even help determine our physical well-being.”

That’s why we at QiqoChat are excited to be in this field.  We believe there are some tremendous possibilities for professional groups to form and collaborate in intelligent ways.