June 08, 2007

ETHERYL wins public bid with HEC MBA programme

ETHERYL recently won a public bid (Paris Chamber of Commerce) to provide HEC with an electronic application and student management system to power their elite MBA Programme.

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February 03, 2006

Introducing an exciting new partnership with Access MBA

Access MBA is a premium provider of MBA fairs with unique one-on-one sessions between candidates and admissions officers.

I am proud to announce this new strategic partnership with Access MBA from the Advent Group. The synergies between our two entities are natural: with its MBA fairs and magazines, Access MBA is a key instigator of relevant physical meetings between prospects and MBA Programmes; Etheryl typically provides the subsequent building blocks to process and manage those candidates with NetApply CRM and NetVestibule.
As part of this partnership, Etheryl will supply the technology to power the new Access MBA Network, a premium community platform that will extend candidate-to-candidate and candidate-to-institution interactions before and after the actual fairs. Naturally, we will be leveraging our award-winning NetVestibule engine to drive this platform.
My team and I look forward to a long and fruitful collaboration with Christophe Coutat and his team.

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January 18, 2006

Our partner BoostZone presents à l'Atelier BNP Paribas

Our partner Boostzone is presenting its innovative solutions based on the NetVestibule Social Networking Platform at l'Atelier BNP Paribas on Tuesday January 24th 2006, 9am.

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October 16, 2005

Featured customer: Manchester Business School

Today we would like to salute Manchester Business School and their admissions and alumni team. Indeed, over the past 12-15 months, MBS has embraced our original vision of a Student Lifecycle Continuum, and is on the brink to unveil one of the first if not the only true continuum worthy of such definition. Initially, the MBA admissions team selected NetApply to replace its former provider; the distance learning branch (MBS Worldwide) also picked up a license of NetApply. Then NetVestibule was introduced to welcome the select MBA candidates admitted by the AdCom, but also to help transform them into students and therefore increase the so-important yield. Later, they introduced our pre-applicant inquiry form that helps identify hot-prospects in order to entice them to apply with a personalized and pre-filled PDF application. Within a month, MBS will be rolling out our NetVestibule for Alumni module, gradually servicing up to 20 000 alumni...

We are thrilled to be working with MBS and look forward to visiting them in the great city of Manchester which is just an hour away from Paris by plane.

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September 06, 2005

Etheryl announces a partnership with Boostzone

Boostzone has selected our professional solution to offer a complete service to bring professional networks to life ("pour des réseaux professionels vivants"). Boostzone provides its customers complete consulting, guidance and staffing to formalize and structure all interactions within the community created by the professional entity, aiming to facilitate value-adding exchanges between the entity and its members.

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June 10, 2005

Copy of my comment to David Teten's blog entry on Social Software landscape

Here is a copy of my comment to David Teten's blog entry on Social Software landscape:

Dear David,

Thank you for this map. It is very helpful to understand the wide ranging applications of this fast evolving field.
Please allow me to introduce ETHERYL S.A.S., a Paris-based company that I founded in 2001. We provide social software and solutions (the NetVestibule suite) to academic (from candidate to alumni), professional (corporate alumni) and associative entities.

In terms of your map, it fits in the “Enterprise” column, but belongs to a number of categories within the “Business Purpose” row, that is: RCM, Workflow (candidate and yield management at the pre-student level), Blogs (each account has a community-visible blog), Social Network Analysis (we help school analyze the online behaviour of the accepted student pool to determine the evolution of their yield and act upon it with built-in CRM tools), with a bit of career related management too! Overall though, it fits in the RCM category (to simplify).

We operate dedicated and fully managed communities for our customers as an ASP (software as rental/service). Some of our references include:
- INSEAD (France, Singapore) - the #1 business school outside the US
- Manchester Business School (UK)
- Manchester Worldwide - Distance Learning (UK)
- Trinity MBA (Dublin, Ireland)
- Club Proctérien (French alumni of P&G)
- European Professional Women’s Network (15 European cities, including Paris, London, Amsterdam, Vienna, Milan, Oslo, Stockholm, Madrid, etc…)

…

I look forward to reading your book; I have to check if it is available in France (or via Amazon.fr).

Best regards,

Yann Lechelle
CEO - ETHERYL

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January 06, 2005

Event: "les Blogs en Entreprise" 18-Jan-2005

I attended this event to assess the trend on this very hot topic. Indeed, the www.etheryl.com web site and NetVestibule were already blog-enabled, from different angles and using different technologies (the excellent Movable Type in addition to some custom code). I am convinced that 2005 will see sustained exponential growth (and saturation?) in the blogosphere at large. However, within the realm of the Etheryl product line (NetVestibule mostly), blogging is yet another media outlet that needs to be offered in conjunction with synchronous 1-to-1 and 1-to-n channels (chatroom or instant messaging) as well as asynchronous 1-to-1 (email), 1-to-n (mailing list) and n-to-n (forums). The question for me is about the balance and availability of each outlet to maximise the relevance of a closed-community output. Hoping to develop further intuition on the matter at the conference...

Conclusion: indeed, I confirm that blogging will become an expected commodity and therefore a feature that definitely must be part of the NetVestibule product line.

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November 09, 2004

Guest Lecture on "Virtual Community Engines: One size fits all?"

November 9 @ The American University of Paris: I will be giving a guest lecture on "Virtual Community Engines: One size fits all?" as part of "Communautés Virtuelles, Agents intelligents", a course taught by Claudia Roda and Thierry Nabeth for the "Master Management et Ingénierie Economique" at the "Université of Marne La Vallée". Topics covered will include the difference between open communities (where half-a-billion potential web users converge to form highly focused interest groups) and closed communities (where users are invited to participate in a selective and closed community), but also the organizational effectiveness of the resulting virtual community (referencing my white paper). Of course, I will be deriving a lot of insights from past and current experiences with NetVestibule, Etheryl's commercial Virtual Community Engine and associated service.

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October 26, 2004

Inaugurating the CEO's Corner

This news category brings you my thoughts, ramblings, white-papers, mostly relevant to ETHERYL at large but not necessarily so either. Direct. Unedited. Time permitting...

Note: some posts predate this inauguration mostly because they file logically under this category too.
Note 2: event-related posts might have a time-stamp corresponding the day of occurrence (and not the time of posting - this means that they may be based in the future!).

Posted by root at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2002

White Paper - Technology for Admissions Offices

Improving Service at the post-acceptance/pre-registration phase

Excerpt: As the various rankings and accompanying controversial debates illustrate, top business schools are indeed very competitive. And while those rankings mostly evaluate quantitative parameters such as GMAT scores, salary increases and number of papers published by the faculty, they often fail to include softer indicators such as service level. Rightly so, since service levels are very hard to measure, compare and often identify. In this paper, we will focus on the service level offered to prospective students from the time they receive their letter of admission, until they finally reach campus and register, or decide not to join. This period can last up to a year for candidates admitted early or for deferrals. The level of service offered to the prospects during this period has a direct impact on the following three typical case-study attributes: cost, revenue loss and finally, competitiveness.

[read more...]

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February 21, 2002

Contribution on designforcommunity.com

Discussion thread "Where tumbleweeds blow"

Getting traffic to a new community site is easy. What I'm interested in is getting people to start talking - essentially to themselves - while a site reaches critical mass. I've found best results so far by taking the line of 'Hey, there's no-one here, come and talk to yourself but help the community grow, be a pioneer' etc etc seems to work fairly well, but I wondered what other people's experiences were in getting-it-going?

– wrightee @ 1:22 PM CST on 1/28/2002

[...]

I think the notion of critical mass is really important. To me, this hypothetical value CM represents the point at which things start to happen. However, I see two very different contexts in which the critical mass will play a role: the open community that takes members from the largest pool (i.e. the Internet-wide community) and the closed community that replicates a physical or offline community that is typically finite and smaller. Respectively, I see the critical mass being the actual number of people in the first instance, and the actual number of interactions in the second instance. While in the first case reaching CM seems more a function of advertising or visibility (and of course proper design!), the second case usually requires more patience and more subtle events. I have found that for the closed community, the design is especially important. I am not talking about graphical design here, but rather about the virtual environment that respects the transposition from offline to online. My theory contends that if users feel that the user interface respects their offline representation (i.e. belonging to subgroups, respect their anonymity or shyness, allow them to be extravagant via a picture or bold characters), then they are more likely to migrate and interact online. The critical mass in this case is represented by the number of online events (or posts) that correspond to their offline equivalent. I shall study my own users' behaviours to find out if indeed this theory holds ground.

– Yann Lechelle (ylechelle) @ 4:38 AM CST on 2/21/2002  

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October 01, 2001

Etheryl S.A.S. is born

Yann Lechelle incorporates Etheryl S.A.S. (société par actions simplifiées) at the Chambre de Commerce de Paris.

ETHERYL S.A.S.
Siège social: 4, place du 18 juin 1940 – 75006 Paris
Siège commercial: 79, bd Montparnasse – 75006 Paris
RCS: 439458910 Paris B

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