We’re excited for any feedback that you or your readers are willing to share. Please give us a shout if you see things that we should work on.

As for the touchpad, we’re working on it. The hardware is world-class, we just need to get the software that drives it closer to perfection!

I have a question for the webmaster/admin here at ignorantium.com.

Can I use part of the information from your post above if I provide a link back to your site?

Thanks,
William

Thanks so much for the fast reply! I’ll go through the links you provided and take a look at where the numbers are coming from. I don’t know that I was clear enough in my post that I’m not doubting the value of the project or the intent of the authors. (In fact, I’m a huge proponent exactly what was done.) I also hope it doesn’t seem that I’m implying they’re faked in any way. My biggest concern, and the reason I wrote about it today, is that I saw a dozen tweets linking to your post all coming from people who are usually regarded as industry leaders in social media. Unfortunately, those same folks have been vocal in the past about the unimportance of ROI measurements in social media. To see them all tweeting about a post talking about such a big number made me suspect that they saw the headline and didn’t bother to understand the numbers.

Again, thank you so much for responding to my post. I hope you won’t mind if I ask more questions as I go through the other articles.

James

Hello James! Thanks a lot for the feedback comments and for putting together such a comprehensive follow-up blog post to the one that I have put together whether you have questioned the validity of those numbers put together. Very insightful and very happy to engage on the discussion as well.
Rawn’s blog post is by no means the original resource of where the study comes from. It’s actually been blogged and talked about extensively in the past from various other resources (Go here, here, here, here, here, here and over here, amongst several other places…).
The original resource is actually an article at CIO 100, under the heading 2008 Winner Profile – IBM, where you will see the details being shared based on that selection criteria and what the award was granted for, based on that piece of IBM Research, which is where the original piece comes from.
I have dug out our internal resources and I have also tracked down the original resource, which comes to explain the numbers with this criteria:

“Cost savings: Using an average hourly rate per employee of US$100/hr, ETS saves IBM US$95,528 each week. Assuming 40 hours per week and 48 weeks per year, ETS brings IBM US$4.6 million in potential productivity gain alone”

And there are some additional costs savings that were calculated as well, if you would want to find out more on them.
Now, I am not sure whether the results have been bloated or not, as you mentioned, and I do seriously hope they haven’t, but if those results were part of the selection criteria for that CIO 100 award I doubt they are “fake”, as they didn’t get questioned for their validity over 2 years ago when they first came out. But either way, very good exercise to challenge them, so I would get a chance to dig further on the actual research and survey results shared and, hopefully, with them we have been able to add some more clarity to the data mentioned on my blog post.
Again, thanks for the great write-up and look forward to further interactions!

Thanks for the kind words.

John
co-founder of Guguchu