One of the missing ingredients in Google's growing Web Office suite is a CRM component. While there is little sign yet of Google providing CRM, a small startup called Etelos has done just that. Etelos has launched a new product called CRMforGoogle, which is a web-based CRM tool that integrates very nicely with Google’s personalized home page and Google Apps.
Essentially CRMforGoogle is a package of Etelos produced 'Google Personalized Homepage' gadgets, which all have CRM functionality. Etelos has cleverly packaged all their gadgets up into an actual product. In fact, if you look at this screenshot, you'd think it was a Google product!
Etelos has launched CRMforGoogle today as a limited Beta release. Features include customizable modules, contact management, task management, the ability to automate client follow up, share schedules and manage projects, and more - all within Google’s Personalized Homepage.
Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus. Jay was Read/WriteWeb's representative at the Adobe Engage event, held yesterday in San Francisco.
After attending
Adobe’s Engage event, where Adobe peeled the
covers off Apollo, I began to wonder how compelling this offering is for the
mainstream user; and what is the most likely diffusion scenario (i.e. how
it will be accepted by the market).
During the presentation, Adobe mentioned that their Flash Upgrade 8 reached an 85% penetration rate within 9 months, which is amazing. The diffusion rate was aided tremendously by social network sites, which helped prompt people to upgrade their players. So does Apollo have a compelling application opportunity that can deliver that same market penetration? Is the ability to blur the lines of offline and online, as well as the ease of starting an application on your desktop, important enough for my mother or brother to want to download a desktop version of one of their favorite sites?
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
It's 2007 and no longer do startup employees, or even those of medium-size and large companies, need to be located in the same place. Instead, more and more companies are going virtual. The answer to long commutes, inner city traffic, tapping into creative minds in other geographies and combating global warming is: a 'work from home' policy.
But in order for working from home to be effective, certain things need to be in place. The most critical is technology - a set of tools, along with the infrastructure, that can replace the traditional office. Using these tools it is possible for team members to connect, communicate and execute as effectively as a traditional company. So in this post, we look at software that makes virtual companies possible.
Pick: Skype; cost: free. Alternatives: Gizmo, Jajah, Google Talk, more...
The first tool for a virtual company has to be one that
replaces face-to-face communication. This is not an easy task, but Skype gets close. This popular software bundles the
phone, traditional chat, conferencing and video conferenecing and works on Windows, Mac
and Linux. It is powerful to be able to chat and, when necessary, call a team mate. All
Skype PC-to-PC calls are free and there are options such as SkypeOut (calling normal
telephone numbers) and SkypeIn (gives you a phone number for anywhere in the world).
Written by Charles S. Knight, SEO and edited by Richard MacManus. The original version of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines List appeared here on Read/WriteWeb on January 29, 2007. Every month, we'll be updating the list and selecting a "Search Engine of the Month". At the end of the year, we'll also select an Alternative Search Engine of the Year.
In February's edition of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list, there are 32 new search engines (and of course 32 dropped out to accommodate them). You'll find the updated list, in HTML and Excel formats, at the bottom of this article. A lot can happen in a month in the ever-changing world of Search, so accompanying the list is my commentary on the changes during February.
Firstly, let's explain how we developed the list. When we say "The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines," we are referring to alternatives to Google. Many readers wrote in to ask what the criteria was for inclusion on the List, such as: is it the percentage of market share, or some other statistical measure? It is not. The criteria is twofold:
1) the Search Engine should exhibit superiority to Google - not as a whole, but in just one particular area. People have been talking about Wikipedia's search engine Wikiasari or even digg as potential "Google killers". That's fine, but we are not arguing that any one of the 100 list members is a "Google killer". Rather, that they should be matched against the appropriate corresponding part of Google. For example, TheFind is a shopping search engine and therefore should be compared to Google's shopping search engine, Froogle. blinkx, a video search engine, should be matched against Google's video search feature, and so forth. (See article #1 for a fuller explanation of these categories.)
2) Secondly, what ultimately gets a particular search engine into the Top 100 (as opposed to the hundreds and hundreds of "also rans") is my evaluation. It is a subjective, personal judgment from an SEO - not an independent, statistical measure. I liken it to a movie critic, who must be ready to defend his/her ratings, but the reader is by no means obligated to agree with them after having seen the movie.
Finally, there is no ranking within the Top 100, which is why it is displayed alphabetically from A-Z. However, starting this month, one of the 100 will be picked and featured as the "Search Engine of the Month."
Today Adobe is holding an
event called Engage, where it is explaining its Apollo web development platform
for tech bloggers, developers and others in the Web industry. John Dowdell from
Adobe has a useful
page of links. The coverage is quite diverse, from Tim O'Reilly
commenting on the user experience aspects, to David Berlind on Brightcove, to
James Governor on Acesis, to Scoble on positioning, to Ryan Stewart's blanket
coverage.
But let's step back and look at the high level. Michael Coté from Redmonk sums it up well:
"Apollo itself is, to be blunt, a new GUI framework evolved from Flash, Flex, ActionScript, and lots of XML. The idea is "bringing the web to the desktop"..."
Really, to put it even more bluntly, Apollo is Adobe's Web platform - only its plays to Adobe's strengths, which is "rich" desktop apps. And in particular, Adobe has two killer assets which it wants to push forward in this new world of desktop/web integration: Flash and PDF (Portable Document Format). David Berlind reported some interesting stats around those two things:
Revision3, the online TV network founded last year by Digg's Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, David Prager of TechTV, and others, has announced a new underground music show on Revision3. The show is called XLR8R TV (pronounced "accelerator" TV) and is being produced by XLR8R magazine, a San Francisco music publication since 1993. The magazine and website XLR8R covers hip-hop, indie and electronic music - as well as related trends in style, art, fashion, and technology.
Revision3 told Read/WriteWeb that the sector of Internet television is really heating up, and so they expect their new underground music show to attract a niche audience that will be attractive to online advertisers.
Revision3 told us that their competitors aren't taking the time to figure out what audiences want or expect from on-demand programming - or worse, they just expect the users to create their own content. Revision3 thinks that a show that costs very little to produce, that leverages a known brand in the underground music community, has never been done before. Their target audience is the tech-savvy, young and smart demographic – not dissimilar to digg's audience (although probably less geeky and with more females).
The show itself will be made up of three segments, anchored by a host who narrates from a location relevant to the content of the show. It will focus on emerging artists and music and will cover genres such as hip-hop, indie rock and electronic music.
Microsoft has acquired Medstory, a vertical search engine for health information. This is an interesting development in a few ways - but in terms of Web tech trends, because it's another sign of the rise of vertical search engines. We've written before about how VSE such as Retrevo are beginning to make their presence felt, alongside generic search engines like Google and Live Search.
Microsoft has bought Medstory because it's an "intelligent" and "intuitive search technology". The NY Times says that Medstory's "search software applies artificial intelligence techniques to medical and health information in medical journals, government documents and on the Internet."
Written by Sramana Mitra
I have written several pieces recently about the Extended Enterprise trend, covering Segments such as Collaboration, CRM and PLM.
In the same vein, that I have proposed a framework for Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS), I would like to discuss in this piece, a framework for Enterprise 3.0.
Fot those working with web technologies, and focused on business applications, the trend to watch carefully is the Extended Enterprise one, which hasn’t quite become mainstream yet.
While this week's poll is
about Google's
Web Office bid, we mustn't forget that a few small Web Office vendors have been in
this space longer than Google and have built up a loyal and strong user base. One such
company is ThinkFree, which I've profiled before
on ZDNet. Today ThinkFree announced they'd reached 250,000 registered users. These users
are made up of small and medium business owners and their staffs, university professors,
teachers, entrepreneurs, parents, bloggers and students.
What's more, ThinkFree users come from more than 200 countries, including Mauritania, Anguilla, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. The greatest number of users come from five regions: the United States, South Korea, Brazil, the United Kingdom and Canada.
Here are some monthly statistics released by ThinkFree:
There was a lot of talk last week about Google Apps Premier, the Google-supported package of web-based office products. Many people spoke about it as if it was a rival to Microsoft Office. While Google Apps Premier is clearly targeted at small business, there's a feeling that it's also more than suitable for enterprises. Indeed Procter & Gamble Global Business Services and General Electric were wheeled out by Google as early customers of Apps Premier.
So in this week's poll we're asking if you think Google Apps Premier is a tipping point, where a web-based Office Suite has became a viable competitor to Microsoft Office - for small and large businesses alike. Or do you think otherwise? Let us know...
