The cyn.in desktop client from a company called Cynapse is a new application that brings microblogging to the corporate desktop. Powered by Adobe AIR, the client is intended to improve collaboration between teams through its real-time "Activity Stream" of events which makes communication quick and easy.
Forterra Systems, a company aiming to bring virtual world technology to enterprises, will shortly release a report entitled Recipe for Success with Enterprise Virtual Worlds. ReadWriteWeb was given an exclusive first look at the report. It is based on pilots conducted with consulting firms Accenture and ACS, using Forterra's virtual world product called OLIVE (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment). One of the more interesting conclusions of the report is that virtual worlds are both more engaging and less expensive to operate than audio and web conference systems. Although as we shall see, there are still I.T. and usability issues with virtual worlds - which Forterra and other vendors will need to overcome.
Will 2009 be the big year for corporate transparency, for a global conversation - perhaps for bargain basement online marketing tactics instead of old-school huge commercial campaigns?
Peter Kim, a former Forrester analyst now working on stealth enterprise software company, recently polled 14 of the most high-profile thinkers about social media marketing and asked them what they expected to see 2009 bring. The end product was an attractive 23 page PDF that we've embedded below, but we thought we'd pull out some of the thoughts we found most interesting for all you skimmers out there.
Ambitious online music magazine Idiomag serves up synchronized songs, photos, videos and articles from and about artists it believes you'll like, based on your past behavior. Today the company is opening up its store-room of dynamically aggregated content to 3rd party developers through a particularly exciting API (application programming interface). Beyond just media content, Idiomag is opening up access to user Attention Data through the APML (attention profile markup language) protocol and will soon offer bundles of topical content coordinated to suit any user's interests.
We're impressed by the offering and excited to see what will come of it.
Hasbro today announced that it has dropped its lawsuit against the makers of Scrabulous, the popular Facebook Scrabble clone that was forced to shut down earlier this year. Scrabulous later reappeared as Wordscraper, a reimagined version of Scrabble, but this app was decisively less popular than the original. Hasbro's own Scrabble game on Facebook also never quite caught on with the old Scrabulous fan base.
MP3 search engine SeeqPod will take a bold step tomorrow and release a Windows Mobile app that will allow users to search for and stream music on their phones. The app will sell for an introductory price of $10 and will include playable music search, discovery, Wikipedia articles about artists and updating collections of playlists.
The company says "Any Windows Mobile device is now essentially an iPod, but streaming." That's putting it lightly; if this app works well then any Windows Mobile Device becomes an iPod with all the free music posted around the web on it.
Enterprise adoption of cloud computing, SaaS, and social media (whatever you want to call it) is accelerating. This is a healthy market, in which vendors are doing well in a tough economy. As we near the end of a year that will go down in history with the words "meltdown," "panic," "crisis," and "depression" attached, it is time to celebrate the winners in this market, enterprise-focused web products that are already doing well and poised for even greater success in 2009. And if these products excite you, we invite you to subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Enterprise Channel.
These days, everybody's talking about cloud computing - the notion that computing's future lies in web-based applications and services and not in software tied to the desktop. After years of web app releases, we now have many solid alternatives to desktop tools ranging from office document creation tools to photo editors. Yet still, some programs remained tied to the desktop with seemingly no plans to move elsewhere. iTunes is one of those programs.
We don't really expect Apple to create a web-based iTunes anytime soon. Why should they? The company's iPods and iPhones dominate the mp3 player market and are locked down so that they, in theory, could only work with the company's iTunes software.
Today, Wuala, one of our Top 10 International Products of 2008, released a major update of its platform. Until today, you had to use Wuala's desktop application to use the service and access your files. Now, however, you can also use a web interface to access Wuala. Wuala also implemented an API that will allow developers to to hook into Wuala's storage services.
As we pointed out in our initial review of the service, Wuala uses the computers of other users to store a large part of the data on the service. Users who share a larger part of their hard drives are rewarded with more cloud storage.
A new project called ContextMiner has been created by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The tool lets anyone automate the collection of links to online videos and blogs along with their extensive metadata. Although they're calling ContextMiner a YouTube archiving tool, it doesn't actually download the videos off the site...yet. Instead, it extracts the embed, and the provides that to you along with other details like the number of views and what sites are linking to the video.
