One of the unexpected perks of starting work at ReadWriteWeb in December? No more Yammer.
This, of course, is more of a company culture problem than anything Yammer can control. Yammer continues to grow, and the enterprise social network space is where companies who are conceding truly social networking dominance to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, will seek to grow.
Today could be the point in history at which we look back and say, "that was the day the Internet fundamentally changed." Today is the day the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) opens up its new registry for generic Top Level Domains and it will have a profound affect on how people find and consume information on the Web. Will it be a gold rush? Is this the end of the ".com" era as we have come to know it?
A top level domain is a core part of how the Internet organizes and parses the names of websites. The most common, of course, is .com, but other TLDs are .net, .org and country domains like .CO or .UK. ICANN's new gTLDs will allow companies, governments and other organizations to register unique strings. For instance, are we about to enter the era of .pepsi? See below for everything you need to know about the new domain name system.
One of the most basic tasks a smartphone can perform is the reading and writing of email. Research In Motion built an empire off of this function with its BlackBerry platform. Yet, the concept of mobile email might need to be redefined. Currently, a mobile inbox does not look all that different from a regular inbox. IBM Research studied how users interact with mobile email and is developing a whole new client based off triage and capturing user intentions.
As anybody who's spent long stretches of time on the phone with customer support knows, the help desk is one area of professional life that could use a refresh. This is true of external customer support departments, which are beginning to use social tools to augment their existing operations. It's also true of the internal IT help desk.
We're already seeing clues about the future of the IT help desk today. The workforce is beginning to become more distributed and mobile, while the nature and number of devices people use day-to-day changes rapidly. That will have an impact on the way companies operate, especially as they continue their move toward the cloud.
Cloud and virtualization company Citrix is releasing its popular GoToMeeting application for Android devices. Citrix cites stats from The Telework Coalition that 58% of companies consider themselves a virtual workplace while 67% of all workers use mobile and wireless computing devices. Combined with the fact that Android controls more than 40% of current smartphone market share, GoToMeeting is long overdue for a release on Google's mobile operating system.
GoToMeeting is going to be preloaded onto Motorola's newest Android device, the Droid BIONIC, starting Sept. 8. The iOS version of GoToMeeting has been downloaded nearly 250,000 times. Motorola will also be pre-loading the Citrix Receiver that allows employees to access corporate Windows apps and documents from anywhere.
One of the hardest things to handle in network or cloud troubleshooting is when something breaks and you are trying to track down why. What did you do to change things that resulted in the problem? Getting at the root of your changes can be difficult, particularly in the case of complex environments that have multiple dependencies and interlinked services. Three vendors, some of whom made announcements at VMworld, are getting the idea from Cher to "turn back time" and show you what your network looked like in the past when it was still working. It is a dandy idea.
Despite all the attention that social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn get as a way for marketers to expand their reach, technology buyers are not using them as primary sources of sources of purchase information, reports research firm Forrester. Print publications and company websites still far outweigh social media when it comes to informing IT buyers and it looks like that is not going to change anytime soon.
It is easy to use a Facebook page or a Twitter account to expand a brand's reach. Set it up and start posting and the marketing department hits its "reach" quotient for the quarter. Yet, for business-to-business (B2B) technology suppliers get little value from their social media initiatives. Hence, Forrester recommends businesses augment their social media strategies to become more effective sources of information for making technology-purchasing decisions.
In January of this year, mobile travel management app TripIt was acquired for up to $120 million by Concur, a company founded in 1993 that provides "integrated expense and travel management solutions." TripIt, founded in late 2006, was one of my favorite 'web 2.0' apps. At the end of 2007, ReadWriteWeb named it one of 10 Semantic Apps to Watch. From the early days, TripIt had managed to pair its sophisticated technology with an easy to use interface. The back end was technological fairy dust, but for the user it was almost deceptively simple. As I described the app in 2007: "you forward incoming bookings to plans@tripit.com and the system manages the rest."
Last month in Seattle I met up with TripIt co-founder Scott Hintz and Concur co-founder Michael Hilton (currently Executive VP, Worldwide Marketing). I was most interested to find out how a trendy consumer-focused travel app found its way into the more rigid, paperwork ridden world of corporate travel management - and how it's faring.
IT professionals need to wear a lot of hats. It is not just enough to be the "server expert" or the "mobile expert." IT departments are often stretched thin by the amount of work that is necessary to get every employee in the business working at optimum efficiency. That means being the server expert, mobile expert, cloud, virtualization, unified communications and applications expert, all rolled in to one person.
What are the applications that IT experts need to be able to function at optimum performance? The ability to streamline aspects of the business into one application is very useful. Here are five applications that help IT professionals do their jobs at peak efficiency.
Research In Motion announced today a new product intended to bridge the gap between personal and business uses on BlackBerry smartphones. BlackBerry Balance is a service tied through the BlackBerry Enterprise Server that cordons work data from personal data for the always-connected worker.
BlackBerry Balance shows users a unified view of the applications and data on the smartphone allowing them to separate sensitive business information or personal uses like scheduling and activity management. As enterprise and consumers merge gadgets from a hodge podge of task specific devices to streamlining one device for many purposes, RIM keeps the IT administrators satisfied with security provisions while also allowing personal use.
