Like a lot of people, I had my problems with Google Apps this week. Sure, Google "feels my pain" but they also lost my confidence. And confidence is a delicate thing. What crashed for me was Spreadsheet. That has always been the weakest component for Google and the strongest for Microsoft. Excel rocks, its just a tad behind the times on collaboration.
But in this post we explain how Google could still win the spreadsheet game by buying eXpress Corp.
Does Twitter Have a Role in the Workplace? A Directory Project Thinks it Can Help
Did you know that there are more than 100 people who work in the Oil and Gas industries who use Twitter? There are more than 400 people on Twitter who say they work in a field related to accounting, 115 professional language translators, 75 people who sew or are tailors and 33 people in the Air Force. How well is your industry represented on Twitter? Wouldn't you like to find those people to connect with them?
ESME, the Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment, is an experimental communication project developed for SAP's 'Demo Jam' by a group of 24 collaborators. It's a red hot vision of a Twitter-like experience behind the firewall.
While not yet publicly available, ESME aims to bring all the best things about Twitter to global business communication. Rapid collaboration, network effects leveraged for support, multiple interfaces and some advanced features that Twitter itself doesn't yet offer. Check out the demo video embedded below.
Sometimes social media users inside big businesses just need to talk about their feelings. More often, they need to share valuable metrics, anecdotes and insights that can help them advance the use of new collaborative tools inside their companies. Where can these conversations go on? Check out ClearStep, a powerful new online community provided by Jive Software.
We were very impressed with Jive's new collaboration service ClearSpace, the technology that powers ClearStep, when it launched in April. Making the feature set there available to the public to discuss the use of social software inside the enterprise is a very good idea.
I am a regular user of LinkedIn, using it both for biz dev and recruiting. I am a fan of the service, but still a bit of a skeptic on the business model. I decided to look at alternatives and the one that gave some use was Jigsaw. According to RWW Companies, Jigsaw is "a provider of business information and data services that uniquely leverages user-generated content contributed by its global membership." It claims to have 500,000 members and more than 500 enterprises using the product.
A new report from Forrester Research, a company that has been closely following the adoption of web 2.0 and social technologies by businesses, now says that their earlier predications about Web 2.0 in the enterprise may have been too timid. Last year, they said that in 2008 I.T. shops would start to take a leadership role in Web 2.0 adoption by business, but this latest report is now debunking the conventional wisdom that I.T. is as skeptical as once thought.
This afternoon at Structure 08 an interesting discussion was had about the birth, growth, trials and tribulations of Salesforce.com. Om Malik from GigaOm was joined by Michael Copeland from Fortune Magazine and Parker Harris from Salesforce.com. While the 'fireside chat' was titled The Endgame for Boxed Software?, the focus was on what lessons can be learned from the venerable CRM vendor.
Lidija Davis is reporting for ReadWriteWeb from the Structure 08 conference in San Francisco
In a recent report, Gartner predicted that early adopters will forgo capital expenditures, and instead purchase 40% of IT infrastructure as a service by 2011. Alistair Croll, senior analyst at Bitcurrent, and MC for the first Structure 08 conference in San Francisco, sees things differently. According to Croll it will be a lot sooner: "Right now, almost every company has someone in their IT department using the cloud to some degree." Croll predicts that by 2009 it will no longer be almost every company; it will be 100% of companies.
Is LinkedIn worth $1bn? Yes. Why? Because Bain Capital says it is. The stock is not public, so you and I cannot trade it. The whole notion of the average punter trading tech stocks (or the average punter's pension fund trading it on your behalf) seems rather quaint, from some bygone era. But why has the public market for tech stocks disappeared? Where has it disappeared to? Will it ever return? The LinkedIn financing offers some clues to these questions.
I have been a total skeptic on proprietary messaging within social networks. After all, who on earth would want a proprietary tool when e-mail reaches everybody? I love it, though, when circumstances change a deeply ingrained opinion. The technology business has a way of doing that. You've likely heard the expression, "I live in Outlook." Well I used to. Now I hop rather awkwardly between Outlook and Gmail. Could I soon live in LinkedIn? Could you?
