By now, you've heard of Adobe AIR - the cross-OS runtime that lets you run rich internet applications on your desktop. We've covered several of our favorite apps in the past, as well as places to find new ones, but so far all we've seen are consumer applications. What about the business world? Will companies ever be using AIR apps on their desktops? As it turns out, many already do and they're as easy to deploy as Adobe Reader.
Most enterprise software sucks. That is my considered opinion from 30 years in the software biz. Words that come to mind are: bloated, inflexible and user hostile. The good news is that it is getting better, a lot better. The driver for change is what I call the consumerization of enterprise software. These new software champions typically have some if not all of these 8 main attributes:
The Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad program is a program that allows companies to showcase their products and compete for the opportunity to present their ideas to the community at this year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference. This competition, organized by Stowe Boyd, began in April when companies were invited to post their video pitches to the E2 web site. After the community voted, the list of contenders was narrowed down to five finalists who will now compete for the final spot. For that grand prize winner, the prize is free exhibit space at the upcoming conference.
ReadWriteWeb's Alex Iskold recently described modern Biz Dev 2.0 techniques that do not involve knocking on doors and talking to people. The Internet is great at automating routine transactions and more software is being sold as a service on a simple "click here" to subscribe basis. But occasionally some contact sport is still required, and you have to resort to what we can now call Biz Dev 1.0 -- what we used to call selling. You will need these skills to raise money and to sell your business, even if you never have to sell to anybody else. Fred Wilson reminded us of the most basic requirement, to ask for the order. Here are 10 other tips:
You've probably heard people talking about the new "it" book: "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies." The book discusses the current trend of people using online social technologies like blogs, social networks, and podcasts, among other things, and how enterprise must learn to embrace these tools. Along with describing how the public's use of these technologies impacts businesses, the book also provides tools from Forrester to teach companies how to embrace social media as part of their business strategy.
A new report released today by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a global enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013.
I first used LinkedIn for business development and wrote about the experience here. In summary, it is one the best new sales tools since the rolodex - as Alex Iskold noted this week. But like a rolodex, it is only as good as the contacts in it and the skill of the person using it.
Recently I have been using it for headhunting. From talking to both Xing and LinkedIn management, I understand that headhunting is the primary use case - at least as a revenue driver for them.
Uh-oh, it's budget time and pennies are tight. Lets see what can we cut? The Expresso machine or the Starbucks expense account? Howls of protest and a sure-fire productivity killer. What about our Webex/GoToMeeting bills? No, way we need that for sales. What if we switch to Dimdim, a freemium, open source-based alternative? And right there we have a nice, simple, "no duh" value proposition and one that will be popular in a recession. But, does the software work?
Here's another word to add to your lexicon: "Socialprise." It's meaning is somewhat obvious: social tools + enterprise = "socialprise." It's a new term, but one we hope sticks around, since it's currently representative of one of the biggest shifts in business today. We covered some socialprise tools before, in discussing Worklight, Google Sites, and HiveLive, but here's a new avenue for social tools in the workplace: Social CRM. A company called InsideView is bringing the social web to CRM, and they're not the only one to do so.
Increasingly people accept that Facebook serves a different function than LinkedIn. In simple terms: deals on LinkedIn, dates on Facebook. This simple reality was obscured for a while, because the Silicon Valley crowd use Facebook (as it is the new, new thing) and so they extrapolated incorrectly that the rest of the world will work that way too. It looked like a contest between the Facebook hipsters and LinkedIn suits. But the real race for business networking has two horses. LinkedIn is clearly one. The other is not Facebook, but Xing.
