Commentary on this week's management changes at LinkedIn implied that a shake-up was needed to make LinkedIn more like Facebook. As somebody who has used LinkedIn extensively and spoken to many people who have also found it very useful, this is a plea to listen to users and not the Valley cognoscenti. Sure, when Facebook was "valued" at $15 billion, a bit of envy was understandable. But now that we're in the real world...
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.
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.
According to a new report by Forrester Research, corporate blogs are the least trusted information source of all. Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say that they trust them. You can grab a copy of this report for free by filling in a form at Forrester. The full trust scale is below, with 'Email from people you know' the most trusted at 77%.
We have some reservations about the findings of the report - and to prove our point in this post we check out a good and bad example of corporate blogging, from Dell and the Walmart blog respectively.
In the world of enterprise I.T., everything is a security risk: your insecure password, an unexpected email attachment, a careless web surfer clicking through to a malicious URL, or the unapproved software you installed on your computer. Today's I.T. has plenty of tools to handle most of these threats, ranging from firewalls and spam filters to malware fighting software and application control mechanisms. Now, they will soon have something more: a new Application Control Engine that specifically goes after and shuts down Web 2.0 apps and social network widgets.
A-ha moments often come when the conventional method lets you down and you need to try something new. That happened on Saturday when Gmail was unavailable to me for over an hour. The outage was long enough for me to have to set up a Yahoo Mail account to send an urgent email. I also used Basecamp to communicate with my ReadWriteWeb colleagues; through that, I learned that Gmail was fine for them. So I started my research online to see what was happening. Of course I started my search with Google, which was not of much use. Then I tried Twitter.
MuseWorx is a SaaS service targeted at 'creative types' - marketing and advertising people, graphic designers, video production companies. It's an on-demand platform that lets creative professionals store and share files, track them, edit and collaborate. Essentially it's an asset management system, which is a common enough software type in this field. However the fact that it's browser-based and sold as an SaaS (software as a service) makes it an interesting one for ReadWriteWeb to check out.
We recently had the opportunity to meet with two senior executives at Google. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus and I met with Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise. Then a few weeks later, I met with Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, via video conference. Both meetings provided some interesting background - but the one question that keeps returning and that was not so well answered is: why is Google not deploying Gears aggressively?
Most people quickly answer this question in the affirmative. I certainly do. However, there are people out there who aren't sure. They look at the monthly cost of a SaaS application and compare it to the equivalent licensed product over an extended period of time. Given enough time, you will eventually hit a point when the SaaS product appears to be more expensive. Let's look at it from the perspective of the total cost of ownership (TCO).
