ReadWriteCloud

Email, instant messaging, forums, code forges and other collaboration tools make it possible for distributed teams to get work done - but they're not great tools for making decisions. The team behind Loomio wants to solve that with a new Web-based tool for focused, concise discussions that allow all team members to be heard. 

With an expected valuation of close to $100 billion, it’s understandable that no one can stop talking about Facebook’s initial public offering this week. But while Facebook basks in the social media spotlight, companies tackling tough business problems are exciting investors, if not consumers. Workday, for example, is expected to be among the largest IPOs this year in the business software market.

PLM is far from the sexiest acronym floating around the Internet these days. Short for Product Lifecycle Management, PLM is often thought of as an esoteric offshoot of the equally obscure PDM, or Product Design Management - the way engineers track control technical data related to a particular product.

PLM is like PDM on steroids, extending the concept to cover "the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal," as Wikipedia puts it. If you haven't heard of PLM, don't feel bad. The category hasn't exactly set the world on fire. But Autodesk thinks cloud computing can change all that.

Most people think of Autodesk as the maker of AutoCAD, the design software of choice for architects, engineers and other design professionals - typically running on high-powered workstations. So why is Autodesk CEO Carl Bass so hung up on the "democratization" of technology - spreading technology to the cloud computing platforms and mobile devices?

At the company's media summit in San Francisco this morning, Bass told a crowd of journalists, analysts and customers gathered in the company's slick design gallery (see pictures below) that the combination of mobile devices, cloud computing and social collaboration is more profound than the shift to PCs.

Here's the problem: Data has already gotten too big for its britches. There are increasing corporate mergers and takeovers, greater pressure among businesses in both private and public sectors to consolidate resources, and to boot, federal regulations mandating privacy restrictions and security policies. Especially in the healthcare industry, the first "big data" technologies to emerge from the former Yahoo project that became Hadoop, have been a godsend.

Hadoop breaks simple data stores free from the bounds of single volumes, enabling them to be distributed in shards across multiple storage devices. Normally a database system hasn't had to deal with encryption. If you encrypt the volume it's stored on, that should be good enough - at least, that's what the U.S. Dept. of Commerce's NIST agency said in 2007 (PDF available here). But that was before the big data problem was even identified, and years before the first Yahoo teams went to work on it.

Today, Alfresco today launches its Enterprise v4, perhaps the biggest update since they began operations. The new software comes with mobile and tablet apps, business app integrations and is loaded with social features that help users share, comment on and collaborate on content. The software is built around an open source content management system that is used by more than 2500 enterprises in 55 countries around the globe. They call it cloud connected content.

Like other social Intranet products, Alfresco users can like or follow particular content streams. Enterprise v4 has integrated connectors to Google Docs, Microsoft Office, QuickOffice, Adobe Creative Suite and Apple's iWork app. You can also publish your content to YouTube, SlideShare, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Pricing for an Alfresco Enterprise subscription starts at about $25k for the typical enterprise. You can download the new software here.

We haven't written much about TIBCO's enterprise social media tool tibbr since a year ago. But they have interesting news, including updates to the service, that they are announcing today with v3.5, scheduled to be available next month.

As the Windows Azure platform began branching out last year from support for purely Microsoft frameworks like .NET, going so far as to incorporate Java, one possibility that was overlooked at the time was to support JavaScript. The reason seemed obvious: JavaScript, as its creators would tell you, is a client language. Well, that's no longer true, now that Node.js makes it about as easy to write JavaScript for the V8 interpreter on the server as it is for V8 in Google Chrome on the client.

Last month, Azure demonstrated how much both its platform and its proprietor's attitude had matured by opening up support for Node.js. Today at a summit of Node.js developers in San Francisco, the maker of a SaaS-based IDE for developers, announced it has added the ability for developers to deploy Node.js apps to Azure.

To all the other "aaS" providers out there, add this one: MaaS, for malware as a service. Yup, the bad guys have their own routines that can provide a one-stop, full-service shopping for fraudsters. How depressing is that?

Turns out, very depressing.

With the announcement by Oracle of their acquisition of RightNow earlier this week, it has brought about some strange bedfellows on how their mutual customers can connect up disparate CRM and other SaaS-based customer support systems. Indeed, at the center of the integration between Oracle and RightNow's technologies lies a product that is sold by IBM called WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration. Let's look a bit more closely at what is going on here.