From small-business support company Grasshopper comes Chargify, a billing and subscription system for web 2.0 and SaaS companies that eliminates the need to build bespoke applications.

Their RESTful API and hosted payment solution permit simple integration into any website, allowing businesses to charge customers on a recurring basis, manage subscriptions, achieve PCI compliance, and gain real-time business intelligence from their billing.

Most platforms gain traction through a killer app. In the second generation of real time, that killer app was market data for financial traders. What will it be in the third generation?

Today, the real-time Web is associated with social networking status updates via services such as Twitter and Facebook. But whether this will be the killer app for this generation is not clear. As we enter a period of "social update exhaustion" (as in, "I really do not care what you had for breakfast"), the real-time Web may evolve into things that we really need to make a living or to get essential stuff done. The killer app matters, because the winner at the platform layer will be the company that hosts it.

Alfresco, the open source enterprise content management company, has unveiled a developer program for those looking to host both the community and enterprise versions of its software on the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform. Alfresco is a leading open source alternative for document and Web content management, competing strongly with ECM giants like Open Text, Documentum, and SharePoint. Enterprises might still have reservations about cloud computing. But Alfresco is attempting to capitalize on companies ready for the cloud with this new software stack and development kit.

Back in July Microsoft launched the technical preview of Office 2010. But despite reports to the contrary, that technical preview didn't include the highly-anticipated online version of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Starting today Microsoft is making a limited preview of Office Web Apps available to partners, and has officially said that a more widely-available beta of Web Apps will arrive this fall.

Adobe is looking to stall falling sales and profit by entering into a new market: analytics. But rather looking to R&D, Adobe is instead coughing up $1.8 billion for analytics leader Omniture. This is the largest acquisition by Adobe since the purchase of Macromedia for $3 billion in 2005.

The acquisition has puzzled many, since Adobe and Omniture products really have no natural cooperation. There have been comments about the measurement capabilities that Omniture will give to content built with Adobe products. But in the end the entire deal revolves around two words: recurring revenue. Adobe's quarterly earnings have fallen due to declining sales of software licenses, and the SaaS model of Omniture will bring the company a recurring stream of revenue.

The government cloud computing service rumored since late July is here, and companies are jumping at the chance to join Apps.gov, an "online storefront" for cloud services and applications pre-approved for use by federal agencies. According to the post by U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, Apps.gov will move at the same cautious pace Data.gov has, and currently the site is pretty bare bones. Certain areas are without any vendors and all but those related to social media are dominated by Salesforce.com and Google. Other big players, such as Amazon Web Services, are also looking to cash in by becoming a part of the site.

Google Apps is an impressive productivity suite. But however good Docs and Gmail are, organizations using Apps are left without the kinds of social software they're used to having outside of work. Singapore-based startup Socialwok is attempting to fix that by offering a social app that lives on top of Google Apps. Socialwok resembles FriendFeed in many ways. The real-time stream of information can include attachments in-line and can be divided into topical feeds. The big difference is that all of it is nested securely under the umbrella of your Apps login.

Jive, a leader in "social business software" for enterprise collaboration and community platforms, has added social media expertise to its repertoire. Through social media monitoring tools from Radian6, the new Jive Market Engagement lets companies track and respond to the social Web in real time.

Radian6 is the kind of software that we've called the future of social media monitoring for businesses. By integrating it into software known for collaboration under the control of the enterprise, Jive is wasting no time in trying to connect its customers with people outside company-run communities.

Yammer is a "Twitter for the enterprise" platform that (to our dismay) won TechCrunch50 last year. A year later the enterprise microblogging space is growing rapidly and Yammer is still moving forward, along with competitors like Socialcast and Socialtext Signals. Today Yammer has announced a pair of Microsoft-centric additions that should be big for business users: an Outlook plug-in and a Windows Mobile app. Outlook is still huge in the enterprise, and a decent working integration with it should be an easier sell than any other kind of desktop access.

Sometimes even the best researchers forget that the answer you get depends entirely on who you ask. A new Forrester survey of 2,000 information workers has revealed that despite the hype, it's not Gen Y that's getting business to adopt collaborative technology. Gen X, those who are 30-43, are the ones leading the charge for social computing.

Forrester's analysis is that despite their different view of technology, Gen Y, Millennials, or whatever you want to call those 29 and under, don't yet have the clout within organizations to make real change. The same Gen X employees who are the fastest growing demographic in Facebook are the ones getting management to accept new technology as more than a fad.