ReadWriteWeb

We have talked about the power of utilizing social networks for businesses before in our Weekend Reading series with books like The Facebook Era, by Clara Shih and Crush It!, by Gary Vaynerchuk, and this week we've got another book under a similar vein. Published just last month, Social Networking for Businesses: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs, by Rawn Shah is a guide for companies looking to take advantage of the collaborative communities of social networks to improve their business.

Today, we drop another another segment in the Rulers of the Cloud series, focusing on SalesForce.com, the cloud innovator that re-invented the rules of CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

SalesForce is growing into a big company, recently announcing over a $1 billion in revenue annual run rate. Yet, the company is still an agile organization focusing on upheaval of the enterprise through cloud services. The newest release brought a major new services focus, SalesForce Chatter. We took a look and found that this product may be the service that brings the company further into the enterprise as a dominant enterprise cloud and collaboration vendor.

This morning, the Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign to bring video to Wikipedia. The project encourages Wikipedia users to add videos using the "100% free and open source video stack powered by HTML5 and Theora" that is the standard for the site.

Our contention, however, is that while technical issues in adding media have certainly had a limiting role, is this all that has kept multimedia from dotting the pages of our favorite collaborative encyclopedia? Can video be collaborative?

It has been quite busy this week on the Web as loads of announcements leading up to SXSW have hit the newswires. This weekend's festivities in Austin look to top last year's Twitter invasion with a location-based show down between Foursquare and Gowalla. It was a busy week at ReadWriteStart as well, so here's a run down of the top stories in this edition of the Weekly Wrapup. This week we've got tips for not killing your startup, how little changes can make big impacts, the truth about VPs of sales and marketing, an early look at some data from TechStars, and an entrepreneur's take on coworking facilities.

We've all heard of the big company that started as two guys in their garage, but these days, with startup organizations and incubators, more and more success stories seem to feature companies that built their success from group collaboration. One excellent example of how startups can take advantage of collaboration is to work in a coworking environment with other companies and entrepreneurs.

Socialtext is one of the smarter companies we cover in the enterprise space. The people there have an intellectual bent. Co-Founder Ross Mayfield is a thought leader and one of the original pioneers of the social Web. He's one of the thought leaders. And the CEO, Eugene Lee, is one of the more eloquent people we run across in the interviews we do.

Socialtext came into the market in 2002, long before blogs bloomed and years ahead of what we know of as the real-time web.

As a result, they have an established client base. They were one of the first, if not the very first, to offer wiki technology as an enterprise product.

Today, email is nearly as ubiquitous as the computer itself. It offers a simple process that "just works" for most users and it has become a defacto communication process for enterprises and individuals alike.

YouSendIt found its place in the evolution of email by providing existing email users a solution to a common problem - sending large files. Along the way, the company has leveraged its position in cloud based solution to offer additional benefits to its users.

Fujitsu has integrated MindTouch technology into its scanner technology. The service means that people can feed documents through a Fujitsu scanner and then automatically post them to the MindTouch cloud-based collaboration service. Documents will be uploaded, stored, shared and processed into a web-oriented environment.

It's the cloud factor that makes this interesting. Scanning documents into a cloud-based environment has a number of implications for markets that still rely on antiquated storage practices. For example, this is the kind of application that would seem to be applicable for law firms that now use warehouses to store millions of paper documents.

With the Super Bowl less than a week away, I am reminded of 2002 and the New England Patriots, which defeated the St. Louis Rams and won the NFL title that year despite being labeled a clear underdog. During the player introductions, each Rams starter soaked up the limelight one after another. The Patriots however chose to enter the stadium as a team, waiving their rights to player-by-player introductions. The Patriots went on to shock the world by upsetting the talented Rams team, and ever since, Super Bowl teams have followed in their footsteps by entering the field as a team.

In this week's installment of the ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup, we analyze some industry predictions on social media and provide entrepreneurs with some stock tips to bring to the negotiating table. We also look into a man in Australia who's looking to turn some heads by launching a Web startup in just seven days on a $500 budget, and we run down the top 10 tools to help small business collaborate online. As usual we check in with our semi-weekly series Never Mind the Valley, which this week chronicles the emerging tech scene in Israel, and shows us how there's more going on in Austin than just South by Southwest.