ReadWriteWeb

Forrester has released its 2010 The Forrester Wave: Community Platforms report by analyst Melissa Parrish. Jive and Lithium took top honors this year. Forrester also evaluated KickApps, Telligent Systems, and Mzinga. The firm concluded that those five vendors have the most mature products and have a lead on the rest of the crowded marketplace. The report focused on vendors providing externally facing community platforms, not internal collaboration suites.

Gartner released its 2010 Magic Quadrant for Workplace Social Software report this week. The same five vendors held onto the Leaders and Challengers quadrants, while the Visionaries and Niche Players quadrants thinned out. IBM, Jive and Microsoft remained the "Leaders" and Atlassian and OpenText remained the "Challengers." Several vendors dropped off the list completely. XWiki, a "Niche Player," was the only completely new vendor to make the cut.

Forrester Research's latest enterprise mobility report is "Mobile Applications Will Empower Enterprise Business Processes" by Paul D. Hamerman. It's geared towards business process professionals, but gives a good overview of the current state of enterprise mobility and where Forrester thinks the enterprise is going.

Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler's new book Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business, a follow-up to Bernoff's and Charlene Li's 2008 Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, was released today. Empowered takes a look at several trends we've been following at ReadWriteEnterprise, including Shadow IT, innovation managment and microblogging. We caught up with Bernoff to talk about the new book.

The iPad is clearly one of those universal technologies that will be as useful in the home as in the office. Much like the iPhone, people will want it for work simply because it will be useful for getting work completed. Like any Apple product, it's easy to use. It's lightweight. And it's mobile. Plus, this baby is as sleek as it gets.

We expect to see a similar trajectory for the iPad in the enterprise as the iPhone has had in recent months.

Apple reported its earnings earlier this week. The company reported that iPhone usage doubled since last summer after the introduction of the 3GS. The iPad with 3GS service will be available in 90 days. Our bet is that by next fall we will be reporting similar news about the iPad as we have about the iPhone.

A third of all Internet users in the U.S. now post status updates on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook at least once per week. According to new data from Forrester Research, more than half of what the report calls "conversationalists" are female and 70% are 30 years old or older. Forrester's data also shows that 59% of all U.S. Internet users now use social networks and that 70% consume content on social media and social networking sites.

By now - the beginning of a new decade and well into the 21st century - it's a story we've long come accustomed to: the music industry is dying a slow, painful, sputtering death at the hands of the Internet.

According to analyst firm Forrester's latest report, 2009 was "a lousy end to an even lousier decade" for the music industry and we shouldn't expect much different until at least 2013. Last year, as a matter of fact, was one of the worst years yet, with a 13% decline from the year before.

A new report released today by Forrester Research is calling the tech downturn of 2008 and 2009 "unofficially over."

"Coming out of a lousy 2009, 2010 is looking a lot better," said Andrew Bartels, the report's author. "We see 2010 as the first year in a multi-year growth cycle. It's not a simple rebound from a downturn."

The smart phone is not a phone. It's a computer. It's like your desktop or laptop. It stores data. It connects to the Internet. It runs applications. It's a computer, not a phone.

The real challenge for the enterprise is to shift its thinking about how it will move beyond the carriers and one day become an entirely data-centric organization - an organization that gives information workers the ability to work entirely on an IP infrastructure, be it for Web-based productivity applications or on a VoiP network.

Forrester Research issued a report today that calls 2010 the year of the smart phone. That seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? To its credit, Forrester does use the report as an opportunity to explore how the enterprise can make the smart phone a part of the daily work life for as many employees as possible.

According to a new Forrester survey, almost 80% of Internet users in the US and Canada would not pay for access to newspaper and magazine websites. Those users who would consider paying for content are mostly interested in subscriptions. Only a very small number of consumers is interested in making micropayments (3%). The study also asked which distribution channel consumers would prefer if their favorite print publications ceased to exist. 37% preferred the web, 14% mobile phones and 11% would prefer to read the content on their laptops or netbooks. 10% would prefer PDFs delivered by email and 3% would read the content on their e-readers.