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Last night Salesforce.com announced version 3.0 of its ServiceCloud product. Today at the Cloudforce event in New York City CEO Marc Benioff revealed more about the new version. Most importantly, ServiceCloud is transforming into a unified communications system for customer support by integrating VOIP and video conferencing technologies - including Apple's FaceTime. Benioff didn't specify, but it's possible some of the new features were built using technology from Salesforce.com 's acquisition of DimDim earlier this year.

We recently covered Forrester's research on how few customers want to use video in the workplace. However, as new consumer tools like FaceTime and Flip Phones proliferate and companies like Cisco and Salesforce.com push new video technologies into the enterprise, the expansion of video seems inevitable.

How is your company using video?

Amazon Prime membership now includes unlimited, commercial-free streaming of over 5,000 movies and TV shows. The new benefits of Amazon's premium service expand Amazon Prime beyond its focus that, until now, has primarily offered customers cheaper and expedited shipping.

Amazon's new streaming video service has been anticipated for several months, as the retail giant moves to compete with Netflix in the movie-streaming - not simply the DVD rental or purchase - business.

Two new reports released from Forrester explore the state of video in the enterprise. "Information Workers Are Not Quite Ready For Desktop Videoconferencing" tells us that most workers polled do not want to use desktop video conferencing. Meanwhile, the "TechRadar For Content & Collaboration Professionals: Enterprise Video, Q1 2011" report looks at video in general across the enterprise.

"Although video hasn't yet taken hold as the way we communicate or work, it will play an important role in connecting the increasingly distributed workforce," says the Radar report. The reports authors cite research showing that 46% of information workers are expected to be telecommuters by 1016.

Despite all the talk of the explosion in online video, playing it can be an incredibly frustrating experience due to the incompatibilities between the various video formats and devices.

A new service from Encoding.com launches today that seeks to address this with a simple new service to make a video playable on a variety of mobile devices: Vid.ly.

Amazon announced today that it has acquired Lovefilm, one of the leading European movie rental services. Amazon already owned a minority share of the company, and will now acquire the remaining shares in the company. The terms of the sale were not disclosed, but varying reports estimate its value to be between $200 million and approximately $270 million.

Akin to Netflix state-side, Lovefilm offers subscription services with both rental-by-mail and streaming access to films and TV shows on to PCs, Internet TVs and Playstation 3. The company operates in the U.K., Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and has 1.6 million members.

Yesterday, Google announced that future versions of its Chrome browser would not support what has become an industry standard - the H.264 video codec - in providing video on the Web. The move leaves Internet Explorer 9 and Safari as the only browsers supporting the technology, which Google says is not "completely open".

While this might sound like a lot of high tech politics (and it very well may be), some suggest that it comes down to the bottom line. In the end, the move may affect the average Web user, leaving them with poor performance and no universal standards for playing video on the Web.

During Samsung's keynote address at yesterday's Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2011) in Las Vegas, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar joined Samsung U.S. President Tim Baxter on stage to announce that Hulu Plus, the premium version of the streaming service for TV and movies, will be coming to Android devices in the near future.

The app was then demonstrated, in complete, running on a Samsung Galaxy S phone.

More signs today pointing to Skype's expansion: reports that the VOIP giant has acquired mobile video streaming company Qik for $100 million.

Update: Skype has confirmed the acquisition on its blog: "Through this acquisition, we'll also be able to take advantage of the engineering expertise that is behind Qik's Smart Streaming technology, which optimizes video transmission over wireless networks."

The tip comes from a reliable source, according to Business Insider, who broke the news of the acquisition this morning. Neither Skype nor Qik have confirmed this, and we'll update this story when we hear more. The two companies do share some of the same investors, notably Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

Jesse Wolgamott presented at Lone Star Ruby Conference on four major NoSQL databases: CouchDB, MongoDB, RavenDB and SimpleDB. We've covered various comparisons before, such as one by Adrian Cockcroft. And of course there's our own article on the subject: "Is the Relational Database Doomed?" But if you'd rather kick back and watch a conference presentation, then this is for you. It has the benefit of including RavenDB in the comparison, which we haven't covered before.