The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘ability’

There are a plethora of enterprise friendly collaboration platforms to choose from these days, with Yammer, Salesforce, Jive, Bantam Live, Socialcast, and others all vying for marketshare. All of the offerings are compelling but now more than ever, the startups and companies that develop these platforms are facing pressure to make their offerings the most appealing and feature-rich. Today, Socialtext, the developer of an enterprise social software platform built around microblogging, is rolling out a more powerful version, called Socialtext 4.0, of its collaboration applications.

One of the features users were asking for was the ability to create groups within their Socialtext applications. So now, you can create collaborative groups within your Socialtext app, that comes with a group home page including an activity stream of group member updates, a dedicated microblogging channel, and one or more workspaces. Collaborative Groups can be synced with other groups and can also be configured for privacy needs. A group can be listed, with its membership designated as either “request-to-join” or open. Alternatively, a group can be unlisted, which makes it completely private.

Users can now view the activity streams of any group that they belong too and can also filter the stream, by individual, the people you follow or see the stream of all the employees in the company. Users can also choose to publish their “Signals,” which are the Twitter-like short message sent on Socialtext, to one group or all the groups they belong to.

And, Socialtext has enhances search in the this new version, providing users the ability to browse and search messages sent by employees in a company. You can also filter your search by group or topic and see threaded conversations. As with many mircoblogging networks, you can now hover over a person’s avatar to see their presence, which lets teammates know who is reachable at a given moment.

Socialtext 4.0 is available on all of Socialtext’s deployment options, including its on-site managed appliance, desktop application,, mobile apps and web-based product. Socialtext’s collaboration tool has a freemium model and a paid service.

Socialtext’s offering is compelling for many businesses because of its on-premise offerings that provides security options unavailable in its cloud-based competitors. But as many companies are increasingly comfortable with placing their business operations and communication in the cloud, its wise for Socialtext to build out its platform to offer more functionality.

Couple of things to talk about, Honda just announced that they are going to showing off an electric concept vehicle, and a Hungarian company is making a concept car that’s capable of splitting in to two separate vehicles. Of the two, I think the Honda is more likely to become a reality. The Honda 3R-C is a single person transport, but pulls design cues from a trike instead of a motorcycle.

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Electrical vehicle concepts running rampant

That’s the JVC GZ-HM340 , which they say is the lightest and smallest HD camcorder with a built-in drive. Full review will be up later this week, but this picture was too cute not to share. Aww, look at them!

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Aw – they love each other

In this episode we talk about watch repair tips and some classic watch legends. Enjoy! Mentioned this episode: Chad the Watch Guy Otto Frei watch repair Tokyoflash

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Another Hourtime Episode

If you’re reading this post, there’s a good chance you have multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. And one problem you may face is pulling all of this information together to build a single online identity — be it for personal use, or to create a professional online profile. Flavors.me is a new site launching today that looks to make this as simple as possible, and it does so with flying colors. After a three month long private beta, the site has just launched to the public.

The service is as simple as they come. After completing a basic sign up form, you link your Flavors.me page to any of 15 online services, with options that include Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (as well as any RSS feed). Flavors.me taps into these services via their APIs (you generally enter your credentials using OAuth or Facebook Connect), and within minutes you’re ready to start customizing your site.

All of your linked content is pulled into your Flavors.me page so it’s easy to access, but it’s never overwhelming — the site’s templates are minimalist, and hide everything but your name and a list of your online feeds/profiles at first. If you click on one of these feeds, the content will smoothly transition into view; it’s all very slick. You can also tweak your page’s color scheme, backgrounds, and layout to suit your taste (though there are only a handful of layouts to choose from initially).

You can get a feel for what’s possible by checking out my Flavors.me page, which took me all of ten minutes to set up — keep in mind that it’s entirely possible to make a page that looks better than this with a little more time.

There are plenty of other services out there that let you list all of your online presences in one place, with options including chi.mp, card.ly, UnHub, and even Google Profiles. But Flavors.me really makes the process extremely simple, and the results look great.

Flavors.me is free for its basic features, and will generate revenue through premium subscriptions, which are $20 a year. Premium features include the ability to use your own custom domain name, real time statistics, and the ability to include a contact form in your page (though obviously you could just include your Email address in the standard ‘About’ field).

Flavors.me was built by HiiDef, an incubator started by former Vimeo exec Jonathan Marcus and his brother, David Marcus.


Flavors.me from Jack Zerby on Vimeo.

Do you follow more than 100 people on Twitter? If so, have you ever tried to manage them on Twitter.com? It’s awful. Really awful. They make you go through page after page of names in no real order (other than how recently you added them). If you want to remove some people you followed years ago, it’s a huge pain. Seesmic has just made a much better way.

The new Seesmic Web app, launching today, brings with it a new main tab: Contacts. As you can guess, this is a contact manager for Twitter that makes pruning your Twitter contacts a breeze. It also gives you plenty of other interesting information about your followers, those who follow you, and all your Twitter Lists, on the fly. For example, for each person you can not only see all their Twitter profile information, but also their Twitter stats from MrTweet which tell you how often they tweet and who they contact the most (publicly) on Twitter.

And all of this is wrapped up in a way that looks very similar to Google’s contact manager that is built into Gmail, so it should be familiar to many of you. But it’s actually better because they show Twitter icons next to each users name, which is an easy way to sort through people.

Another new contact management feature Seesmic Web has added is the ability to drag and drop any user to add them to a list. Again, this is about 1,000 times easier than doing it on Twitter.com. As you might imagine, Seesmic Web also now has the ability to make, delete and alter Twitter Lists.

Other new features include better conversation threading (if you click on the “in reply to” portion below a tweet, you’ll see an overlay with the entire back-and-forth). Also new is Tweetmeme retweet data for each link in a tweet. Simply click on the “+” button next to a link to see an overlay with that data (including a text snippet and image). The ability to upload pictures directly from the app, and tag tweets with your geolocation (assuming you’re using something like Google Gears that can add that to the browser) has also been added. Other, smaller UI tweaks have been made as well.

With the addition of Retweets and Lists over the past few months, Twitter.com has become a very useful client itself once again. But other web-based Twitter clients like Brizzly and Seesmic Web clearly believe they can still do a better job than Twitter itself. And with this contact management system, Seesmic Web just gave me a definite excuse to start using it.

If you run a Website that uses DoubleClick’s DART ad server or Google Ad Manager, those products just got a major upgrade and rebranding. The DART brand is being retired and it will now be called DoubleClick For Publishers. Meanwhile, Google Ad Manager (which targets smaller Websites) will now be called DFP Small Business. With the rebranding, DoubleClick is rolling out a new dashboard to manage the ads served on a publisher’s Website, improved ad-serving algorithms, and a new set of APIs.

Google is consolidating all of its ad serving products for display ads under the DoubleClick banner, and turning DFP Small Business (formerly Google Ad manager) into a feeder system for DoubleClick for Publishers (formerly DART). Google details some of the new changes on its main blog:

• A new interface that has been completely redesigned to save time and reduce errors.
• Far more detailed reporting and forecasting data to help publishers understand where their revenue is coming from and what ads are most valuable.
• Sophisticated algorithms that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
• A new, open, public API which enables publishers to build and integrate their own apps with DFP, or integrate apps created for DFP by a growing third-party developer community (apps under development today include sales, order management and workflow tools).
• Integration with the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange’s “dynamic allocation” feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their ad space to bids from multiple ad networks.

There is more detailed info on the DoubleClick blog.

Approximately 11 million new domain names were registered in the fourth quarter of 2009, an eight percent increase in new registrations from the third quarter of 2009.

The increase has brought the total of registrations across all of the Top Level Domain Names to 192 million, an increase of nearly 15 million domain name registrations since the close of 2008. That means we’ll likely cross the 200 million milestone this or next quarter, provided growth continues.

The numbers come from VeriSign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief (PDF).

In Q4 2009, the base of domain name registrations grew by two percent over the third quarter of 2009 and eight percent over the fourth quarter of 2008.

According to the Industry Brief, the base of Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) rose to 78.6 million domain names, a three percent increase quarter over quarter and a 10 percent increase year over year. In terms of total registrations, .com unsurprisingly continues to have the highest base followed by .cn (China), .de (Germany) and .net.

VeriSign’s average daily DNS query load during the fourth quarter of 2009 was 52 billion per day with peaks as high as 61 billion per day, jumping 48 percent for the daily average and 31 percent increase for peak daily queries as compared to fourth quarter 2008.

(Via press release)

Salesforce’s enterprise friendly social collaboration platform Chatter was announced at last year’s November Realtime CrunchUp with much fanfare. To many, there is no doubt that Chatter will have a lasting impact on the enterprise and cloud computing. Following Salesforce’s debut of Chatter, over 67,000 Salesforce customers requested to be private beta testers of the realtime collaboration platform. Today, a lucky 100 large and small businesses, including Reed Exhibitions, Schumacher Group, and TransUnion, will begin to use Salesforce Chatter as the platform enters private beta.

Salesforce says that private beta participants were chosen based on their existing Salesforce.com technology deployments and potential Chatter use cases. Chatter itself as a platform has much of the same functionality as when the platform first debuted. One addition is the integration of Chatter to Saleforce’s iPhone and BlackBerry apps, allowing users to tap into Chatter’s realtime stream on the go. Chatter will be integrated into the new Salesforce homepage along with a dashboard of reports and approvals, workflow, tasks and calendar. You’ll also be able to see filters as well. Chatter will let you see updates from people, files, applications, HR, and will integrate other feeds (Dow Jones, Thompson Reuters).

Similar to Facebook, employees can create business profiles with professional information like personal contact data, area of expertise, and work history. Searching other people’s profiles, colleagues can quickly identify individuals who are relevant to their enterprise needs. Users can post status updates to share communications, files and links around a project, sales deal or customer support case. And users can see realtime feeds of personalized updates from people, applications and documents. With Chatter, all status updates from a customer’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or custom Force.com application are posted to the feed. So apps actually have the ability to post status updates, similar to a person, creating an actual ecosystem around apps and employees. Any app listed on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange will be able to stream updates to the Chatter feed. Since they are delivered on the Force.com platform, developers can build or enhance cloud applications to use Chatter’s profiles, realtime streams, and APIs.

Sharing is a huge component of Chatter, with users having the ability to search the Chatter feed to access, share and download any materials. And employees can manage who has has access to certain information. Chatter wouldn’t be a viable communication platform for the enterprise if it didn’t integrate with consumer social networks. Chatter allows employees to pull in social media information from Facebook and Twitter to gain insights into customer satisfaction and the greater community. For example, employees can monitor the Twitter conversation about a particular prospect or competitor from within Chatter. Chatter is also deeply integrated with Google Apps.

Salesforce Chatter will be included for free in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform. If businesses don’t use either of these products, they can pay $50 per user per month which will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content and Force.com. Salesforce will also be rolling out a lightweight free version of Chatter. At the moment, Salesforce is being cagey about when Salesforce will be available to the general public, but we expect that it should be rolled out at some point this year.

Chatter sounds a lot like an enterprise-friendly social network, but Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff is adamant that the product is best characterized as a collaboration platform. In fact, Salesforce doesn’t see its main competitors as Facebook, Twitter or even enterprise friendly social networks like Jive. Instead, the company believes Chatter will pose a serious threat to Microsoft’s Sharepoint and IBM’s LotusNotes. Both of the latter products are used heavily by enterprises for hosted communication. Social CRM startups like Bantam Live are already in the market with competing offerings.

The private beta of Chatter represents the unveiling of a brand new strategy for Salesforce, which is the incorporation of the realtime stream within the enterprise. It should be interesting to see the feedback from businesses both small and large on how useful Chatter is for day-to-day business. It’s not a definite that Chatter will revolutionize collaboration in the enterprise, but its sure to be exciting to see if the platform can gain serious traction.

Jabra wasn’t going to be left out of the MWC fun and so the Clipper was announced. The little Bluetooth device features a novel clip for securing to an article of clothing and a 3.5mm jack for your favorite earphones. Bluetooth 2.1 A2DP, EDR, and AVRCP technology gives the clipper everything it needs including the ability to automagically pause media playback when a phone call comes in

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The Jabra Clipper gives the gift of Bluetooth to any 3.5mm headset