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Posts Tagged ‘manager’

Most social media campaigns stinks on ice.

Go here to read the rest: 
Facebook campaign demands Portugal soccer team rock mustaches for the World Cup

Passlogix, an enterprise software company focused on simplifying access to company resources, is announcing an authentication product which will allow users to log on to Windows with any type of identification device–including national ID badges, access cards, one-time password tokens, and biometrics. The product, v-GO Universal Authentication Manager, utilizes the customers’ existing infrastructure while also leveraging corporate directories, thus lowering the total cost of ownership from an average of $150 per user to $15.

Passlogix aims to be the last strong authentication product that companies will need to buy as their product can evolve based on their customers’ needs. They hope to achieve this goal by providing an open architecture whereby any device from a multitude of manufacturers can be used for Windows login, rather than forcing a company to choose a singular method which is often times proprietary. By employing this type of architecture, clients are able to move to a new authentication vendor, use physical access devices already being utilized for other purposes, and use multiple types of authentication methods across a company’s network. For example, a company could use pre-existing building access cards (which only allow entrance to those who work in that building) to log in at one branch, while others from the same company, but at a different office, can use a completely different proprietary access card to log in from their location. Similarly, those in the second branch could use an entirely different mode of authentication, such as biometrics, to securely log in. This feature is especially useful for companies who have varying levels of access privileges.

By allowing organizations to use authentication devices which are already deployed, Passlogix removes the need for additional investment in secure Windows logon. Those who use this product will never have to remember their password again, as it is stored on the authentication device. Furthermore, dedicated servers typically needed for secure network access are not needed, which again lowers the total cost of ownership, and brings down any potential scalability barriers.

Strong authentication solutions for Windows are also more secure than the use of a password, which can be compromised in any number of ways, as physical access of the authenticator is needed. If an employee loses, or his means of authentication is stolen, Passlogix can remotely shut off the authenticator, thus blocking access to any files or information on an organization’s network. Additionally, they can report on the use of access of the authenticator to see what, if anything, has been jeopardized.

Passlogix is in a unique situation given that most of their competitors are also those whose products they support. Companies such as HID Global and DigitalPersona provide strong authentication tools which can be integrated into Passlogix’ infrastructure.

v-GO Universal Authentication Manager is priced at $15 per user and carries a yearly 20 percent fee for support and maintenance.

Passlogix was founded in 1996 and has raised approximately $20 million in venture capital. Their latest round of funding was for $11.5 million in 2002 and was led by Hanseatic Americas. The company has sold 21M user licenses of their various products in 140 countries.

A new website launches in the UK today that uses “the power of group-buying to save consumers up to 90% off the best things to do, see, eat and buy.”

Sounds familiar? Yep folks, it’s yet another Groupon clone.

Only this time, Groupola.com is already making claims to be biggest group buying site in the UK. That’s because it’s launching simultaneously in 8 of the largest cities across the UK, including London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff and Edinburgh.

This makes it immediately standout from rivals such as Berlin-based MyCityDeal and Groupon itself, both of which have a UK reach currently limited to London.

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)

Monica Keller, a MySpace Group Architect who has played a key role in advancing MySpace’s initiatives in activity streams and openness, is leaving the company to join Facebook. Keller announced the news in a blog post this evening. She will be joining Facebook as an Open Source and Web Standards Program Manager, where she’ll be joining a team that includes David Recordon and Luke Shepard. MySpace confirmed that Keller had left the company but declined to comment further.

Keller played a key role in launching MySpace’s Real-Time Stream API, helping to design the Real Time Stream using PuSH and architecting the network’s Twitter Sync Ingest.  Keller was involved with the technical aspects of the Stream, and was also involved with the design of MySpace’s developer platform. She’s also represented MySpace on numerous conference panels.

While Keller has some nice things to say about the struggling company in her post, she clearly wasn’t pleased with the way some things were handled at MySpace:

But I have chosen to leave. While I was able to have some temporary creative freedom this is not the norm or part of what other engineers enjoy and I do not feel there is one cohesive push to deliver the best we can deliver anymore.

To my friends and colleagues at MySpace, some parting advice:

It is imperative that MySpace puts in place strong technical leadership who can attract good technical talent and make well-informed decisions. It is important that they stay connected to rest of the world and work on interoperable standards and solid products which benefit the end user. Many of my fellow engineers have fantastic ideas and a plan for phased delivery.

This is a loss for MySpace, but it certainly isn’t the end of their real-time and open initiatives (which have been more progressive than Facebook’s).  We hear that these are still being spearheaded by recently promoted MySpace co-president Mike Jones, and that Christina Wodtke, who recently joined the company after running the activity stream product at LinkedIn, is involved in running the team’s day-to-day operations.

Image by Adam Tinworth.

Check out the jobs on CrunchBoard. Jobs from New York to San Francisco to Germany. See jobs in Europe here.

In the last couple of weeks we have added more than 50 jobs on CrunchBoard, including a Ruby Developer and student intern here at TechCrunch.

Here is a quick sample of some jobs posted.

uStream,
Account Manager and more – Mountain View

MyWire
Platform Architect – Redwood Shores

isocket
Web Developer – Burlingame

Linkedin
Senior Software Engineer – Mountain View

BookRenter
Ruby on Rails Developer – San Mateo

CollegeHumor
PHP Developer – New York

See the rest of the postings here!

2009 was a banner year for Salesforce.com. The enterprise cloud computing company made significant enhancements to its product lineup, reported overall strong earnings, and even launched their own take on realtime enterprise social networking and collaboration, Chatter. Today, Salesforce is launching one of its first product enhancements for 2010: the Force.com Visual Process Manager.

Force.com, company’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications, will now allows companies to design and deploy business processes inside their apps without having to build the applications on other software. Customers can visually design any complex business process with a design tool and instantly run it in the cloud without writing a single line of code. The technology powering the Visual Process Manager is based on technology acquired from Informavores, call scripting startup Salesforce bought last year.

The Manager has several different components. The Process Designer essentially helps businesses sketch out applications with established set forms, questions, and choices, and logic components, like task assignments, decision trees, and approval processes. These components can be dragged and dropped into a visual process design diagram/ The Process Wizard Builder enables companies to design a “wizard” to help walk end-users, step-by-step, through their business process. The Process Simulator lets customers test out and review processes before they are deployed. And lastly, the real-time process engine will run all of a company’s sophisticated processes and provides realtime scalability.

For example, if an insurance company wanted to create a step by step business application for sales representatives to follow in order to create a price quote for insurance packages, the administrator could visually map out every question and step the sales reps need to take and then simple create an application that would automate these processes.

Prior to the inclusion of the Visual Process Manager, companies would have to build applications off of separate platforms, including on-premise software, hardware and infrastructure, to automate processes. The bonus to the Visual process Manager is that it integrates seamlessly into all of Salesforce’s applications. The Process Manager will be available to Enterprise and Unlimited Edition Force.com subscribers for $50 per user per month.

The company recently rolled out Force.com Sites, which lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as for public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform. And Salesforce also opened up an additional distribution channel off of Force.com: the Value-Added Reseller (VAR) program

While the opening up of the Visual Process Manager pales in comparison to the scale of launching Salesforce Chatter, both products represent Salesforce’s rapid pace of innovation. It should be interesting to see what 2010 brings for Salesforce; the company just raised $500 million, which we all expect will be uses towards a few acquisitions.

For much of the past year, the major criticism of Foursquare was that it only worked in a few select cities in the U.S. and was basically iPhone-only. In the past few months, both Foursquare itself and a growing core of third-party developers have changed that. Today brings yet another expansion in the Foursquare universe with the beta launch of a Windows Mobile app.

To be clear, this app is only meant for touch screen Windows phones, and you need to be running either Windows Mobile 6.1 or 6.5. But if you have those, you can submit your email address here to be let into the beta. Once they kick the tires in beta for a bit, the plan is to submit the app to the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Windows Mobile Sr. Product Manager Anand Iyer writes today on his personal blog. Iyer has been working on this project on the side for a few months now, and made the app along with the help of development house Touchality.

This isn’t (yet) an officially sanctioned Foursquare app, but Iyer and crew have been working with the Foursquare team since before the public APIs were made available to get it done. Foursquare itself made its iPhone app and the just-launched BlackBerry app, but the Android app and the WebOS app (that works on the Palm Pre) were also done by a team outside the company. This addition of a Windows Mobile app leaves Symbian as the only major mobile OS with a native client, but work is also being done on that front. Foursquare also offers a limited mobile web version.

Foursquare itself is hard at work on a complete revamping of their main website. While it currently serves as a way to view some of your location data, you can’t do things such as check-in from the site. For that, I’d recommend using the excellent FoursquareX application. Unfortunately, that is Mac-only for now.

One of the key features of the Nexus One has nothing to do with its hardware. The latest and greatest Android phone also is the first device to come with the new Android 2.1 OS. And while other phones, like the Droid, are going to get it too (likely later this month), for now, if you want to play around with it, you’ll need a Nexus One. Or, starting today, you can also download the Android 2.1 SDK.

As noted on the Android Developers Blog, the team is releasing it before most devices have it so that developers can play around with and build for the new features introduced in 2.1. Though Google calls 2.1 a “minor platform release” over Android 2.0, there are a number of new elements such as voice recognition, live wallpapers, a new launcher, more home screens, and some WebKit changes. Those who have ported it over to the Droid note that the new OS is also faster.

Google also notes that there is a new USB manager available through the SDK Manager that supports the Nexus One. This may or may not be related to the new services that it seems like Google wants to include with the device, such as a new docking station for backing up your data.

You can find the new SDK here.

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