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Posts Tagged ‘the-enterprise’

One major obstacle to use of Macs in the enterprise has always been the absence of Outlook. Sure Macs have Entourage, but the program just doesn’t cut it for business users entrenched in the ways of Outlook. Those set on using a Mac have often resorted to partitioning their hard drives or installing programs like Outlook2Mac to access the program.

Soon such tactics will no longer be necessary, as Microsoft has announced the availability of Outlook in the next version of Mac Office. The change will likely be implemented in the new version of Office that is set for release in time for the holidays in 2010. In the mean time, those using Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition will enjoy steps Microsoft has takent towards making the experience more Outlook-like.

The release comes as part of a new business edition of Mac Office designed to provide Mac users with better connection to Microsoft Exchange Server, and improved compatibility across platforms. Microsoft’s Mac unit is also building the Outlook software from the ground up to ensure compatibility with Mac’s backup and hard-drive search features.

Last May I wrote about reMail, a new iPhone application that brought full-text search to the iPhone. It was quite impressive (especially given that the iPhone lacked any search functionaly at all at that point), but the application had a few problems that kept it from really catching on, including a subscription fee and some possible privacy issues (it required users to hand over their Email login credentials). Today, that changes: reMail is launching an entirely new application on the App Store that should allay any privacy concerns and features a one-time price of $4.99 instead of a subscription. You can download it here.

The last version of reMail relied on the company’s optimized servers, which were much more efficient at running search queries than most Email providers. However, that technique came with one caveat: it required users to hand over their login credentials. I pointed this out last time I wrote about the company, figuring that most people probably wouldn’t mind too much, but CEO Gabor Cselle says that it was a surprisingly common complaint — people are just unwilling to hand over that login data (which is probably a good thing). Fortunately, reMail 2.0 does away with this problem.

The new version of reMail downloads the entire contents of your Mailbox — every single message — onto your iPhone, which it then stores locally. That may sound undesirable for those of us with large Email boxes that are many gigabytes large, but the reMail team has done an excellent job at compressing data for its search index: Cselle says that they’ve managed to squeeze 100,000 Emails into 500 megabytes (most Email accounts are only a fraction of that size).

To get started, you’ll have to download your entire mailbox to your phone which will take some time (Cselle recommends setting the phone to Wi-Fi and leaving it over night), but the service will pick up where it left off if you have to have to cut it off mid-way through the download process. Searching itself works exactly as you’d hope, showing results only a second or two after you’ve typed a query, with matching words highlighted.

Of course, the iPhone 3.0 software update finally introduced Email search to the iPhone, which may lead some people to wonder why reMail is even necessary. Cselle points out a few major benefits: for one, reMail’s search is around five times faster than the iPhone’s, and it searches full-text (the iPhone only searches headers). And reMail retains its full functionally offline, while the iPhone’s search often requires a data connection to search older messages.

As I’ve written before CEO Gabor Cselle is a guy who really knows Email. Here’s a brief bio of Cselle from our last post:

He wrote his Master’s thesis on Organizing Email, worked on the Gmail team, and was also VP of Engineering at Xobni, which he left last year to pursue his own company. The company’s backers include Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, who built a little application called Gmail (they also co-founded FriendFeed). These guys know what they’re doing.

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Today VMWare has announced the acquisition of SpringSource, a provider of Web application development and management services. The deal closed at a $420 million valuation, with $362 million in cash and equity plus an assumption of approximately $58 million in unvested stocks and options.

SpringSource is a notable proponent of “lean software,” a concept that is gaining traction in the enterprise space as a means of accelerating the delivery of business applications in the cloud. With the acquisition, VMWare and SpringSource will partner with goals of delivering a platform that allows clients to “more efficiently build, run and manage applications in both internal and external cloud architectures.”

“VMware has led the modernization of datacenter infrastructures through innovative virtualization and cloud architectures, providing customers with cost savings, agility and choice,” said Rod Johnson, chief executive officer, SpringSource. “The SpringSource team and community are committed to revolutionizing the way companies build, run and manage applications. By combining forces, I’m confident that we’ll be able to deliver a set of truly remarkable solutions that dramatically simplify enterprise IT.”

The move comes shortly after a small exodus of talent from Google to VMWare.

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So, Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. But what does it mean? Well despite the rhetoric of some that this is a minor deal because FriendFeed’s audience was small compared to that of its acquirer Facebook, or even Twitter, this deal should actually have some wide-reaching implications for the future of how many of us use the web socially.

Talent And Features

Let’s be clear, from what all involved parties are saying, this was a talent acquisition. Facebook has no need to integrate the entire FriendFeed service into its site which has over 250 million users. Actually, it already has a FriendFeed, its News Feed. But as we’ve pointed out numerous times, Facebook’s New Feed was simply nowhere near as good as the social stream FriendFeed had created. So instead, what Facebook will do is integrate the best features of FriendFeed, with the help of the people who built them.

Actually, Facebook had already been basically doing that (whether on purpose or not), something which led me to write in my very first post for TechCrunch back in April (appropriately titled “You Will Be Using FriendFeed In The Future — But It May Be Called Facebook”) the following:

But I think it’s FriendFeed that Facebook should be more closely following [rather than Twitter], given what it wants to do with its service. That’s especially true when even more information starts coming into the site by way of Facebook Connect. Twitter has exploded in popularity because it’s so simple — but it’s far too simple for everything that Facebook want to do. But FriendFeed seems to be morphing into exactly what Facebook wants to be.

Given that FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said that there had been talks between the two sides for a while, it would seem that Facebook understood that. The incredible speed at which FriendFeed was developing and deploying new features — features which Facebook should have — was too hard to ignore.

Social Feeds

And why any of this matters is that an improved News Feed is what Facebook needs to hold off the challenge from the company that once spurned it, Twitter. Twitter is still growing fast, and its more-open nature is turning it into the social platform of choice, something which Facebook used to be.

Facebook has a great opportunity to be the web’s central hub thanks to its Facebook Connect product which not only allows users to sign into other sites with their Facebook IDs, but also brings data back into Facebook from all around the web. But as was evident after the last New Feed (and total site) redesign, it has been difficult for Facebook to figure out how to handle and best showcase all that social data coming into the site.

FriendFeed has been very good at that, albeit on a much smaller site. But it’s not like these FriendFeed guys are amateurs. Almost the entire team comes from Google, including co-founder Paul Buchheit who was integral in the building of a little service known as Gmail.

Messaging

Speaking of Gmail, this is pure speculation, but what if once the New Feed has been updated, if Facebook decides to use Buchheit and co.’s services to build a better messaging system? MySpace just completely revamped their system, and Facebook’s is pretty poor.

Of course, one could also argue that with a killer social stream, it may just negate the need for a revamping of the email system. After all, FriendFeed does messaging very well right now with its combination of public and private comments and posting.

Filtering

One aspect that is small but hugely important for the social stream, is filtering. Facebook had been getting better at it with various groups you could place contact into to sort your stream, but FriendFeed was again, much better.

Here’s a perfect example. When one of your contacts on Facebook posts and item that you don’t care to see, you have the option to hide it. But if they’re constantly posting the same type of item, you can only either hide them each time, or hide that entire user. With FriendFeed there were several more options, including hiding elements from just a certain source, as well as automatically unhiding items if a friend had “liked” it.

I could go on, let’s just say FriendFeed’s method is much, much better.

And Twitter? Yeah, they badly need filters, pronto.

The Open Debate

But today’s acquisition also extends beyond that of Facebook’s services. A lot of current FriendFeed users are expressing displeasure with the move because they saw FriendFeed as a true bastion of hope for an open social stream versus Facebook’s closed method. While Facebook’s Chris Cox is saying the right things today about Facebook’s desire to be open, and there has been some progress, the process has been really slow. And plenty wonder if Facebook really wants to be open at all.

The same people also see Twitter as more open, but still relatively closed use of the social stream, because its APIs are limited. FriendFeed, which recently launched a new version of its own APIs had the respect of the developer community for their openness, if nothing else. Now, a lot of users are upset at the prospects of a very open service being lured behind a wall.

The Twitter Paradox

Something else that is interesting in all of this is just how reliant FriendFeed has been on Twitter as a source of its data. We saw this first hand the other day when Twitter went down (and cut off its APIs) due to the DDoS attacks. FriendFeed was much, much quieter without the importing of tweets.

Facebook has applications that allow you to import your tweets to update your status as well, but as we’ve seen, neither side seems to particularly care when those applications just stop working for weeks, or break.

The FriendFeed team clearly saw the value of Twitter in their ecosystem, but with Facebook, it’s wouldn’t be surprising if the emphasis will be less on Twitter, and more on Facebook’s own status updates. But if Facebook is smart, they may let FriendFeed do to its News Feed exactly what it did to the FriendFeed stream, which is open it up to all those Twitter updates.

The reason is that while Twitter itself remains important in that scenario, it’s possible that with Facebook’s 250 million plus users, a lot of the conversation (meaning comments) will start to take place on Facebook (just as it did on FriendFeed). This will slowly devalue Twitter over time as users realized they can have these conversations and cut out the middle man. This happened to a smaller extent when FriendFeed added the ability to post your own messages right to FriendFeed.

The Big Picture

This acquisition is a very smart move by Facebook to bolster its product, especially as it relates to the real-time web. One thing it does not do however, is make Facebook simpler. I’d still argue that Twitter has an inherent advantage over Facebook because it is so much simpler to use, resulting in a much lower barrier to entry. But naturally, with the complication comes a lot more data, and data is ultimately be the key for a larger battle for the web, so it’s a trade-off.

Where this leaves FriendFeed as a service is still up in the air. The team has said FriendFeed will continue to run as-is for the time being, but made no promises about the future. Cox’s comments seem to indicate that FriendFeed will be a sort of farm system for the big league Facebook, which I’m sure will piss off plenty of FriendFeed devotees.

Eventually, one way or another, it’s hard to see FriendFeed as it stands now, continuing on. Facebook will begin to take up too much of the FriendFeeders’ time, and it will languish. It’s sad, but that’s the web. Not every service can flourish. There simply aren’t enough users with enough time to use all of them.

So this move was also smart in a long-term sense by FriendFeed because it ensure the awesome technology it has fostered with FriendFeed will continue on, and could one day reach a billion people.

One thing is for certain, the Facebook/Twitter battle just got a lot more interesting. And those are always fun to watch.

[photo: flickr/conerwithonan]

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Google’s small but growing enterprise app business is now going for Microsoft’s jugular. At a press conference today (see Mike’s real-time notes), Google announced a new plug-in that will sync Google’s enterprise versions of Gmail, contacts, and calendar with Microsoft’s Outlook. In the enterprise, Outlook is still king and not everyone is ready to switch just yet to browser-based email, calendars and contact management.

So employees can continue to use Outlook if that is what they are comfortable with, and Google Apps will run on the backend. Google is claiming that its enterprise apps cost less than half of Microsoft Exchange (the server software that is paired with Outlook, where all the money is). The new syncing tool, Google App Sync, works only on Windows at this point and is only available for (paying) enterprise customers.

Steve Ballmer is not going to be happy about this.

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There has been some doubt lurking in the trenches about whether Google has a solid, organized enterprise strategy. But there have been some recent developments that indicate that Google might have a viable game plan to become a player in the enterprise space. Yesterday, Google rolled out Google Apps Directory Sync, a tool that will let businesses sync the user account information in Google Apps with Microsoft Active Directory or Lotus Domino. Google says it’s using technology from Postini, security and compliance company Google acquired in 2007, to import information from users’ LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) systems, which includes mailing lists, groups, and user aliases, to a user’s Google Apps account. This utility will help many businesses, schools etc. who are currently using Google Apps save a lot of time and energy when it comes to importing information to their Google Apps system.

Following up on our story about the hilariously absurd use of goats to mow the lawns around Google’s headquarters instead of lawnmowers, we were able to get a comment from PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA is okay with letting the goats be goats (eating grass and looking cute), but they have some major concerns about how they’ll be treated in doing these tasks.

Says Amy Cook, an Assistant Manager of Marketing for PETA:

PETA has no problem with letting goats do what goats want to do (e.g., look cute and eat weeds), but we do have concerns about how the goats may be transported, whether they are provided with access to shelter during storms and shade as well as water during hot weather, where they are housed when they aren’t “working,” what kind of veterinary care they receive, and what becomes of old and/or excess goats. PETA has found over and over that whenever animals are used by a business to make money, corners are cut and animals often suffer as a result. And that really gets our goat, if you’ll pardon the pun.

You think Google, with its “don’t be evil” mantra, would be kind to the goats. But then again, they have been cutting food supplies to employees during tough times, so you have to wonder if the goats would be left without an ample supply of water as well. Also, veterinary care seems like one of those goat perks that might be on Google’s cost-cutting checklist.

But you never know. I’m going to reach out to Google for comment.

Update: And here’s the response from Niki Fenwick, a Google representative:

Google takes the wellness of our employees very seriously and we pride ourselves on having a responsive and adaptable culture. The lawn-mowing goats are not, of course, full-time Google employees - but we would certainly respond directly to any concerns about their treatment. I can confirm that during their time in Mountain View, like other Google employees, each goat is entitled to a free organic lunch.

Love me some organic salad, hope the goats do too.

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Last month, Sookie Solutions got the bad news that its iPhone app, Peekababe, was getting rejected from the App Store. The reason? Excessive sexual content. Well today, it’s here, sexy as ever.

Here’s the gist: The app features pictures of several women wearing clothes. You can swipe from side to side to get different women/clothes combinations. But if you touch the screen, those clothes magically dissolve leaving you with a bikini or lingerie-clad lady. You can then set these girls as your wallpaper.

Yes, it’s kind of silly in a juvenile way, but the real story is that Apple first rejected the app, then later accepted it. Perhaps this is another sign of easing restrictions on the App Store. After all, the app seems to do basically the exact same thing it did before. But it also appears to be yet another tale of the app approval process causing confusion. “It took us close to 1 month to get approved. The approval standards should be more specific and easier to understand. You will see that our app content is very similar to already approved apps’ content,” developer Alan Bigio tells us.

He goes on, “One thing that you may want to suggest is that Apple sets up a pre-approval process where developers send an idea, and Apple can accept it or reject it before developers waste time. In the long run this could even benefit Apple, because too often they have their employees wasting time with apps that get reject for very simple things.” That’s an interesting idea, certainly with developers getting increasingly annoyed by the uneven app approval process, it seems like something needs to be done.

So why did Apple approve the app this time? Well it may be because Sookie now includes a 12+ rating for it. “My rating was based on the guidelines that they have for the iTunes store. Better to be safe than sorry,” Bigio says. There is also a clear note saying that it does not contain any nude or pornographic pictures. 12+ is kind of funny though. Something tells me a lot of parents wouldn’t want their 12-year-old playing with this app.

There have been plenty of other “sexy” apps that have appeared the App Store over time, including iStrip, MagicPen, Wobble and Bikini Babes. But Peekababe seems to have the clearest images and is definitely one of the most blatantly sexual yet. And watch out, because in the next version, you’ll get a sexy cowgirl, a hot nurse, and “many more babes too!,” the app promises. Check out the video below to see it in action. The app is $0.99 in the App Store.

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