Punching Soup - Tag: saas

Minimizing the Cost of SaaS Operations

Bob Warfield — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:59:42 -0700

SaaS software is much more dependent on being run by the numbers than conventional on-premises software because the expenses are front loaded and the costs are back loaded. SAP learned this the hard way with its Business By Design product, for example. If you run the numbers, there is a high degree of correlation between [...]

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Product Update: Workday 10

Naomi Bloom — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:15:25 -0700

You may well wonder why I’m writing about this when Workday’s newest release (yes, those releases are coming three times a year when PeopleSoft releases are coming every 3 years) has already been covered by several of the top enterprise software analysts, including Altimeter’s Ray Wang, InformationWeek’s Doug Henschen and Strativa’s Frank Scavo, and many more have full research [...]

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Freemiums for SaaS

Bob Warfield — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:41:48 -0700

Time for my first Learnings post about my Helpstream Experience. Freemiums are a fascinating subject. Whole books have been written about the concept of extracting value from something that’s free. The FOS (Free Open Source) movement is all about free, and we benefited tremendously from it at Helpstream. Not one single software license fee was paid [...]

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HRM SaaS InFullBloom vs Everything Else: The Musical!

Naomi Bloom — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:00:44 -0700

Since my singing finale to last year’s closing keynote at the HR Technology Conference (if you missed it, you missed it because no YouTube versions have popped up – yet), many colleagues have asked me about my next such performance. And no, the picture (that’s me in the foreground) isn’t from HR Tech but rather from my long [...]

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The Strangest Enterprise Software Ad I’ve Ever Seen

Zoli Erdos — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 22:44:26 -0700

I’ve seen some strange ads before, but this one by Enterprise SaaS provider SuccesFactors is beyond imagination – not the ad itself, but where it is placed:

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The Expanding Gap Between On-Premise and SaaS Solutions

Brian Sommer — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:32:17 -0700

SaaS and On-Premise solutions are growing further apart, not closer. The innovation within SaaS vendors is fast, furious and focused. It's also embarassing to on-premise vendors.

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Tuesday’s Tip: Understanding The Many Flavors of Cloud Computing and SaaS

R "Ray" Wang — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 07:16:01 -0700

Confusion Continues With Cloud Computing And SaaS Definitions Coincidence or just brilliance must be in the air as two esteemed industry colleagues, Phil Wainewright and James Governor, have both decided to clarify definitions on SaaS and Cloud within a few days of each other. In fact, this couldn’t be more timely as [...]

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The Future of HR May Get Written By Northgate Arinso

Brian Sommer — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:38:54 -0700

HR technologies, especially HR outsourcing solutions, appear to be changing a lot lately. Northgate Arinso is growing organically and inorganically to become a major player domestically and abroad.

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Defining Cloud is Simple. Get Over It. The Burger.

James Governor — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:44:51 -0700

My efforts at cloud definitional work began with 15 Ways to Tell its Not Cloud Computing. In the intervening time the forces of complexity and, yes, pragmatism have triumphed. We’re now making the long transition from simple and public to complex and private – hopefully some simplicity will make it through the process. Talking of simplicity, [...]

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Is SaaS the same as cloud?

Phil Wainewright — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:30:21 -0700

From the customer’s perspective, it’s all the same. If it’s provided over the Internet on a pay-for-usage basis, it’s a cloud service. Within the industry, we argue about definitions more than is good for us. Customers look in from the outside and see a much simpler array of choices. Why is this important? It matters to [...]

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Infrastructure APIs: New Site in a Box

Adam DuVander — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:35:37 -0700

Got an idea for a new website? It's easier than ever to build a first-class application by offloading some of the harder stuff to other services. Read on and discover that your new site is already halfway built.

The Cost Difference Between On-Premise and SaaS

Brian Sommer — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:26:20 -0700

The SaaS vs. On-Premise cost differential turns out to be quite significant. Large enterprises are starting to embrace SaaS applications for more than cost reasons.

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The Sleek and the Geek @ SAP

Zoli Erdos — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:56:00 -0700

Need more proof that being co-CEOS is an awkward situation? Watch this SiliconAngle video between 0:20 and 0:35 Of course you can watch the whole thing… and read these reports of the press event: Oracle Who? SAP Co-CEOs Slam Oracle – They Are The Old Way SAP State of The Union: The CEOs Talk Oracle, SaaS [...]

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RightNow: Analyzing the ‘Cloud Services Agreement’

Michael Krigsman — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:44:32 -0700

Cloud-based CRM vendor, RightNow, recently released new service that are not revolutionary but do challenge other vendors to simplify pricing / licensing terms and conditions.

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IT failure: ‘Evil is the cure for incompetence’

Michael Krigsman — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:06:04 -0700

Dilbert's thoughtful view on IT failure, politics, and blame.

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Google Launches Apps Marketplace

Zoli Erdos — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:00:00 -0700

I’m at the Google Campfire One event where they’ve just announced the Google Apps Marketplace. The site is live now, feel free to browse. The speculation is now over, this is Google’s answer on whether they will enter the Business Applications market – they just did, with an entire ecosystem of Partners. The new Marketplace fills [...]

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Redux: Will Google Enter the Business Applications Market?

Zoli Erdos — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:27:26 -0700

If you think I am here to spill the beans, you’re wrong. On a purely speculative level, if there is some news to come, and if there is an embargo related to it, then I respect that. And it’s all a big IF. So no, I am simply dusting off an old post I wrote [...]

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Four pillars of the transition to SaaS

Phil Wainewright — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:51:18 -0700

One of the most interesting phenomena to arise when you bring as-a-service providers together is the instant sense of camaraderie and a shared outlook. Barriers come down and people start to discuss their challenges and experiences, relieved to discover that others are encountering similar questions. It’s especially noticeable at gatherings in Europe, where opportunities to [...]

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A Simple Hint Why SaaS Is Better

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:30:17 -0700

When I pressed send this morning on an email message, Gmail popped up a dialog box asking whether I’d meant to attach a file. “You wrote ‘find attached’ in your message,” it gently mentioned, “but there were no files attached.” Of course, as so often happens, I’d finished the message and pressed send without remembering [...]

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Webciety and Enterprise 2.0: A snapshot of today’s social computing conversations

Dion Hinchcliffe — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:55:38 -0700

Though smaller than in year's past, Germany's CeBIT trade show in Hanover this week remains one of the giants of the industry and is a must-attend event for much of Europe's technology leaders. For the last two years, I have been participating in Webciety, a show within a show that explores the emerging 21st century digital lifestyle. Here is a breakdown of how Europe is looking at Enterprise 2.0 adoption and how it affects us as well.

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RightNow’s New Customer Service Agreement Genuinely Important

Paul Greenberg — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:19:19 -0700

Once in awhile there is something that isn’t only important coming out of the vendor community but actually kind of refreshing. Given my right-brained proclivities, I didn’t think it would come from the world of contracts (that’s a Ray Wang specialty), but interestingly enough it does. RightNow released the details of its new Customer Service Agreement [...]

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Tuesday’s Tip: When To Go With A Two-Tier ERP Strategy

R "Ray" Wang — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:38:28 -0700

Single Instance ERP Harder And Harder To Justify The holy grail of an ERP implementation used to be the single instance deployment. However, market forces, a move to adopt new disruptive technologies, slow pace of innovation from incumbent vendors, and high maintenance fees have changed many organization’s perspectives. Add a slew of rapidly changing business requirements [...]

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The Facebook imperative for enterprise software

Dion Hinchcliffe — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:57:11 -0700

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, the well-known CRM and cloud computing company (and now soon-to-be social software vendor) wrote a guest post on TechCrunch late last week making the case for “why enterprise software should take its cues from Facebook and become more social.” What then does this mean for the future of IT and what impacts will social computing ultimately have on the enterprise.

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E-mail Alert: Campaigner Releases New, User-friendly Version for Business Owners

Linc Wonham — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:38:00 -0700

E-mail marketing service Campaigner has announced several new features to its existing set of tools designed to help smaller businesses effectively and efficiently meet their marketing needs. In addition to a new user interface and upgrades to numerous editing, formatting and list-management tools, the company—a division of Protus—is offering other incentives to attract new customers.

Campaigner is part of Protus’ Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) business communications range of services that also includes Internet fax service and virtual business phone service. Campaigner focuses on E-mail marketing services and provides its customers—mostly small to medium-sized businesses—alternatives to staffing their own marketing departments or hiring outside consulting firms.

“Small business owners often start a business because they’re good at something or have a passion for it,” said Steve Adams, vice president of marketing for Protus. “When they try to market that business, though, they may find the tools that are available assume a level of experience or expertise they don’t have. We asked our customers how we could make it easier for them to create effective sales-generating and loyalty-building campaigns. We then designed the new Campaigner to address those needs.”

Campaigner believes its new user interface to be much easier for its customers to utilize as they create and track their E-mail marketing campaigns. The redesigned E-mail editor now resembles a Microsoft Word interface, and the upgraded formatting functions include the ability to paste from Word more seamlessly than before. Users will now also be able to import their contacts directly from Microsoft Excel, and Campaigner has added an integrated image library, a new spell-check function, and an array of online help options and tutorials.

To promote the changes, Campaigner is offering new customers free templates that will include the customer’s business colors, logo, fonts and contact information, and a 30-day free trial for services. Small businesses can subscribe to the service for $10 per month.

Quarterly Financial Tracker: Q4 CY 2009 SaaS Vendors Continue To Trump On Premise Vendors In YoY Growth

R "Ray" Wang — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:00:09 -0700

The Year Of SaaS Shows… And Yes, In This Economy. The recession continued to take its toll on software sales with a slight impact to the SaaS vendors. Growth rates have come down from the high 30’s to the low 20’s. But with “flat” the new growth metric in this down economy, results remain impressive. Traditional [...]

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News Analysis: Salesforce.com Announces Private Beta Of Chatter

R "Ray" Wang — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:51:51 -0700

Chatter represents both a collaboration application and platform Announced at the 2009 Dreamforce conference in November, Chatter represents both a collaboration application and platform. Software built on the Force.com platform will gain the collaboration capabilities. Solutions in AppExchange will be able to use profiles, real time streams, and other API’s. Some key features include: Aggregating streams [...]

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Do Whining Customers Negate the Power of the Social Customer?

Bob Warfield — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:12:18 -0700

Fellow Enterprise Irregular Vinnie Mirchandani seems to think so. Vinnie tells the story of uber-Twitter-maven Kevin Smith’s troubles with Southwest Airlines. Keven evidently ran afoul of Southwest’s 3 decade-old “customer of size” policy. Smith was recently shown off a flight that was full because he wouldn’t fit between two other passengers and hadn’t purchased a second seat [...]

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SaaS Accounting Gains: Now What Say You, McKinsey?

Zoli Erdos — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:52:41 -0700

According to Goldman Sachs Accounting is now at the #3 spot in SaaS implementations, reports Dennis Howlett. Not a real surprise, certainly not to Dennis’s readers, or those who follow Ben’s Accounting 2.0 series. Still, seeing the numbers makes me feel good, given that I debated a short-sighted report by McKinsey a few years ago, when [...]

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The SaaS applications wiki – open for business

David Terrar — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:59:29 -0700

Over on AccountingWEB’s forums (you need an AWEB account to log in, but it’s free) there have been some heavy exchanges discussing the barriers to adoption of Cloud solutions by accountants in practice in the UK. I found it interesting, but sadly the dialogue has been too vendor driven, with plenty of verbiage from the [...]

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Bob Evans: SAPs Primary Competitor

Vinnie Mirchandani — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:22:18 -0700

Best piece of advice Bob at Information Week gives Hasso Plattner in an “open letter” is quit the asinine focus on Oracle as “primary competitor”. That is aiming way too low. He says: “Rather, SAP's top competitor is cloud computing...

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First impressions of Google Buzz: Smart, useful, long road ahead

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:18 -0700

Earlier this afternoon Google Buzz went live after a comprehensive launch event streamed live over YouTube. Buzz is a brand-new social tool that helps users to share updates, links, photos, videos, and more with the online world at large. Aimed at consumers and eventually enterprises, Buzz is Google's most serious Social Web play yet. Find out why with my detailed breakdown and analysis.

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Enterprise Software in Harvest Mode

Tom Foydel — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:24:49 -0700

Over the weekend I met a fellow in a local hardware who was looking for some very unusual screws. We got to talking and I found out that he supplements his retirement pension by re-conditioning dental chairs, of all things. Evidently it’s a decent money maker for him and he enjoys the hobby. The conversation started me [...]

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How SaaS Helps Enterprises Effect Change

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:02:56 -0700

Listen to my conversation with Eric Berridge, CEO of Bluewolf, one of the pioneers of a new generation of professional services companies that specialize in software-as-a-service and cloud computing. In this podcast, learn what attracts large enterprises to SaaS, and find out why adopting SaaS can help change the culture of an organization and effect business [...]

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Changes at #SAP

Dennis Moore — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:38:00 -0700

This weekend, it was announced that Leo Apotheker was leaving SAP immediately. Leo had been SAP’s CEO. Replacing Leo would be co-CEO’s Jim Snabe (focusing on technology) and Bill McDermott (focusing on sales). Also announced was the elevation of Vishal Sikka, the company’s CTO, to SAP’s Executive Board (the management board). Recently, it [...]

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NetSuite’s Revenue in light of the bigger ERP revenue question

Brian Sommer — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:11:54 -0700

Earnings reports and channel checks suggest SaaS vendors are making in-roads in the ERP space. On-premise vendors may be at risk although the effect of acquisitions makes it hard to ascertain within their financial statements.

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Friday Rant — What’s Holding Ariba Back? (Part 1)

Jason Busch — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:13:00 -0700

With its latest quarterly earnings announcement from last week, Ariba appears to be on a roll. While I plan to examine some of the details from the call and the earnings report in more detail next week along with the yearly and quarterly performance ...

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The Enterprise App Store And Self-Service IT: How SOA, Saas, And Mashups Will Thrive

Dion Hinchcliffe — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:29:07 -0700

There's been some useful discussion recently about using the app store model for distributing enterprise software and services within organizations. Up until now, most IT needs in the majority of businesses have been met largely through one-size-fits-all delivery of solutions...

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SAP’s 12Sprints joins the social enterprise bandwagon

Dion Hinchcliffe — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:23:47 -0700

I spent some time this morning working with SAP's new 12Sprints collaboration service, which was announced earlier this week. Available free in open beta immediately, it's a cloud-based service that's a cross between Basecamp and Google Wave and is ostensibly designed for team collaboration. Not incidentally, 12Sprints is also clearly a social application and it includes viral invitation, extensive commenting and discussion capabilities, and interesting new twists on measuring community opinion such as real time consensus tracking. Here's my analysis and breakdown.

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Appian Analyst Briefing: 2009 Overview and Future Outlook

Sandy Kemsley — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:58:57 -0700

Appian issued a press release last week on their growth in 2009, and had an analyst call today to provide more detail and answer questions. I attended their user conference in October, and was interested to hear their plans in the wake of recent BPM acquisitions. In short, their 2009 performance was the best in their [...]

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Channels for Business Content on SlideShare

Ross Mayfield — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:37:38 -0700

As an advisor to SlideShare, I’ve been proud to watch it grow into the world’s largest professional sharing community. Traffic grew 400% last year to 25 million unique monthly visitors, the majority of which are business decision makers. And guess what, its mostly people (and increasingly companies) pitching each other. So over the past couple [...]

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Where Business Process Meets 2.0

Susan Scrupski — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:40:09 -0700

The 2.0 Adoption Council is experimenting with a range of new market ideas that leverage the power of the social web. The 2.0 thinking surrounding network effects, scale, voluntary collaboration, free (as a business model), and social performance/productivity improvements are just a sample of some of the drivers that have made the Council thrive. [...]

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Why Your Cloud Applications Should Be Multi-tenant

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:03:10 -0700

Image via CrunchBase Listen to my conversation with Rick Nucci, chief technology officer of Boomi, a SaaS integration vendor, who we last interviewed here in April 2009 on the topic of SaaS Integration, Simpler through Sharing. In this podcast, learn why multi-tenancy is such a crucial ingredient for software-as-a-service and other cloud services, and find out how [...]

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A Quick Look at Ariba’s Results — Notes From the Earnings Call

Jason Busch — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:48:00 -0700

I'm in the process of listening to Ariba's earnings call (always a good gauge of the overall market) and plan to report on a number of the specifics early next week, along with the recent quarterly -- and yearly -- performance of Ariba competitors in...

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EuroCloud UK members making sense of Cloud standards and security

David Terrar — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:59:25 -0700

The newly formed EuroCloud UK group held their first member meeting a week ago at the Thistle City Barbican Hotel – a panel led group discussion on Cloud standards and security. Chaired by Phil Wainewright, the panel experts were Dr. Guy Bunker, independent consultant and blogger, formerly Symantec’s chief scientist and co-author of ENISA’s cloud [...]

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Middle America’s Manufacturers Adopt SaaS ERP

Phil Wainewright — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:13:46 -0700

Listen to my conversation with Mark Symonds, CEO of Plex Systems, which delivers ERP software-as-a-service to mid-market manufacturing companies. In this podcast, learn why middle America’s manufacturing companies are turning to SaaS to operate their business systems, and find out what sort of business is most likely to adopt a SaaS solution as the logical delivery [...]

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The Changing Software Partner Ecosystem

Brian Sommer — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:41:08 -0700

Resellers of SMB ERP products and other application software partners are experiencing a changing solutions world. Presenters at the Progress Software Global Partner Conference gave some great insights into these changes.

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Monday’s Musing: The Hidden Value In SaaS Deployments

R "Ray" Wang — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:34:16 -0700

Gains In SaaS Adoption Driven By Speed And Cost Savings Preliminary data from Q4 earnings data show continued traction among SaaS solutions. Expect SaaS deployments to gain steam in 2010 as organizations finalize their SaaS apps strategies to take advantage of 7 key benefits: Richer user experience - SaaS apps bring Web 2.0 usability to the enterprise [...]

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Friday Rant: SAP – Betting on the Half-Life of the Frictionless On-Demand Platform

Jason Busch — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:06:00 -0700

I've written about SAP's Frictionless acquisition countless times on Spend Matters -- what it meant initially, the advantages it provided SAP, its disadvantages, and how the platform would ultimately become part of a broader On-Demand strate...

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The app store: The new “must-have” digital business model

Dion Hinchcliffe — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:14:18 -0700

Amazon announced today that it was opening up its Kindle reader device to 3rd party applications to be distributed later this year in the Kindle Store. This news was just one more in a string of announcements from platform vendors large and small that they're getting the message: The app store model that Apple has proved so successfully with the iPhone is becoming the next frontier when it comes to next-generation software distribution that creates clear value for both customers and companies alike. What will then mean for software distribution models of the future? You can bet they will look a lot like the Apple App Store...

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The social Web in 2010: The emerging standards and technologies to watch

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:38:24 -0700

The emergence of Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social Web as a global force in the last several years has done a great deal to highlight their potential to fundamentally alter the way we communicate and collaborate both at home and in business. However, despite the movement of social computing into our daily lives we're all clearly on a long journey together as the technologies themselves emerge from infancy. The state-of-the-art today when it comes to the social computing environments that surround us now -- in our browsers, mobile devices, and elsewhere -- underscore how much more we have left to do to make these new modes of digital conversation and discourse become mature, efficient, safe, and truly useful. Fortunately the Web doesn't stand still and there continues continues to be rapid research and development when it comes to the mechanics of today's online social universe. There are many new efforts under way to refine and improve the world of social media, some of which we'll explore here and many which are just beginning...

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