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Archive for July, 2009

Irwin Lazar

This week brings news that Apple rejected Google’s application to make its Google Voice mobile application available for download via the iPhone application store. Google Voice users are instead stuck using Google’s web portal to manage their voicemail accounts.

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Starting in August, I’ll be taking a look at a variety of Enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms.  If you’d like to see your product reviewed here on the Enterprise 2.0 blog, please send a note to itsinsider at gmail dot com.  Admittedly, I’m not a tech blogger, but I will be looking for the value add products bring to the broader concerns related to introducing these products to the enterprise (ease of use, cost, integration with legacy/large enterprise applications, security, governance, and so on).

Please be prepared to address the following:

1. Company background (who are the founders/# of employees/how did it the company get started/financing?)

2. Early successes (what is unique about the product/what value is it delivering to customers?)

3. At least one customer case study.

4. Who is the ideal customer for the product?

We’ve also opened up Demo Thursdays at the 2.0 Adoption Council.  We will reserve Thursday mornings at 9am ET for any vendor with a suitable enterprise-ready 2.0 offering.  You can sign up to be considered here.

Irwin Lazar

I mentioned previously that one of the key trends at this summer’s Enterprise 2.0 conference was in how to bring public social computing tools into the enterprise in a manner consistent with requirements for compliance, security, and governance. This week SocialText reinforced that theme with the launch of the SocialText Microblogging Appliance, joining SocialCast among others with a twitter-like appliance-based application (along with SaaS offerings from the likes of Yammer and Present.ly).

The emergence of enterprise-ready tools for micro-blogging show the rapid movement of twitter-like messaging from toy to tool. Now how long before we see these capabilities as part of a unified communications offering integrated with telephony/voice, video, conferencing, and messaging?

Irwin Lazar

A couple of more markers this week underscoring the growing interest in video as a collaboration technology:

Taken together these two data points highlight the relative strength of video conferencing in light of a rough market for communications application and system vendors. We’re seeing a number of key trends pushing demand for video, most notably falling travel budgets, but also the falling cost and rapidly improving quality of video conferencing. Even among the twitter/facebook generation, video conferencing through public services such as Skype continues to grow. Don’t ignore video as you develop your collaboration architectures.

The Enterprise 2.0 team is gearing up to build the the program for the first annual San Francisco conference coming this November and we’d like to hear your success stories, case studies and the valuable lessons you’ve learned working with E2 tools and technologies in your organization. Submit your proposal through the Call for Papers, open until July 31. We’re looking for sessions and workshop proposals in the following topics:

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