So here we are just a couple weeks away from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. We have been working for eight-plus months on the agenda and we are ready for a great event. Personally, I’m just ready to get to Boston and hear from all the great speakers we have lined up! Like Stowe, I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ulrike Reinhold about Enterprise 2.0 and cover some of our highlights and goals for the upcoming conference. There are a lot of great programs at this year’s event that didn’t get a chance to cover in the interview. So here are some of the important links to check out our program:
The truly unique characteristics of Twitter are its simplicity and lack of specific purpose or application. Twitter is merely a digital conversation; albeit one that’s constrained to short statements of 140 characters or less. Like any conversation, you choose to talk to one other person at a time or broadcast out to many. You can make your conversations private or public. You can choose to blather, or to comment on everything from walking your dog to world affairs. You can follow and share your thoughts with thousands of people or you can offer your attention to a select few. As with any live conversation, contribute something particularly witty, funny or unique and your comment could be repeated to millions of users by Twitter’s digital word of mouth, also known as a re-tweet. At its core, Twitter is just a platform for simple conversation and that’s what makes it unique.
Breaking from the video format of other posts we recorded audio of a three way conversation. With George Athannassov based in Colorado, David Terrar in the UK, their core programming team in Bulgaria and a client base spread across the planet, WordFrame are a very international company. Terrar is Executive Director and one of the shareholders, and the company is owned by George and other members of the team with no outside investors. The company has been bootstrapped from the start and lives off revenues generated from their existing customers.
At this week’s VoiceCon conference I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion featuring Cisco VP & CTO of UC, Joe Burton, and IBM Lotus UC and Collaboration Services U.S. Leader Peter Fay on the role of Web 2.0 in an enterprise UC architecture.
Given SIP’s role as the common protocol within a unified communications architecture, it’s important to be aware of security threats, especially as organizations widen their adoption of SIP-to-SIP extranet connectivity and SIP trunking for PSTN access.
Today is short notes day, here are three interesting bits and pieces for you to ponder. First, there’s a quick look at the GTD Global Summit, an opportunity to drink the Kool-Aid of productivity, 2.0 style (I am a panelist and have 3 golden tickets — 50% off registrations — to offer, read on to find out how to get one). Second, a thumbnail review of what might be the first “2.0″ business parable, Where in the World is my Team? And finally, a pointer to a rather unique dashboard, since we’ve been on that topic, thanks to Irwin Lazar.
President Obama won a small victory this week, getting to keep his Blackberry, but it’s not your standard-issue Curve or Storm that will hang from the President’s hip, rather he will use a Sectera Edge, made by General Dynamics, and NSA approved at a cost of several thousand dollars. The Obama administration, ripe with 20-somethings, with the first Presidential blog, and masters of Facebook, has also been told that instant messaging is no longer allowed. How can arguably the most important distributed organization in the world function effectively in today’s world with out access to even the most basic collaboration tools? Marc Ambinder notes that Obama’s aides have been advised to use the telephone for important communications. Will they at least have access to a unified communications dashboard that displays availability?
Nortel today declared chapter 11 bankruptcy for its US and Canadian operations (follow the story over on NoJitter.com). Nortel has been around for over 110 years, transforming itself many times over the years. In the last two years, at least on the enterprise side, Nortel has focused on competing with the likes of Cisco as an end-to-end voice & data systems vendor, while differentiating itself via a deep partnership with Microsoft’s UC offerings and a growing partnership with IBM Lotus. More recently Nortel has introduced initiatives in virtual worlds applications and communications-enabled business process platforms.
That’s the pitch that startup Unison Technologies is making with it’s new free UC client integrating voice, instant messaging, calendaring, and LDAP directory into a single application. The client forces you to view ads, but the company is betting that customers will accept ad-supported software in exchange for not having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for similar features from Microsoft or other. But it doesn’t look like this is going to fly…..
The easiest way to predict the future, as Alan Kay said, is to invent it. Some friends of mine, over at a stealth design/innovation startup called WilsonCoLab, decided to start a site dedicated exclusively to this task at www.cloudworker.org, which beta-launched today with a neat contest (seriously flattering to have a word you coined taken this seriously!). Cool logo, eh?
The Enterprise 2.0 Blog is affiliated with the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, an event focusing on social tools and technologies that help make companies more creative, agile and productive.
Jun 4th, 2009 |
