Microsoft Expressions to become a stand alone product

According to eWeek, Microsoft will be dropping Microsoft Media from it's media suite, Expressions Studio. It will instead become a stand-alone product that will be launched on July 10 in the San Fransisco area. Read the whole article here.

To catch enterprises eye, Google must make some changes

According to an article at eWeek, they believe that Google must find a way to change GMail and where it hosts the information before the enterprises will recognize it as a business tool.

Your Web browser must stretch itself to serve as an application host; your link to the Internet becomes more important than ever; and your continued use of the cloud application in question is tied tightly to the operational competence of your provider.



Read the full article here.

StumbleUpon back to origional owners

According to the Bits Blog at the New York Times, StumbleUpon was purchased from eBay by its original owners. New plans for the site include features such as URL shorteners so that StumbleUpon users can share the links in places such as Facebook. The websie currently has 7.5 million users.

Twitter's wide web

Are you still looking for those companies on Twitter who tweet about your industry? Are you looking for your competitors? ReadWriteWeb recently did a great wrap-up of what they consider the top 7 Twitter search engines. Check them out:

monitter
Twitterfall
twistori
Tweet Scan
TweetChannel
Twitscoop
Tweetizen

Twitter commercial accounts on the way

eWeek reported today that Twitter has announced that they will soon offer commercial accounts for an extra fee. This is just one step in what Gartner predicts that 80% of social software platforms will include enterprise blogging features by 2011. For the full story, read the article here.

Twitter now fastest growing social network

According to a new article at Read Write Web, Twitter had 7 million unique visitors in February of 2009, as opposed to 475,000 in 2008, which is a growth rate of 1382% over the year. Surprisingly, the largest age group using Twitter is between the ages of 35-49. The article also states that 62% of the users access the application from work. Read the full article here.

What are your collaboration rules?

Brett Young recently posted his collaboration rules at his blog Collaboration Tech. I thought they were worth sharing:

1. Capture once.
2. Process once.
3. Resist printing.
4. Don't use email to collaborate, use it to communicate.
5. Send links, not attachments.
6. Store in a searchable, likable repository.
7. Be a sharer, not a hoarder.
8. Use real time communication, instead of voice mail or email, to reduce cycle time.

For an indepth look at these eight tips, read the blog here.

Sponsored conversations on yoru blog -- a good idea?

In a recent article written at Read Write Web, Marshall Kirkpatrick disagrees with a recent Forrester report that says it's a good thing to engage in conversations on blogs that are sponsored. He states that it isn't that much different from advertising, and that the new industry should not be overrun with this type of advertising yet. For more of his opinions, read the blog post here.

What do you think? Do you write a blog? Will you write about a topic on your blog if a company sponsors it?

Citrix expands to visualization market

Citrix is planning on entering the visualization market with the new system Citrix Essentials. Its goal is to make hypervisions more manageable, scalable and flexible. The new system is specifically for XenServer and Hyper-V.

The pairing with Microsoft on XenServer is part of what Citrix has code-named Project Encore, and effectively expands the two companies' 20-year relationship into the arena of application management. Under Project Encore, the partnership will be expanded from applications and desktops to servers, will center on a joint marketing strategy and will "add significant enterprise value" to Microsoft's Hyper-V, the companies said.

For more, read the article here.

Yahoo Mobile coming at end of March

Announced yesterday, Yahoo will be releasing an a software at the end of March that will bring iPhone like capabilities to everyone's mobile phone. The program will work on the majority of mid- to high-range smart phones. This new application will be promoted with the 70 partnerships it has formed with operators. For more information, read this article at eWeek.

What BPM can do in the current economic situation

Elise Golding recently shared with WhatPC? what business process management can do for a company in this current time of economic crisis. She points out that business processes are at the core of a business, and now is a great time to start controlling the processes. She also outlines some of the major activities that go on in BPM program management: Sponsorship, Objectives and Outcome, Education and Training, Opportunity Analysis, and BPM Programme Road Map.

For a more in-depth look, read the article here.

TrueSwitch aligns with Google

TrueSwitch has recently teamed up with Google in order to make it easier to import data from old email services into GMail. It can import information from e-mail servers such as AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail. It also allows the user to chose what they'd like to import, from contacts to messages, and defines which messages were imported from the older accounts. For more information, read the article here at CNet.

Latitute: The Ultimate Mobile Social Networking

Yesterday, Google announced the release Latitude, which is deemed the next step in mobile social networking. Read Write Web is a way to track where your friends are using your mobile phone. Read Write Web then goes on to question if users are going to feel like Google is too much a part of their life, and they already use other social networking sites like Facebook on their phone. What do you think?

Dell may enter SmartPhone market

In a recent release at eWeek, they anticipate Dell to release a new SmartPhone they've been working on. They saw their computer shipping business fall 16% in the last quarter, and hope to bring a new customer into their portfolio with these products. For more on the story, read this article at eWeek.

Do you trust cloud computing?

Read Write Web recently took a look at how cloud computing is being accepted by the public. As a major buzz word of 2008, there are many people who are not convinced of the power of cloud computing. They're looking at it as one way to back up data, not a cloud that will keep data safe in one spot.

Some said the cloud was trustworthy enough for non-critical data, but not for secure and private communications, such as those used in the enterprise. And still others noted that trusting cloud services was risky, especially given the recent shutdowns of the once-hot services like I Want Sandy, Pownce, Google Notebook, and Jaiku.

Do you use cloud computing on a regular basis? What are your thoughts? Do you keep multiple backups other than your data in the clouds?

AOL beefs up email software

According to a recent article at eWeek, AOL announces that it will now have one click access to other email providers including GMail and Yahoo.

Ted Cahall, president of AOL products and technologies, had this to say about the new technology:
"Web Mail is an integral part of the AOL experience and at the heart of our product offerings. With this new release, we can showcase the important role AOL products continue to play in the company. Enhancing products that already attract a large, engaged audience is a key goal for our organization."

Where's your budget for your enterprise networks?

I found this podcast at eWEEK, they talk with 3com about how to address cost of ownership solutions within the enterprise space. Some great information, take a few minutes to listen to it.

In this eWEEK podcast hosted by Mike Vizard, 3Com President and Chief Operating Officer Ron Sege talks about how to reconcile increasing application dependency on network bandwidth with the need to contain costs in these challenging times.

Cisco invests in Xobni

According to the New York Times, Xobni has received a $7 million of funding from Cisco. This is Cisco's latest venture in to Web 2.0 tools, following Jabber, Postpath, and WebEx.

Collaboration is a key focus of this investment, both between companies and the software that Cisco has been investing in.

“Cisco and Xobni actually share a very similar vision of using collaboration,” said Sandhya Venkatachalam, director of corporate development at Cisco. They both “center the experience around the people one wants to communicate with.”

Read more here.

GMail becomes enterprise friendly

A recent article at eWeek looks at how GMail has taken a turn to become an enterprise tool. Some relatively new items that are featured in GMail are:

-Google calendar
-Docs gadgets
-Alerts from calendars
-G Chat available on cell phones

Read the article here.

Hard news from inside the company

In these hard economic times, many companies are forced to cut back. However, many of them are looking to break the news in a more personal way by blogging them. The New York Times ran a story today. Many companies are taking their time to write their story down, as many employees take time to use Twitter and blogs to share their thoughts.

One example is Cake Financial:

Steven A. Carpenter, chief executive of a two-year-old investing advice site, Cake Financial, had blogged about the company’s new weekly video show and its move to new quarters in San Francisco. On Oct. 19, the night before he laid off 30 percent of his employees, he wrote a post about the cutbacks.

The next morning, he met with the six employees he was letting go. Afterward, he clicked the button to publish his post about the “extremely sad day for all of us who have to say goodbye to a group of great people.”

“Our whole company is built on the idea of transparency in investing, so that was a reason why it was important for us to do it,” Mr. Carpenter said in an interview. He also wanted employees and outsiders to know they were each getting the same version of the story. “It let them know what we were up to in real time, so they didn’t get nervous about what was going on,” he said.