GigaOM » Simon Mackie Archives

Ricoh’s file storage service quanp to shut down in the US

Simon Mackie — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:55:59 +0000

quanp, an online file storage service from Japanese electronics giant Ricoh that we’ve covered previously, is being shut down in the U.S. In an email sent to customers, the company notes that the service, which was in beta, will be discontinued on September 30th. This closure will not affect the original Japanese version of the service.

No reasons have been given as to why the company is closing the service, but it’s probably safe to assume that Ricoh found it hard to gain traction with quanp in an ultra-competitive cloud file storage market. New user signup has already been closed, and current quanp users should make sure they have downloaded any files stored on the service by 11.59pm PT on September 30th, as at that time all user accounts will be deleted, together with any files stored on them.

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GoFileDrop now works with Gmail accounts

Simon Mackie — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:10:24 +0000

GoFileDrop (previously called GoDropBox) is an app that adds a public mailbox to your Google Docs account, enabling anyone with the appropriate link to upload files to your account. It was previously only available to Google Apps customers via the Google Apps marketplace, but it can now be installed by users with regular Gmail accounts.

To install it, just head to the GoFileDrop site and hit the button to add the service to your Gmail account. It works in the same way as the version available for Google Apps users: Once you’ve authorized GoFileDrop to access your account, you’ll be given a unique URL that you can then forward to other people, which allows them to upload files to your Google Docs account through their browser (they can only upload files and don’t have the ability to read or otherwise access your account). The upload page is shown in the screenshot above. It is easy to use and supports drag and drop, allows batch file uploads and file deletion, and shows upload progress. Uploaded files appear immediately in your Google Docs account, and you’re also sent an email notification of any new uploads.

50 MB of data allowance is provided free. Additional data costs £1.75 ($2.86) per GB, with bulk purchase discounts.

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Collaboration app Cohuman has been acquired and will shut down

Simon Mackie — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:43:40 +0000

Cohuman, a web-based collaboration and project management app that we’ve written about previously and was also the recipient of the Net:Work People’s Choice Award 2010, has been acquired and will be shutting down on August 31. In a blog post and email sent to users, founder Matthew Work explained that finding institutional investor to secure funding for the company has been a struggle. An acquirer has no been found, but it seems that they are only interested in Cohuman’s staff and its technology, not the service itself, as the site is to close. Details of the acquisition and acquirer have not been disclosed.

Current Cohuman users should check out Work’s blog post, which contains instructions for exporting data from the service, as on August 31st all user data will be deleted. You can also contact Cohuman tech support at support@cohuman.com and via the site’s Get Satisfaction page. There’s also a message board hosted on the site’s home page.

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Supporting Millenials in the workplace

Simon Mackie — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 21:04:26 +0000

There’s a shift happening in the workplace. A significant and growing proportion of the working population is now made up of “Millennials” (also known as Generation Y, and often defined as people born between 1982 and 2001). Millenials tend to be tech-savvy, raised with ever-present mobile phones, ubiquitous online access and social media. But how can businesses support Millenials at work; how do they expect to communicate, collaborate and get things done? A new report over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), Millennials in the enterprise: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce, surveyed Millennials about their use of technology at work, with a particular focus on how they communicate and learn and what they expect in regards to technology support. Analyst David Card examined Millennials’ attitudes and behavior regarding communication means and preferences, their approach to solving problems and their mobile and after-hours work habits.

One interesting characteristic of Millenials noted in the report is that they tend to rely on their own resources and network of friends or colleagues to try and solve problems before going down the official support path. This is an important point to note for IT departments that need to support Millemials: they are prime candidates both for self- help solutions and for collaborative problem-solving and training. As Card explains, “Forward-thinking IT managers will gear solutions and policies around those concepts, and engineer FAQs or self-help portals that behave like search, social networks or forums.”

The report also looks into Millenials’ use of technology. Unsurprisingly for a generation that grew up with mobile phones and ubiquitous Internet access, it found that Millennials use mobile and home devices for work, and that significant numbers of Millennials work at least part of the time from home, are extremely mobile and like to use their preferred choice of devices. Forward-thinking companies can boost employee satisfaction by respecting their preferred choice of devices; the report notes that a quarter of Millennials said the type of devices supplied by employers strongly affected their job satisfaction, and nearly half said it had at least some influence.

To get the full report, head over to GigaOM Pro (a subscription is required, but a free trial is available). Card’s report is actually only the first of two parts; it will be interesting to read the second part, which will examine how prepared corporate IT departments are to cater for the needs of their growing ranks of Millennial employees.

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Socialcast extends collaboration to external contributors

Simon Mackie — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:00:17 +0000

Socialcast, a social business start-up that was recently acquired by VMWare, has announced an update to its product that will support what the company calls the “extended enterprise:” the external contractors, partners, suppliers, clients and customers that all businesses rely on to get their work done. Users will now be able to create “external facing” groups and invite people from outside their organization to participate in discussion and collaboration.

In order to keep company data secure, enterprise social networking tools like Socialcast usually only allow people from within a company to join that organization’s social graph — a restriction that is usually based on email domain. This makes social business tools useful for discussion and collaboration within a particular organization, but means that whenever users want to interact with people from outside of the organization, they have to use a separate tool, like email. Some social business tools, such as Moxie Software’s Spaces, do offer facilities for bringing external users into discussions, but they are usually focused on specific groups of people (customers or contractors for example). Socialcast’s new features are much more flexible, allowing users to invite external participation from anyone, but still allow the company to maintain control over data privacy.

Bringing external users into Socialcast is pretty straightforward; a user simply has to create a new group and check a box to make it “External facing.” External users invited into that group will log in and use Socialcast in exactly the same way as employees, with just the same capabilities as regular users (posting updates, commenting, uploading and downloading files, etc.) However, they only have access to that group and cannot see anything else, even the search box is eliminated, as shown in the screenshot to the right. Internal users (employees) accessing the group will see a prominent warning that the group is external facing and anything they post could be seen by external contributors.

In addition to the ability to bring external contributors into groups, Socialcast is also getting two other enterprise-friendly features:

User Roles. Community administrators, or IT within large enterprises, can now create permission-based access to Socialcast’s premium features, reducing the burden on IT and community administrators.
Org Charts. Automatically mapped org charts make it easier for people to understand “Who’s Who” in the company and their social interactions without having to leave the Socialcast community. External contributors will also be included in these charts.

I think opening up Socialcast to external contributors is a welcome move that’s likely to be followed by other social business vendors. Companies are not islands: they work within much larger interconnected networks of vendors, partners and clients. Having two separate silos of information for communication and collaboration — a social business tool and email, for example — is tricky to manage for both users and management; the way that most social business tools can only be used within an organization was one one of the reasons that I suggested that Google+ might find a home in the enterprise. Opening up Socialcast to external contributions should help to resolve that issue, while allowing businesses to maintain much more control over their information than is possible with a consumer tool like Google+. Archiving external conversations in a social business tool like Socialcast makes a lot of sense, too: if a particular user leaves a company, the business has an archive of their conversations and relationships with external suppliers, which makes it much easier for their replacement to hit the ground running. I spoke with Tim Young, Socialcast’s founder and CEO, who said that a select group of companies that have had 45 days’ worth of early access to the new version of the app in beta have seen a whopping 40 percent increase in usage, so it seems that businesses will readily embrace these kinds of features.

The new features are rolling out Tuesday. There’s no per-user charge for external contributors, so companies can add as many as they like.

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Attach sticky notes to any web page with Syncpad Webnotes

Simon Mackie — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:04:25 +0000

Long-time WebWorkerDaily readers will probably know that I’m a big fan of Simplenote, a cloud-based service that enables users to sync notes across different clients on various platforms. It’s a popular service and has an open API, so developers have created many useful third-party add-ons for it. One such useful add-on is Syncpad Webnotes, a Chrome extension that enables you to attach virtual “sticky notes” to any web page that can be synchronized across different browsers through a Simplenote account.

Syncpad Webnotes is actually an add-on for yet another Chrome extension, Syncpad for Simplenote; if you want to install Syncpad Webnotes you must first first install Syncpad (which is a full-featured plain text client for Simplenote). Once you’ve installed both extensions and set up Syncpad with your Simplenote account credentials, you can add sticky notes to any web page by clicking Webnotes’ icon next to the address bar; notes ca be repositioned on the page by dragging and dropping. Sticky notes are automatically synchronized to your Simplenote account and so will also appear other machines that you’ve installed Webnotes on. You can also access these notes in other Simplenote clients; Webnotes just adds a specially-formatted line to the each note to identify that it is a Webnotes sticky note and tell it where to position the note on the page. As a simple way to add contextual notes to a web page, Syncpad Webnotes works really well.

Syncpad Webnotes requires a free Simplenote account.

(via Addictive Tips)

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File sharing service Min.us moves to Minus.com

Simon Mackie — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 09:13:41 +0000

Simple drag-and-drop file sharing service Minus, which I wrote about a couple of months ago, has acquired the Minus.com domain name. Minus.com will be used as the service’s primary domain going forward, rather than min.us, which was used previously and was thought to be a little confusing. Users who prefer the old domain or who have it bookmarked shouldn’t worry, however, as the min.us domain will also continue to work as before, and all existing links will continue to work properly. As it’s shorter, min.us will still be used to provide shortlinks to galleries.

As well as moving to the new domain, the team at Minus has been busy adding new features to the service and updating its apps. For example, a recent update to the desktop app updated its look and feel and also included a nifty new screenshot tool, which enables users to take screenshots (either full screen or a region) and upload them to their Minus account, while the Android app has gained the ability to preview plain text and PDF documents.

Minus is free. As well as through the website, files can be uploaded and accessed via a desktop client (available for Windows, Mac and Linux); mobile apps for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7; and browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox.

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LifeSize wants to simplify enterprise video conferencing

Simon Mackie — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 08:00:47 +0000

Traditional enterprise HD video conferencing and telepresence products tend to suffer from a few drawbacks. They’re generally very expensive, requiring significant investments in infrastructure as well as the video equipment; they are often pretty complex to use and difficult to deploy; and they also tend to be incompatible with mobile devices and systems from other vendors. LifeSize, a supplier of video conferencing products that was acquired by Logitech in 2009, is aiming to address those issues and to make video conferencing simpler to deploy and use by announcing some new products Wednesday.

Firstly, Logitech has announced that it has acquired Mirial, an Italian company that provides personal and mobile video conferencing solutions. The acquisition means that Logitech’s LifeSize division will be able to broaden its portfolio and offer a fully interoperable, enterprise video conferencing software solutions for distributed desktop and mobile users, offering compatibility with PC, Mac, iOS and Android devices. Mirial’s products will be added to LifeSize’s product range and will not be re-branded. Financial details of the acquisition haven’t been disclosed.

The company has also announced a new cloud-based business-class HD video collaboration platform called LifeSize Connections. It’s scalable, can be used instead of expensive on-premise infrastructure, and offers up to 9-way video bridging at 720p30 with fully encrypted media (this compares with up to 1080p30, 48-way calling for LifeSize’s on-premise solution, although there are apparently plans to increase Connections’ capacity over time). It’s fairly inexpensive, costing $30 per user per month for desktop licenses, or $100 per seat per month for endpoints. LifeSize will be rolling out a private beta of the service in the next few weeks. It’s expected to become globally available in the third quarter of this year.

Finally, LifeSize is also announcing a new entry-level 720p endpoint, LifeSize Passport Connect. It’s optimized for cloud-based platforms, such as LifeSize Connections, offers a simplified user experience and integrates Logitech camera technology. It costs under $1,500 ($999 when bundled with LifeSize Connections).

With these announcements, LifeSize is taking aim at its enterprise competitors such as Cisco and Polycom. By lowering the total cost of ownership of video collaboration and making its solutions much easier to deploy, it’s hoping that these new products will boost its sales with organizations that might previously have been reluctant to fully embrace video, and also enable existing customers to consider using video with remote offices and telecommuting employees. LifeSize Connections should be attractive to companies with a high degree of client interaction as it enables “guest invitation” capabilities, which will allow them to use their video solution to communicate with their clients. However, when compared with the cheap or free consumer video conferencing solutions available from the likes of Skype and Google, LifeSize’s offerings still seem pretty expensive. As Ryan noted in his post about the launch of 8×8′s Virtual Room video conferencing system Tuesday, companies will need to consider whether the higher-quality video and encryption provided by “business class” solutions from the likes of LifeSize are worth paying for, when cheap consumer solutions are often even easier to deploy and use, and are frequently “good enough” for most purposes.

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Gui:Config makes tweaking Firefox advanced settings a snap

Simon Mackie — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:03:51 +0000

Firefox is a very customizable browser. As well as add-ons, it has a large number of advanced settings that you can tweak, some of which enable you to do pretty useful things like stopping Firefox from switching into “Work Offline” mode if your Internet connection drops. Firefox’s advanced preferences page is accessed by entering “about:config” into the location bar and hitting return. However, the problem with that page is that there’s no information about what each setting actually does, and the user interface isn’t easy to figure out for less technical folks, either. Gui:Config is an add-on that provides a simple interface for many of the most-tweaked about:config settings via a familiar options-style window. It makes it much easier to change the settings that can normally only be found in the about:config screen.

Once installed, you can access Gui:Config via Tools > Advanced Settings … The options are organized under two tabs: Accessibility and Browser. Under Accessibility, you have settings for Mouse Behavior, Awesomebar, Websites, Session Restore and Miscellaneous. Under Browser you get settings for Browser Cache, Websites, Extensions, Bookmarks and Security and Privacy. Each setting is adjusted via checkboxes and drop-down menus. Helpfully, hovering your mouse pointer over any of the options provides a short description of what it does in a pane at the bottom of the window.

The organization of Gui:Config’s options window may take a little while to get used to, and it doesn’t provide access to all of Firefox’s advanced settings, but it does make tweaking many commonly-used settings really easy. If you need to adjust any other settings, you can still get to the regular about:config page.

Gui:Config can be downloaded from the Firefox add-ons repository. It’s compatible with Firefox version 3.5 to 5.

(via Ghacks)

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ccLoop wants to improve email with smart mailing lists

Simon Mackie — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:04:51 +0000

ccLoop wants to help tackle the email overload problem. However, unlike many collaboration tools that are trying to take information and conversations out of our inboxes, ccLoop is attempting to improve email by making it into a better and more streamlined communication tool. It effectively offers a business-focused take on the kind of mailing list functionality provided by Google Groups and Yahoo Groups.

If you’re used a mailing list app before, the concept will be familiar. You can create a mailing list (called a “loop”) through the web interface; it can be designated as being for a team (only open to people you invite), for an organization (open to anyone from your company, based on their email address, and anyone you invite), or public (open to anyone). You can also specify whether anyone can post to the loop, or just yourself. You then give your loop a name, which forms its email address (so you could have gigaom@ccloop.com, for example), and invite members. People can then post messages to the loop by sending emails to its address and will receive messages that others send to the list.

Once your loops are set up, you can primarily work with them through your email client, although you can also view and search the messages and files that have been sent to each loop through the web interface. The web interface also offers facilities to manage your loops and adjust editing settings like who can post to each loop, and you can specify whether you receive every email from each loop, get a daily digest or only access the loop via the web interface. Additionally, you can use the web interface to follow loops that others have created, and share loops with others.

Realistically, ccLoop isn’t going to solve the email overload problem on its own, but it does offer a useful way for organizations to structure and archive email conversations — discussing projects or sending out company-wide updates, for example — and for individuals to determine how they receive the messages from those conversations. It isn’t really doing anything new, as it’s effectively just a slightly more modern take on the kind of mailing list functionality offered by the likes of Google Groups and Yahoo Groups. However, those apps have clunky interfaces; ccLoop makes setting up and managing mailing lists a breeze. The app is currently in beta and is free; premium features will likely be introduced at some point.

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