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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

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)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

What mobile apps are essential for collaboration on the go?

Simon Mackie — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:50:10 +0000

With a growing proportion of the workforce already being highly mobile, coupled with an increasing number of workers are expecting to bring their own devices to work, it’s clear that picking the right collaboration apps to keep workers productive while on the go is vital to business success. But what apps do mobile workers need to get their jobs done? A new Forrester report, Mobilize Your Collaboration Strategy, has identified eight “must have” categories of mobile collaboration apps. Here’s a run-down of all the categories outlined, together with some of GigaOM’s recommendations for apps to use in each category:

Email and calendars. Email is, unsurprisingly, still the most important mobile app. According to Forrester, 87 percent of smartphone workers use email on their devices (which leaves me wondering what other 13 percent use their smartphones for), and collectively, they do 32 percent of their email on a smartphone. While most smartphones come with their own email and calendaring tools most users will use, there are some third-party options worth considering:

Gmail and Google Calendar. If you use Gmail, it’s worth noting that the mobile-optimized versions of the Gmail and Google Calendar sites are pretty good. They are fast and have a great UI, and one of the advantages of using them is that you can seamlessly switch from device to device without having to set up IMAP details in your various devices’ email clients.
Touchdown. Brings superb Microsoft Exchange support to Android devices.

Document-based collaboration. Mobile workers need to be able to access their documents while out of the office on any of their devices. Cloud-based document collaboration tools need to include mobile access to be truly effective.

Documents to Go. Dataviz’s Documents to Go is a popular mobile document editing app. It’s available for a variety of platforms, including iOS, BlackBerry, Android and Palm. When combined with a cloud file sync service like Dropbox or box.net, it enables users to access and edit their documents no matter where they are.
Soonr. Soonr is a cloud-based document sync service. However, it also offers integrated MS Office document editing capabilities , which means users don’t need to use a separate app like Documents to Go.

Web conferencing. According to Forrester, 18 percent of information workers and 34 percent of senior staff use web conferencing at least weekly. Mobile access means being able to attend meetings even while away from the laptop.

Fuze Meeting. Fuze Meeting’s impressive service is accessible with mobile devices. Its new Telepresence Connect service can extend traditional room-based telepresence to iPads and Android tablets.
Join.me. LogMeIn’s simple and easy-to-use web conferencing app is accessible through iOS and Android apps.

Activity streams. Forrester thinks activity streams are becoming a critical resource for organizations that work collectively: sales teams, project teams, and executive staff, for example. Mobile support is crucial as it enables workers to stay updated no matter where they are.

Yammer. Yammer is a popular enterprise social networking tool very much like a private Facebook for the enterprise. It offers mobile support though mobile apps available for a variety of platforms.
Socialtext. Socialtext is another enterprise social networking and collaboration app that offers activity streams. It offers mobile support via an optimized version of the website.

Presence and chat. Knowing whether a colleague is available or not is a killer feature when out of the office. While this category of app lags today, Forrester expects adoption to accelerate. These types of features are often also often included in other mobile collaboration tools.

eBuddy. A multi-protocol mobile chat app that supports AIM , ICQ, Google Talk, Yahoo! and MSN Windows Live Messenger within a single interface. It’s available via a native client for Android and iPhone and there’s also a mobile-optimized website.
IM+. Another popular “all-on one” IM app that supports a variety of protocols, including AIM, iChat, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber, Google Talk, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and Skype Chat, and works on a number of different mobile platforms.

Social collaboration. In this category, Forrester includes access to internal blogs, wikis, community sites, and social networks from a tablet or smartphone. Mobile access allows every professional will remain connected and part of the collaborative process.

IBM Lotus Connections. IBM’s social suite is supported on a range of mobile platforms, including Android, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Nokia.
Jive Software. Jive Software’s enterprise social suite provides mobile access though apps for iPhone and BlackBerry.

Expertise location. Forrester says this type of application is on the rise as firms look for ways to make mobile employees productive by helping them identify experts from anywhere. This type of app brings together presence, notifications, social profiles and data from HR. Many social business tools provide this kind of functionality, including:

Video conferencing. Skype has some 170 million active monthly users, and 39 percent of those people use Skype for work. Web conferencing vendors are also adding video to their products. Due to heavy resource requirements, there are few multi-party mobile video conferencing apps, though.

Skype. Skype provides video calling for mobile platforms including iPhone and Android.
Fring. One of the first apps to bring four-way video calls to the iPad, Fring provides native mobile apps for a variety of platforms, and also has mobile browser access.

Personally, I’m not convinced expertise location is really a “must-have” category of mobile collaboration app just yet. Do you agree with Forrester’s categories of “must-have” apps, and which apps do you recommend for each category?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Yagan Kiely

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Shortmail wants to reduce email overload by keeping messages short

Simon Mackie — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:06:27 +0000

Most of us are drowning in email. Could a solution be to impose a Twitter-like character limit on emails? Baltimore, MD-based 410Labs thinks so; its Shortmail service enforces brevity by limiting messages to 500 characters or less.

Getting started with Shortmail is simple; you need to sign in with your Twitter account, which then forms your Shortmail email address (my Twitter handle is spiky_simon, so my Shortmail address is spiky_simon shortmail.com, for example) Once signed in, you’ll be taken to your inbox. The Shortmail web interface is pretty easy to use, but the service works with POP3 and IMAP so you can also use it with your regular email client.

Any outgoing messages sent from your Shortmail account have a footer attached that says “This is Shortmail. Please reply in less than 500 characters; about 5 sentences.” Anyone trying to reply with a message that’s longer than 500 characters will be sent an email telling them that their email is too long with a link that allows them to edit their email to get it under the limit.

Apart from limiting the length of emails, Shortmail also has the ability to make conversations public. Prior to sending an email you can check the “Public” checkbox; the email and any replies will then become available online, complete with a Twitter-friendly short URL so you can share the conversation with others (Shortmail warns the people you email that the conversation will be posted online). This public conversations feature could be useful for sharing discussions with your team, for example.

Shortmail certainly works to keep emails snappy, but while I’d love to find a service that reduces my email overload, I’m not convinced that Shortmail’s approach is the right answer for me. While shorter, more concise emails obviously take less time to process, I find it’s the volume of emails that I receive that causes most of my email overload, not each email’s length. If, as noted in this Shortmail blog post, 99 percent of business communications already fits within the 500 character limit, is there much of a reason to use it? I think it’s likely that Shortmail will annoy people on those occasions when they do need to send me a longer message; spending time editing an email or splitting it up to meet the limit would be pretty time-consuming. Also, any incoming attachments are simply stripped from the message with no warning to the sender, which I think could lead to miscommunication (“Did you see the doc I sent you last week?”).

What do you think? Could Shortmail’s character limits solve email overload problem?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Google looking to integrate Google+ features into Gmail

Simon Mackie — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:47:08 +0000

It should come as no surprise that Google is looking to use its new platform, Google+, to add a social layer to the company’s existing services. It seems the company wants to forge ahead with plans to incorporate some of Google+’s social features into its flagship webmail product, Gmail. According to a Google+ post, Mark Streibeck, Engineering Manager for Gmail frontend, is looking for community input on how Google can successfully integrate the two apps.

Specifically, Striebeck is asking for help with three questions:

What email features would make it easier to interact with Google+?
How could Google integrate Google+ features into Gmail?
How can Google integrate social concepts in Gmail to make the email experience itself better?

If you’d like to provide your input, you can either join in a brainstorming discussion using Google+’s built-in video chat tool, Hangouts, on Tuesday, July 12 at 3pm PDT (although given the number of comments on Streibeck’s post already, I think it may be pretty popular and difficult to get into), or leave your thoughts in a shared Google Doc (you’ll need to ask Streibeck for access).

It will be interesting to see whether Striebeck can use Google’s own tools (Google+, Hangouts and Docs) to successfully gather the community feedback he’s looking for here, particularly as Hangouts is limited to ten simultaneous connections. But it does demonstrate that Google+ can be used as a collaboration tool, and underscores how Google+ may yet find a home in the workplace.

Personally, I’d like to see email notifications in Google+, and also to use profile information from my Circles to populate my address book in Gmail. What social features from Google+ would you like to see added to Gmail?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Study: 58% of UK workers expect the office to be extinct by 2021

Simon Mackie — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 15:52:24 +0000

The current crop of web workers might be the pioneers on the virtual work trail, but it seems that the general working population believes that it’s not too far behind. A new study commissioned by Virgin Business Media reveals that 58 percent of U.K. workers think the offices of today will not exist in ten years’ time.

The study was commissioned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of smash-hit British sitcom The Office (upon which the U.S. show is based). It surveyed 1,000 U.K. workers about how their working lives have changed over the last ten years, and how they expect them to change over the next ten years, primarily looking at the impacts of technology. As well as sounding the death knell for traditional offices, the survey also revealed that 56 percent of respondents believed that they would spend less time commuting in 2021, presumably because they believe they will spend more time working remotely. Technology has had a significant impact on the lives of the workers surveyed, with the overwhelming majority — 83 percent — feeling that technology had enabled them to become more productive in the last ten years. It seems that the consumerization of the workplace is well underway, too, with 56 percent of workers feeling that consumer and business technology will have merged by 2021, and 62 percent believing that they would use just one device to handle both their personal and work life in ten years’ time.

Virgin Business Media’s study correlates with the findings of a joint report from Regus and Unwired called VWork: Measuring the benefits of agility at work, which Jess wrote about recently. The VWork study surveyed 600 businesspeople and also concluded that the traditional office (as we know it, at least) is headed for extinction, with Philip Ross, CEO of Unwired, suggesting that in the future increasing numbers of workers are likely to be given a stipend to purchase their own office space (Darrell wrote about the benefits of such schemes recently). Interestingly, the VWork study reveals that only 12.3 percent of people would like to work from home.

As more workers become untethered, thanks to the web and mobile technology, it’s likely that we’ll see companies changing their use of office space. We’re already witnessing coworking spaces springing up in cities worldwide to accommodate increasing numbers of virtual workers, and forward-thinking companies are also revising how they use their campuses as more staff move into remote working arrangements. As Mark Heraghty, managing director of Virgin Business Media, notes, “[j]ust like the dinosaurs, the office may soon be resigned to the history books, with six in ten workers predicting that they won’t exist by 2021 … As employers search for more agile and effective ways of running their businesses, we’re increasingly finding that firms are swapping expensive office spaces in favor of a virtual workplace, where all activities can be conducted remotely.” But will traditional offices really become extinct by 2021? I’m curious to hear whether you agree with the workers surveyed in the Virgin Business Media study, so please take a minute to answer the poll.

Photo courtesy Flickr user shvmoz

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Microsoft Word Web App gets co-authoring capability

Simon Mackie — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:24:20 +0000

Microsoft has rolled out a co-authoring update to Word Web App, part of the Office Web Apps suite. This means multiple users can now edit a document simultaneously via Windows Live SkyDrive in Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft Word for Mac 2011 and Word Web App.

This update brings Word into line with the Excel and OneNote Web Apps, which have had co-authoring features since launch, and also with its main web app competitor, Google Docs.

When Word Web App was released, I was told by Microsoft that co-authoring wasn’t available as it was “too distracting” for users to have others come in and edit a document they were working on. Clearly, Microsoft has changed its mind on this point, but it has also put a great deal of work into making sure the Word Web App co-authoring experience doesn’t confuse. As shown in the image below, there are notifications to alert users when a collaborator is editing the document, and there are also notifications to alert users when a specific section is being edited. To prevent conflicts, only a single user can edit a paragraph at a time; when a user starts editing a paragraph, a lock is placed on it until the document is saved. If a collaborator saves the document, a notification pops up, letting the user know that they need to save the document to see updates. It’s certainly a less fluid collaboration experience that Google Docs’, but presumably one Microsoft believes is less distracting for users.

Let us know what you think of Word Web App co-authoring in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Share screenshots with Dropbox Screen Grabber

Simon Mackie — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 21:04:13 +0000

A while ago I wrote about Grabbox, a nifty Mac OS X utility that allows users to share screenshots via Dropbox. Today I stumbled across an equivalent app for Windows: Dropbox Screen Grabber. It allows you to take screenshots using a predefined hotkey combination and then instantly uploads them to your Dropbox public folder, while the URL of the uploaded file can placed on your clipboard to make sharing the screenshots really easy.

You can elect to take screenshots of the whole screen or just the active window. Dropbox Screen Grabber actually has a few features that make it a little more versatile than Grabbox: You can redefine the hotkey combination; automatically resize screenshots before uploading them; and control which Dropbox folder they are uploaded to. You can also use it to automatically upload screenshots of your desktop at predetermined intervals, which could be useful if you want to monitor or record a process, for example.

Dropbox Screen Grabber is a free download from the Dropbox Addons wiki. Users of multi-monitor setups beware: it has a known bug that means it will only take screenshots on the primary monitor.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.