GigaOM » Software Apps

Collaboration Tool MemberHub Updates to 2.0

Scott Blitstein — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 17:00:50 +0000

I’ve written a few times about MemberHub being a great group communication and collaboration tool, so I was interested to hear about its recent upgrade to version 2.0.

MemberHub provides places for group members to connect and communicate, as well as tools for managing those members. It offers more features than such services as Convos and Tgethr, which we’ve looked at in the past.

Its core features are focused on easily sharing information and working collaboratively within groups, whether working online or via email. It is built around discussions and messaging, integrated file management and calendar functionality.

MemberHub is not a project management system, but it has functions not found in other group communication systems, like the ability to send out text messages from the app. This could be tremendously useful for both reminders and emergency notifications.

Thanks to the recent upgrade, administrators can now add members to a group without users needing to pre-register.

For larger groups, the process of managing members and hubs (or groups) within a business or organization has been simplified. Improvements to this area make working with the product much easier. MemberHub can manage members individually and as a part of multiple groups, which is one of the key differences between MemberHub and other collaboration tools I have seen.

As a user, I can now add multiple email addresses to my profile, to better facilitate being a part of multiple hubs or groups. Administrators can add members to the larger organization, and assign them later to individual sub-groups like Finance or Membership. Administrators can create subdomains with custom branding for each hub.

An organization of any size should see many benefits from implementing MemberHub. In my first review, I was impressed with its functionality as a communication platform. I still think that MemberHub is a great option for businesses, schools, non-profits, and churches. It’s now an even better option for larger groups.

MemberHub remains one of my favorite and most-recommended web services. I’m not aware of any other service that combines member management and online communications features as well.

MemberHub offers a free single-hub plan, and paid options ranging from $5 per month for 3 hubs and 30 people, to $149 per month for 1,000 people and unlimited hubs.

How are you keeping your group connected?

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Alternatives to Dimdim for Web Conferencing

Charles Hamilton — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:00:38 +0000

Now that the online collaboration service Dimdim has been purchased by Salesforce and is being shut down, what alternatives for collaboration, conferencing and screen sharing remain available?

The web conferencing market has changed considerably since our 2007 WWD roundup, but here are a few options that we’ve covered in the past.

Fuze Meeting. This service is entirely browser-based, and offers many features, although it doesn’t have a free option.
Skype. Simon reminded us that this is a good alternative for small meetings, and it has both video and screen-sharing capabilities.
Yugma. This app includes some sophisticated features, but still offers a free version.
Yuuguu. Doriano liked this IM-based service because it doesn’t require those you’re sharing screens with to download or install anything.

Here are some of the other solutions available. Prices, features and usability vary greatly.

What will you use to replace Dimdim?

Image courtesy Flickr user vivevans

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EditMe: Easy Wiki Creation and Collaboration

Scott Blitstein — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 16:00:11 +0000

Many teams have information spread across multiple systems owned by different people; creating a shared knowledge base of information that can be accessed and updated by everyone can be incredibly valuable. As part of a rapidly growing company with product lines that are continually evolving, I was recently tasked with choosing a platform for the storage of product and company data, to bring together the information currently housed in Google Docs, emails and elsewhere.

A shared wiki is the logical place to store this type of information. A wiki is accessible to anyone on the team; a good wiki will become the clearinghouse for any and all information that needs to be documented. While there are many wiki packages, after a diligent search we chose editme.

I had identified a few very specific needs when looking for our wiki solution:

WYSIWYG Editor. Even as a tech-savvy company, my experience has shown that most users don’t easily adapt to using specialized wiki syntax. My goal was to make the platform as easy and accessible as possible; if people don’t understand it or the process is difficult then they won’t take the time to use it. I found editme had an easy-to-use visual editor but with the option of using some more powerful syntax as well. The ability to add images, formatting and links to other items and pages is crucial for maintaining an appealing and useful environment. editme does this quite well.

Permission Levels. Even though our team is very open, there is certain information that needs to be segmented and made available to a more limited audience. I liked that editme let me keep the wiki overall private and secure within our team but then also gave me the functionality to create groups for users and then easily assign pages to specific groups. Overall, I am happy with the way that I can assign and manage these permissions. (However, on a related security issue, I’m not fond of the way that that it sends password reminders and logins via plain text in an email. I would much prefer a reset link or other reset or reminder options.)

It is also possible to make the wiki site public, or a mix of public and private; the ability to segment access and permissions in those scenarios becomes even more critical.

Affordability and Support. As a software company ourselves, we have no problem supporting other products and services that we find useful and that contribute to our own success. I know that there are also open-source alternatives that we can install and maintain but as a business critical service we decided that going with a hosted and maintained offering was our best option. With unlimited users at even the cheapest plan and pricing ranging from $5 – $79 month, it was well within our budget, and as new employees join the team we simply point them to the wiki to get them started.

In the six months we’ve had our editme site up and running we’ve found that the adoption has been good, particularly in our Customer Experience group where we focused our initial efforts.

Initially, we had some trouble with the menu creation and the page organization features; they were functional but confusing. That has since been revamped and the new Page Organizer feature is really slick. We can now drag-and-drop pages around to easily change the structure of the site.

Billed as both a wiki and a collaboration platform, editme straddles the line between wiki and web site creator, comfortably living in both worlds. While we were primarily looking for a data organization tool, the additional web site creation and styling features are easy to use and a nice bonus.

Pricing for editme starts at $5 per month, and 30 day trials are available on all plans. It’s a hosted solution and works across all major browsers.

Find out more about how software is enabling companies to improve collaboration — check out our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco in December.

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Intel’s Multi-Billion-Dollar Cost of Doing Business

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:31:55 +0000

Intel’s patriotic investment in American manufacturing news blast worked so well last year when it made a fairly big to-do over its planned capital expenditures that it’s taken a similar tactic this year, showcasing its $6 billion to $8 billion in planned manufacturing investments.

The iPhone’s Challenge to Open Source

Matt Asay — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 18:37:11 +0000

Freedom-loving developers have long used open-source licenses as a tactic to maintain the open availability of their source code. With the rise of closed hardware/software platforms like Apple’s iPhone, however, that tactic is being challenged. This might not be all bad, as the case of The Battle for Wesnoth illustrates.

It’s a bit ironic that such a closed platform as Apple’s iOS, and its accompanying App Store, welcomes open-source software at all. Yes, the Apple iPhone SDK states, “If Your Application includes any FOSS, You agree to comply with all applicable FOSS licensing terms.” But the platform itself, and the App Store rules, effectively block adherence to this stipulation by removing the ability to access, read, and redistribute underlying source code for apps.

It’s a core part of Apple’s mantra, as repeated by Apple CEO Steve Jobs this week, that “integrated will trump fragmented [Android] every time.”

This integrated approach is at odds with the more free-spirited, open-source approach, as reflected in new skirmishes between open-source advocates and Apple or app developers. For example, the Free Software Foundation recently filed a complaint against Apple for its distribution of the open-source GNU Go game without providing its underlying source code, as required by the GNU General Public License (GPL). The FSF believes Apple’s App Store rules violate Section 6 of the GPL, which indicates that “a redistributor of the licensed program may not impose further restrictions on the recipients to copy, distribute, or modify the program.” Apple doesn’t allow any of those freedoms.

Unsurprisingly, rather than confront the question, Apple simply dumped the GNU Go from the App Store.

But the issue won’t die, thanks to a similar concern arising over The Battle for Wesnoth. It’s a tricky situation, because in this case, Wesnoth’s developers — at least, many of them – do not favor the FSF’s position, and believe that the App Store regulations do not violate either the spirit or letter of GPL licensing.

As an interesting corollary to this legal argument, Wesnoth developer David White defends open-source applications on the App Store because they funnel money and interest back into open-source development:

Wesnoth has obtained significant revenue streams which have been used to fund the development of art and other content in areas in which Wesnoth needs improvement to compete with commercial offerings.

FLOSS [Free, libre, open-source software] gaming has been exposed to a significant audience which might be otherwise unaware of it.

Other FLOSS games are now also interested in distribution on the same platform.

In large part, these funds are possible precisely because the App Store regulations make it onerous to get Wesnoth on the iPhone/iPad in any other way other than through the original Wesnoth development team. Apple doesn’t allow multiple entries for the same app within the App Store, and Apple’s policies make it difficult to replicate the open-source code.

Can developers get the source code from the app developer’s website? Absolutely. Can they recompile it and distribute it to jailbroken iOS devices? Of course. It’s open source. It’s the platform that’s closed, and closure provides the opportunity to better monetize the code.

The platform effectively makes the open-source app proprietary without a single line of code licensed under a restrictive license.

This isn’t actually new. Think of Google. As Om Malik has written, infrastructure is Google’s key competitive advantage. Guess what? That same infrastructure that makes it possible to run open source at dramatic scale and efficiency is the very same infrastructure that makes it virtually impossible for anyone else to make any use of this open-source software.

Because Google runs this software internally, it isn’t required to release it. Even if Google released every single line of code, small competitors couldn’t replicate its services, if for no other reason than they couldn’t afford the hundreds of thousands of servers necessary.

More fundamentally, even big competitors couldn’t replicate Google, for the reasons Tim O’Reilly pointed out at the Open Source Business Conference in 2009:

Tim asked a question to the audience: “Could anyone in the Open Source community build the infrastructure to deliver Google Voice Search?” The response: a stony silence. The implication? Vendor lock-in is [no] longer about proprietary source code. It’s about massive, hard-to-replicate data sets — making Google a potential Microsoft of the next decade.

Hardware and data make Google’s source code essentially useless to anyone but Google. Does this make it less valuable as a member of the wider open-source community? Hardly. Indeed, as I’ve said before, Google is the world’s largest “open-source company,” and a better open-source citizen than most. Why? Because Google can afford to give away mountains of code because its sales aren’t threatened by competitors (or customers) taking the services enabled by its code without paying.

Smaller software developers lack Google’s scale, of course, but may be able to achieve some of the same effects by writing applications to run on closed platforms like Apple’s.

Wesnoth’s developers don’t appear to have been motivated by the desire to sell more games because of Apple’s restrictive policies. Rather, they simply wanted the maximum audience for their creation. But the closed nature of the App Store is helping them to both find more users and more paying customers, all while leaving source code fully available for those who actually want it: developers.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical, a Linux vendor.

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Apple TV: 250,000 Sold In Six Weeks

Ryan Lawler — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 22:15:45 +0000

Apple didn’t announce the number of Apple TVs sold as part of its earnings release, but Steve Jobs was on the company’s investor call today and gave the first official numbers for how many of the brand new set-top box have seen purchased. So far, the sales are pretty good: Jobs reported that the company has sold more than 250,000 Apple TVs since the company first made the product available in early September.

Apple first announced the new Apple TV broadband set-top box on September 1, pricing it at $99 and announcing a new business model for streaming rentals of TV episodes and movie files. With the new streaming model, Apple rents TV episodes from Fox and ABC for 99 cents, compared to the $1.99 price for standard definition episode downloads and HD downloads for $2.99.

To put that into perspective: Roku reported at the beginning of this year that it had sold 500,000 of its set-top devices after about a year-and-a-half on the market, and hopes to have sold more than a million of its box by the end of the year. So Apple is tracking well ahead of other, similar devices already in the market.

That said, Apple TV is still very much a hobby when compared to the other products it makes. Apple sold 4.2 million iPads and 3.9 million Macs in the third quarter, as well as 9 million iPods and 14 million iPhones. While those products were available all quarter, compared to just the last several weeks like the Apple TV, it’s clear that it could be some time before Apple’s video set-top box becomes a significant portion of Apple’s business.

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Ray Ozzie to Leave Microsoft: Has The Future Left the Building?

Om Malik — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 21:29:57 +0000

Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect with Microsoft is leaving the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. Ozzie, is widely viewed as someone who tried to change Microsoft’s internal attitudes towards cloud computing. He is credited for Microsoft’s move into the cloud with its Azure efforts.

Hey Shareholders, Capex Means Cash in the Cloud!

Derrick Harris — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 23:27:42 +0000

Om’s post about Google’s soaring infrastructure spending got me thinking about the hypocrisy in the way we assess web companies’ decisions to splurge on the very equipment that makes them tick. Startups are either expected to or praised for spending on more infrastructure, while public companies feel the wrath of financial analysts when they do the same.

Users come to love services like Facebook and Twitter (even Foursquare) so much that it resembles a national crisis among some circles when one of their sites goes down for a few hours. How do they try to avoid these occurrences in the future? Well, they spend some of those millions improving their physical infrastructures and creating specialized software to address unique needs. Greenpeace aside, I don’t recall hearing any complaints about Facebook’s first data center, nor about Twitter’s planned data center, and these companies aren’t even making money.

So why is it that financial analysts and shareholders get so up in arms when massive public web companies like Amazon or Google embark on spending kicks? After all, they bring in billions in revenue each year, and Google is responsible for more web traffic than Facebook and Twitter combined. Because it detracts from near-term profitability, that’s why. Om calls such analysts “idiots and short-term thinkers,” and he’s spot-on with his analysis of the situation.

Imagine if Google’s search engine, or its paid Google Apps service, went down as frequently as Twitter. What about Amazon Web Services, which hosts a good number of popular web sites and relatively important enterprise applications? What if these companies never rolled out new services because that would require spending more money on infrastructure? The answer is that they wouldn’t be too popular for too long. Companies delivering services via the web have to spend money – on infrastructure – to make money.

I can only imagine the number of cloud computing providers who’d love to have the problem of needing to scale to meet demand, and actually having the cash to do so. That day will never come if they don’t do infrastructure right in the first place.

When we’re talking about companies for which millions today might mean billions tomorrow, it might behoove shareholders and analysts to lighten up a little bit on the bottom line.

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New Relic Gets Another $10M, Proves SaaS Profitability

Derrick Harris — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 15:28:34 +0000

SaaS startup New Relic has received an additional $10 million in venture capital for its application performance management (APM) offering that targets both data centers and the cloud. Tenaya Capital and Allen & Co. led the Series C round, with existing investors Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures also chipping in. The round brings New Relic’s total investment to $20 million, proving the importance of management and monitoring as companies adopt cloud computing, as well as the power of the SaaS 2.0 model.

What separates New Relic from other APM providers is that its RPM service monitors live software from the inside instead of simply monitoring external web application metrics. RPM comes in five editions, ranging from the free Lite version, which gives basic monitoring capabilities, up to the Enterprise version, which provides a range of capabilities to discover and cure performance issues. According to founder Lew Cirne, the internal view helps customers identify problems early and avoid “the thorniest issues,” citing the recent Foursquare outage as a problem that might have been avoided if the company could have been proactive in addressing the problem.

Formerly, New Relic supported only Java and Ruby web applications, but as of today, it also supports .NET and PHP applications. This is nothing new for cloud-based services, which tend to start with a focused offering and expand their customer bases as they grow by adding additional language support. Even larger companies like Google and Salesforce.com took this approach with their cloud offerings. More applications mean more money, after all.

New Relic’s already-expansive footprint would seem to underscore the value of its service and of the SaaS model. The company counts just about every cloud provider as a technology partner (Joyent and Heroku offer it as an add-on in their offerings), and the company has experienced 200 percent growth annually since launching in 2008. Cirne says the company presently has 5,600 customers running the service in production, with 900 of them paying New Relic directly. Among them are large enterprises running New Relic within their data centers.

Perhaps more important than the product, however, is how the economics of New Relic underscore the power of the SaaS model –- specifically, the freemium model prevalent among SaaS 2.0 vendors. Nine hundred paying customers is no small feat when you consider that the company just increased its sales force to three from two a couple of weeks ago. Cirne contrasts New Relic’s approach to that of Salesforce.com, which customers can’t start using without speaking with multiple salespeople, as well as to the last company Cirne founded, Wily (an on-premise APM vendor), which he sold to CA for $375 million.

When CA bought Wily, Cirne says it had 500 customers, 270 employees (about 150 of them in sales) and had raised $45 million. Keep in mind, New Relic just closed its latest round. Most of what it has accomplished was with about $10 million. Cirne says $20 million is way more than New Relic needs to achieve profitability, but it’s good to have some extra cash to capture opportunities in what he thinks will be a billion-dollar business.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons user KlausFoehl.

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Credit Suisse Spawn DynamicOps Enters Private Cloud Game

Derrick Harris — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 01:40:27 +0000

The cloud-management space got a little more crowded today with the release of DynamicOps’ Cloud Automation Center. That market is currently full of hot startup vendors like Cloud.com, Nimbula, Eucalyptus and Abiquo, all of whom are trying to give companies out-of-the-box internal clouds that mimic the public-cloud experience while maintaining existing IT policies, so DynamicOps has a great deal of competition. However, the Lexington, Mass.-based company does have a couple of aces in the hole that might make it particularly appealing to enterprise customers.

One is its evolution from an internally developed virtualization-management solution at megabank Credit Suisse into, a spinoff company selling that software to the greater IT community in 2008. Credit Suisse was managing thousands of virtual servers and desktops while DynamicOps’ underlying Virtual Resource Manager software was developed, so scalability isn’t an issue. In fact, said VP of Marketing Rich Bordeaux, one customer currently manages 30,000 VMs and virtual desktops and is looking to have more than 60,000 within 18 months.

Furthermore, because the bank wasn’t about to move certain application from physical servers, physical-resource management is inherent in the Cloud Automation Manager. The new features in Cloud Automation Manager are what make it truly cloudy, though: multitenancy, self-service provisioning, and the ability to provision and manage resources from Amazon EC2.

DynamicOps’ other ace is that Cloud Automation Manager is an integral part of Dell’s recently announced Virtual Integrated System (VIS) offering. The DynamicOps software is the foundation of the VIS Self-Service Creator component. VIS is Dell’s attempt to combat competitors’ converged infrastructure solutions (e.g., Cisco UCS and HP BladeMatrix), so such an OEM deal should help validate DynamicOps’ claims of enterprise-readiness (if the Credit Suisse heritage doesn’t already do so).

Of course, it’s hard to get too excited about any cloud software right now before organizations actually start buying it. Web hosts and MSPs have been buying up software from vendors like VMware, Cloud.com and 3tera, but most other businesses appear to be doing no more than dipping their toes in the water right now. DynamicOps has a strong virtualization-management history, though, and an existing customer base to tout (and sell), so perhaps it can break in where others appear to be left outside.

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