Hashable has a fun interface but is all business under the hood, according to founder and CEO Mike Yavonditte. With its ability to track and index your professional relationships and connections in real time, with social awareness and even geo-tagging, it is everything that LinkedIn isn’t. Read more »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The first quarter of 2011 saw plenty of competition between various web companies — and some heated tension, too. Content farms generated the most debate, with Demand Media’s IPO attracting attention and controversy and Google making a major change to its ranking algorithm. Facebook, meanwhile, maintained its heavyweight status online, but this time the social network’s impact was centered on social search, unified communications and comment systems. And Facebook’s ongoing dominance raised the question, Is there room for more than one social network? If niche networks like Quora and Color are any indication, the answer is “yes.” Additional companies mentioned in this report include Twitter, Groupon, Microsoft, LinkedIn and MySpace. To see the full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Last week, LinkedIn unveiled an upgraded version of its platform to developers. The professional social network is trying to establish itself as the source for professional profiles, and with 100 million users and an upcoming IPO, what are its chances of finally sealing up this role? Read more »
LinkedIn has launched a series of website plugins that effectively duplicate the features of the “open graph” platform Facebook launched last year — a move that throws the business-oriented network into what looks like head-to-head competition with Facebook for the clicks and identities of web users. Read more »
Wedbush Securities says we are seeing the rise of the “Second Internet,” and the companies that are growing and succeeding share certain attributes — including an understanding of the social web — and are rarely the same players who succeeded in the earlier phases of the web. Read more »
Hadoop has been used by large web companies for applications such as search engines, but the reality is that the project is so much more. This report takes a closer look, examining what Hadoop is (and isn’t), who’s doing what to productize it and why we can expect to see the market pick up serious steam in 2011. We profile the growing number of companies — from startups like MapR to Cloudera, the arguable leader in the space — using Hadoop, the challenges still hindering widespread adoption and where potential users can expect the market to go as we move through 2011 and beyond. Companies mentioned in this report include Yahoo, Facebook, EMC, Teradata and Appistry. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
CrunchConnect, a new service from SalesCrunch, is entering private beta today, and it’s worth a look. CrunchConnect’s web conferencing and screen sharing system has some useful features, including the option for participants to sign in via LinkedIn, so others can see their profiles. Read more »
Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Envision this: A few minutes before a scheduled meeting time, you get an SMS that shows photos of the participants, together with data from their LinkedIn profiles, their last few tweets, and links to your most recent emails with them. That’s the idea behind Noteleaf. Read more »
Technological advancements have minimized the need for employees to be as physically present in a traditional office setting, and employee relationships now extend across different time zones and geographies. This paper discusses the future of work and the workplace in that context. We examine the shifting nature of actual workspaces, from four office walls to the online world; the emergence of new flexible hours that no longer require a nine-to-five mindset; the role of consumer-grade technologies such as iPads, smartphones and notebooks in the workplace; and what role cloud-based services such as Box.net, Huddle and Dropbox play. Companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Apple, Google and Skype. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In its latest attempt to build social-networking features into its business, soon-to-be-public LinkedIn today launched a news recommendation service called LinkedIn Today, which it hopes will function like a specialized Twitter for business networks. But will it convince people to spend more time on the network? Read more »
Human beings naturally belong to a variety of networks based on different contexts like shared interests, work, school, geography and the like. So it seems logical that there is room for specialized or niche social networks oriented around those specific groups or activities. Read more »
Will solar panels generate buzz like a Tesla Roadster or boredom like an efficient water heater? Solar service providers are hoping for a Tesla response, and are increasingly turning to social media tactics in an attempt to create engaged communities around the sunny clean power. Read more »
There are plenty of customer relationship management tools out there, but most come with very significant price tags. Discourse is a web app that works with your LinkedIn account, offering an easy to use deal and project management tool at an easy to bear price. Read more »
Keeping in touch with people over various online social services can sometimes seem like goofing off, but those connections can be tremendously valuable. Thanks to social tools, I have more meaningful interactions with people than I would have been able to maintain in the old days. Read more »
With enterprise data volumes growing, business and IT leaders face significant opportunities and challenges from big data. Using cloud-computing technologies, organizations are experimenting with distributed data stores, cloud compute capacity for data analytics, hosted data integration and even operational databases in the cloud. Hadoop/MapReduce, meanwhile, has moved past test and development stage to become a viable extension or alternative to traditional relational databases. Though the space is not without its obstacles, including plenty of privacy concerns, there are numerous sales-growth opportunities and new business models finally surfacing in 2011. Companies mentioned in this report include Google, IBM, Apple, Oracle, Salesforce and VMware. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
LinkedIn has filed to trade on the public market Thursday seeking to raise up to $175 million. Since its inception in 2003, LinkedIn has grown to a profitable company that has sales of $161.4 million in the first nine months of 2010. Read more »
Facebook isn’t much of a platform for business, but BranchOut, which integrates with the social network, is applying tactics and techniques from social gaming to take on LinkedIn in professional career networking. Companies that want to build business apps on the Facebook platform should pay attention. Read more »
Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Who will set 2011′s standards in NewNet technologies like social media and real-time feeds? In terms of growing user adoption, revenues and technology innovation and influence, there are the sure-to-be leaders like Facebook going head-to-head with mid-size companies with potential to disrupt. Read more »
Hashable, a New York startup in private beta, looks to create and facilitate introductions and interactions. But CEO Michael Yavonditte sees a much brighter future for the venture as a way to encourage more real world engagement, measure social relationships and create a decentralized social network. Read more »
More and more, open source search looks to be a viable alternative for organizing unstructured data in the enterprise. The open source community believes it has advantages in scalability, flexibility and speed over enterprise-specific behemoths like Autonomy and Microsoft. But more importantly the functionality, cost structure ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Are you looking to convince a colleague or a client of the value of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter? Here’s a list of some basic ways you can use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for specific business activities. No bells, no whistles, just business. Read more »
Unvarnished, a startup that launched earlier this year as a way of allowing users to provide anonymous feedback on co-workers and colleagues, has closed a new round of financing and come out of invite-only beta mode with a new name: the service is now called Honestly. Read more »
LinkedIn today launched a new feature for college students at over 60 universities that it calls “Career Explorer,” which will allow students to explore different career paths based on their school, their level of education, and the industry they hope to join when they graduate. Read more »
We’ve all been there before: One of the social networks we use regularly suddenly changes its features, and we’re left scrambling to figure out the impact of those changes. Remember when Facebook narrowed the custom tabs within Pages, requiring major overhauls? Read more »
If you’re self-employed and you want to network with others in your field who might be able to help you find opportunities, there’s no dedicated service to help you build a social graph around your specific area of expertise. New startup Namesake wants to be that service. Read more »
LinkedIn has agreed to acquire ChoiceVendor, a startup that allows companies to rate and review business-to-business service providers. The acquisition appears to be designed to improve LinkedIn’s ability to offer recommendations and other social features to its members and the companies that use the social network. Read more »
This week is Social Media Week, which is a great opportunity to put the emphasis on the “social” aspect of social media and boost your productivity at the same time. Isn’t social media inherently unproductive, though? After all, studies suggest that it wastes money. Read more »
The iTunes App Store has more than 250,000 active apps for sale. How will you get yours get noticed? After you’ve spent significant time and resources on developing and releasing it, you can’t simply wait for it to be “discovered.” In today’s crowded marketplace, you need a strategic and savvy marketing approach to sell your app — or you risk it getting lost in an ever-expanding deluge of sub-par offerings. Navigating the nuances of app marketing involves many steps, from knowing the finer points of search engine optimization to understanding Apple’s ranking policies and how to use social networks to your advantage. This guide offers strategies for all of those topics and countless others, including app design; choosing a release date; Facebook, Twitter and YouTube marketing ideas; what makes or breaks a press release; and tips on how to win the approval of the ever-influential app blogger. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
ResearchGATE, a social network for scientists aimed to facilitate their collaboration on research, has raised an unspecified amount of money in its first institutional round of funding. The site has amassed 500,000 members in the last two years, with strong contingents from biology and medicine. Read more »
BranchOut wants to bring LinkedIn-style business networking to Facebook using an application that pulls information from your friends’ profiles about what companies they work for, along with any other business-related details. Should LinkedIn be afraid of this new competitor? Yes and no. Read more »
Last week, Twitter went down. Again. And yet we all gnash our teeth, wring our hands, cry foul, shake our fists at the sky, then breathe a quick sigh of relief once the Fail Whale is gone and our Twitterstream flows again. Read more »
As the data landscape changes, so must the databases used to gather, store and analyze the rich information within them. Consumer-facing Internet companies are able to scale by using NoSQL data stores, and CIOs can learn from what’s worked for hugely successful web sites. Here, we offer a number of recommendations for enterprise decision makers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
What you do on Twitter to gain followers usually won’t work on Facebook. Trying the same tactics on LinkedIn could be the kiss of death. Here’s a breakdown of the ways you can build a following and where those tactics are best put to use: Read more »
I think of my Social Media Triad: Three social networks where I’m building a good following and where I can do the bulk of my promoting. Everything else is the icing, while those three places are the cake. My triad consists of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Read more »
LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner says the business-oriented social network is planning acquisitions to help it take advantage of growth in the mobile market, and also plans to boost its staffing levels, as it continues to add social features that mimic those offered by Twitter and Facebook. Read more »
The near-ubiquitous access to collaborative communities, social networks and communications tools that my iPhone apps provide is actually improving my ability to network more frequently with my friends, fans, followers and contacts. Here’s a handy list of community and communications iPhone apps to help you network. Read more »
You might have noticed that your number of Twitter followers has dropped to zero today. Twitter is currently undergoing maintenance to fix a bug, and as part of that process follower/following counts have temporarily been reset to zero. This isn’t the first time this has happened. Read more »
