What every enterprise should know about social-business tools
The latest GigaOM Research podcast examines how new social-business tools are disrupting the enterprise and changing the nature of the way we work. Read more »
Survey: Which social-technology tools and trends will disrupt the enterprise most?
Social technologies in the enterprise have evolved from being simply collaboration tools for employees to an integral part of customer service, finance, and HR infrastructure. With this potentially huge disruptive force in mind, we invite GigaOM readers to share their thoughts on which tools and technologies will most change the workplace. Read more »
Crowdtilt opens API to bring group-funding to any site
Y Combinator-backed Crowdtilt on Wednesday announced the beta launch of its API that will enable third parties, from vacation sites, online retailers and startups looking for capital, to use the startup’s group payments capabilities. Read more »
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IT spending update, fourth quarter 2012
Many factors have driven the recent high demand for IT products and services. However, relentless global economic weakness and uncertainty have resulted in a deterioration of worldwide IT spending through the third quarter and will continue to be an anchor in the fourth quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Defining the new office suite: 5 essential apps for work
With the adoption of iPads, tablets and smartphones into our work flow instead of just sitting at a laptop computer here are five categories of apps positioned well for becoming a fundamental part of our day to day work environment in this mobile era. Read more »
Prepare for the next generation of enterprise collaboration
Jacob Morgan, author of The Collaborative Organization, talks about the evolution of corporate collaboration platforms, what collaboration resources young workers entering companies will expect, and how to get people to actually use the tools provided. Read more »
Sparqlight aims to save enterprise users from boring recurring tasks
With the collaboration market already crowded, it’s hard to imagine an unoccupied niche for yet another tool, but startup Sparqlight thinks they’ve found one by scaling down business process management to provide a flexible, cloud-based option for knowledge workers. Read more »
Software is eating the world and Atlassian is getting fat
Marc Andreessen has famously argued that software is eating the world, reconfiguring nearly every industry. That’s good for America, according to Andreessen, but it’s also great for software collaboration tools company Atlassian, which is generating steady profits and a lot of IPO chatter. Read more »
Wiggio snags one million users, pilots new premium service
Under-the-radar collaboration suite Wiggio has managed to rack up a million users by courting college students looking for a low-effort tool and by insisting that the product be simple enough for a fourth grader to use. Now they’re piloting a paid premium version. Read more »
Do we need WordPress for the enterprise?
The collaboration space is already crowded, but one expert feels there is still a gap in the market for a “WordPress for enterprise,” a flexible collaboration platform that allows businesses to tailor their collaboration suite as easily as WordPress allows them to tailor their sites. Read more »
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Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem
The recruiting ecosystem is changing, led by professional social networks like LinkedIn and Viadeo and companies like Jobvite and BranchOut, which are building Facebook apps for hiring and career development. The bottom line is that technology enables the recruiting process to be more streamlined, scientific and democratic. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
FuzeBox video conferencing ready for iPad’s Retina display
Fuze HD for iPad shoots and displays 1080p HD video, and also supports a number of collaboration tools. The app allows multiparty chat with up to 10 participants and interoperability with a number of high-end telepresence systems. It also lets users record and share iPad video. Read more »
Enterprise social tools are garbage, says Red Hat CEO
Fans of enterprise social networking tools tout their ability to break down silos and pierce the executive bubble. But as hot a topic as these tools are, not everyone is a fan. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst thinks they’re “garbage,” claiming you can’t buy collaboration. Read more »
The lessons of Virgin Media’s flexible working initiative
Virgin Media announced today that it’s rolling out a suite of Cisco collaboration tools after a successful pilot. How did they ensure a widespread adoption of these tools and a smooth transition to new ways of working? Both companies share lessons from the pilot. Read more »
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Personal tools lead to practical business
Much of today’s business communication activity still happens in email, but that presents a problem for the current on-the-go workforce. This report, based on a recent survey of business managers, highlights some of the problematic areas around business content collaboration and provides options for working through them. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Tales from the Trenches: Flip Flop Shops
The five partners in charge of Flip Flop Shops run their expanding franchise out of home offices spread across North America. How does this entirely remote team keep the business on track while maintaining a flip-flop friendly lifestyle? President Brian Curin fills us in. Read more »
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NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
Don’t expect the pace of change in web technologies to slow down in 2012. The web is far from dead. Social media may have anointed one huge player in Facebook, but even if there is little room for a start-from-scratch general-purpose social network, there are several companies creating useful alternative social graphs. Companies can leverage key technologies and trends in 2012 to earn revenue and gain share, whether that’s by leveraging HTML5 for rich cross-platform experiences, doing heavy data analysis or integrating collaboration tools across businesses.Companies mentioned in this report include Dropbox, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business
Work media refers to tools based on the patterns of interaction, influence and communication from social networks of the open web. Today, these tools are being adopted at a startling pace — perhaps the fastest of a class of new software in the business sector since the web itself. And, perhaps even more startlingly, IT organizations seem to be scurrying to pick company-wide solutions that utilize these new tools and ideas. This piece makes a different and largely positive case for the use of work media, based on what we have learned in recent years about human cognition. The bottom line? Work media is key for work productivity and innovation, in large part because it lines up with the way that the human mind works and the way that people’s thinking is influenced by their social connections. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
The future of work is already here. It is just already distributed, one might say. The freelance economy, microtasking, mobile workers, coworking spaces, crowdsourcing: All of these point to how work is increasingly shifting from the twentieth-century model of Taylorism (think scientific management applied to labor processes such as assembly-line production and fixed workplaces) to a more flexible, hyperspecialized and connected workforce. This report examines the new world of work, from the devices and software services we use to the growing role of social media, the importance of a group-centric mentality and how the roles of employees, managers and organizations are evolving. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
IT managers now face a new challenge in the enterprise: the significant presence of a new generation, the Millennials, in today’s digital workplace. These young employees were born in the 1980s or later; they were raised with ever-present mobile phones and ubiquitous online access and social media, and they often demand access to those services and devices while at work. This report, the first in a two-part series, surveys Millennials about their use of technology at work, with a particular focus on how they communicate and learn and what they expect in regard to technology support. We aim to assist IT and tech-support management by pointing out the opportunities Millennials present and also the potential pitfalls. Companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Google and Twitter. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
5 steps for effective real-time document collaboration
It’s great to have access to technologies that allow us to collaborate on documents in real time. However, real-time collaboration, in fact all collaborative writing, will be more successful if you follow these five steps to integrate your writing process with your tool’s technical capabilities. Read more »
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Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises
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 »
Talking Through New Productivity Tools With Your Team
When you add a new tool to the set you expect your team to work with every day, it takes more than just a little bit of training to get the ball rolling. You have to sit down and talk about the tool. Read more »
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Report: High-Impact Collaboration in the Enterprise
You can’t innovate without collaboration, and without innovation, companies fail. There is now a whole new world of collaboration tools available to enable what can best be termed “high-impact collaboration.” These break-through tools — workspaces like Box.net, Huddle and Central Desktop or customer-powered support communities like Get Satisfaction — are made possible through the convergence of cloud computing, social software and the ubiquity of mobile technology. With these new technologies, employees can channel their passions and work together more effectively — regardless of where people are located — to accomplish their mission. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Apple, Twitter, LiveOps 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 »
