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Instgram’s Twit-storm, Netflix nabs Disney, GMail’s Pretty iPad App

RoadMap re-run, our talk with Instagram’s Kevin Systrom

iTunes 11, When Things Connect, Sun Volt

What Aspiring New Media Stars Should Know About Agents and Managers

Holiday Gadget Gift Guide

War Tweets, Google TV and Nexus 4

Director Jay Duplass on low-fi movies through high-tech

Election Dissection, Ditching DSL and Dumping the iPad

Sandy’s Social, Infrastructure Impact and Forstall

Windows 8 Surfaces, and disruption eruption

iPad Mini, iMac gets skinny

Boxee Cloud DVR, Apple Rumors and Chromebook

Commutist interview: Joy of X author Steven Strogatz

Commutist podcast: Patent trolls, Costco ban and Passbook’s home run

Commutist, meet Nerdist, and interview with Chris Hardwick

T-Metro, Broadband Caps, Remembering Steve Jobs

Apple’s iO-Mess, Dirty Data Centers and Tesla

News from the Mobilize Conference

Paul Tough: How Children Succeed and what you can learn from them

The iPhone 5 Event

Come on, Kindle, Light My 4G Fire

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• Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
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• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

With that in mind, we invite GigaOM readers to share their thoughts on which of the key social-technology and business-culture forces will be most disruptive in the enterprise. Fill out the survey below to let us know which trends smart vendors can best harness to gain revenue and market share.

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On Wednesday, the company announced the beta launch of its API, which will enable third parties to use Crowdtilt’s group payments capabilities.

Since the startup launched earlier this year, users have been able to go to Crowdtilt’s site to create a campaign and solicit funds from friends and others. But with its crowdfunding API, companies from vacation home rentals to e-commerce sites to startups looking for capital will be able to plug that capability into their own sites and apps.

For example, a vacation rental site could use the API to let friends group pay for the cost of a rental online and skip the hassle of collecting payment after the fact. Or an online retailer could use it to let friends share the cost of pricier gift. The startup says new crowdfunding models permitted under the JOBS Act can also be powered through the API.

Developers can integrate various payment processors, such as Stripe, Balanced and Braintree, into their applications. And the API includes collaboration tools like comments, messaging and updates. Down the road the company will charge a fee, but for now it says it will be free for the invitation-only beta version.

The announcement is timely given the boom in crowdfunding options online. And, aside from the traditional Kickstarter-like sites, FriendFund provides an online tool for pooling money and social commerce site Fancy and eBay enable group gifting. But Crowdtilt’s API brings that idea to a broader set of use cases and applications.

The company has raised $2.1 million from SV Angel, Crunchfund, Highline Ventures and other individual investors.

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With the adoption of iPads, tablets and smartphones into our work flow instead of just sitting at a laptop computer, what apps are will become essential? The following  five categories of apps are positioned well for becoming a fundamental part of our day-to-day work environment in this mobile and cloud-based era:

Drafting new ideas and communications

Capturing our ideas in text through typing will continue to remain a core aspect of the tools we utilize every day at work.  But it’s not really traditional word processing.  More and more, what people are doing with “captured words” is posting them on internal and external company blogs, tweets and status updates.  Cutting and pasting from a Microsoft Word document into any one of these communication streams is painful at times because you lose most of your formatting in the process.

What we don’t need is all of the fancy markup features available in today’s word processing applications: charts, tables, graphs, multimedia, and everything else that can be utilized in creating a polished final document.  Markdown, a text formatting syntax created by John Gruber and inspired by marking up plain-text email, combined with a simple text editor keeps one focused on the words.

With an app like Byword ($2.99 Universal, $4.99 Mac), users can focus more on what is being said.  And with omnipresent character and word counters, you can get your meaning across with fewer words.  With the ability to export paragraphs, phrases and even entire documents of text to formats that are readily consumed by today’s online publishing forms like Twitter, WordPress and Facebook, apps like Byword return us to a much simpler world where we type with fewer distractions.  Elements ($4.99 Universal) by Second Gear is another popular app in this category, but is currently missing a Mac counterpart to make the iCloud integration complete.

Adding structure to your thoughts

Capturing your ideas can be a daunting task if all you have is pencil and paper.  You quickly realize that your mind is not that organized.  The technique of mind mapping isn’t new, but it’s an effective tool. You typically start out with a single word and start linking it to related words in a hub and spoke fashion.  Each new word can become the center of a new idea and have a collection of related words attached to it. And you never know when inspiration is going to strike you.  Having access to all of your best ideas and a mobile device to note it on wherever you are is just one of the ways things are changing.

FreeMind is an open-source mind mapping utility whose XML file format has become the standard to which all mind mapping tools have adopted.  MindNode ($9.99 Universal, $9.99 Mac) has the ability to export your thought to this format, as well as an image file, PDF document, and even a textual outline.  Its not just brain storming sessions that you can use MindNode for.  It also works great to start outlining how business divisions or computer systems are related to one another, creating task lists for entire teams broken down into subcategories, and even making plans for upcoming events.  SimpleMind ($6.99 Universal, $29.99 Mac) by ModelMaker Tools is another popular app in this category, but is currently missing iCloud and Retina display support on the Mac.

Communicate with a sketch or drawing

The popularity of the social game Draw Something is a good indication that people enjoy casual drawings as a way to communicate with one another.  We have conference room whiteboards, bar napkins and scratch pads to quickly capture and communicate an idea.  But there are better ways of doing this and then sharing with colleagues online.

I have experimented with several different drawing apps and have found the integration between iPhone, iPad and Mac that is offered by Autodesk’s new release of SketchBook ($1.99 iPhone, $1.99 iPad, $29.99 Mac) to be exactly what I have been wanting.  The choice of pens, brushes and markers as well as being able to quickly switch colors is very easy to navigate.  The responsiveness of the user interface allows me to quickly capture a simple diagram, or outline a basic idea very quickly.  What I have used prior to this was GreenGar Studio’s Whiteboard ($0.99 Universal, $0.99 Mac), which has an even simpler interface and is more geared toward collaboration than detail.

Photo optimizing scanners

There are still times when group collaboration is best facilitated with whiteboards and dry erase markers in crowded meeting rooms.  However, once a meeting is over, it seems there’s always someone waiting to occupy the room you were just using.  Almost everyone has a camera with them and fairly often you’ll see people quickly capturing the contents of a whiteboard with their camera as meetings come to an end.  The problem is that the lighting of conference rooms is not great, and to avoid glare, you have to take your photos at an angle.  That is where photo enhancing apps like JotNot ($1.99 Universal) come in to play.  These apps take photos of whiteboards, documents and receipts, straightens them out, and optimizes them through the settings of various filters.  Related photos can be collected into documents and saved as PDF files for later review.  Scanner Pro ($6.99 Universal) by Readdle is another popular choice in this category.

Hand written notes

It is not so much as being a free-form note taking app as it is more about the way that NoteTaker ($1.99 iPhone, $4.99 iPad) captures your handwriting on a mobile device.  While you can use your finger, more and more people are finding a stylus one of the must-have accessories for their iPad (taking two positions in Amazon’s top 20 best sellers in touchscreen tablet accessories). Magnifying a particular area of a page, NoteTaker captures your handwriting in this area, and has a way to automatically advance forward on the line and even to the next line so you can just keep on writing.

Another great feature is the introduction of a hand guard that keeps your wrists from messing up the notes you are taking.  Capturing your handwriting in its original form adds value and makes the notes you take more personal.  Notability ($0.99 Universal) by Ginger Labs can also record voice memos, but lacks some of the more advanced shape tools included with NoteTaker.

While I do agree that today’s smartphones and tablets are not always creating polished documents, complicated spreadsheets, and boardroom-ready Power Point presentation, I do not agree that they are not being utilized to create.  As we transition through this new paradigm, we will utilize technology in very different ways.  In the end, the question being asked is which app, or apps, are to become an essential part of how we work every day.

Each of the five use cases above are good candidates for replacing any one of today’s three designated essential office apps.  As to which of the three is most likely to be replaced; honestly, I do not use spreadsheets every day.  But how I work isn’t the same as everyone else. Which apps do you think will become essential for everyday app for business?

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“There’s people at the bottom of the market that have products like Do.com, online to-do lists, and they’re useful but they don’t have automation. They don’t have analytics. At the other end of the spectrum, you have huge BPM tools that can do workflow with automations, but it’s like trying to use a sledge hammer to drive in a tack,” explains Michael Weir, Sparqlight’s CMO. “Those [tools] are for companies with rigid industrial processes and everything that could possibly happen is built into the system. Our product is for what I call the big fat middle — people who need workflow, transparency, templates but who also live in the modern world where they collaborate with anyone, anytime, anywhere. They need it to be improvisational.”

Sparqlight was founded in 2010 to address this market segment and has thus far been entirely bootstrapped. It launched its public beta at SXSW this year, attracting more than 1,000 companies so far, from HR departments to engineering firms. Now they’re announcing the public launch of their enterprise solution. Like many of its competitors, Sparqlight has opted for a freemium model, offering a free, stripped-down version for individuals and small teams and from today a beefed up product for paying enterprise customers priced at $20 per user per month.

So what sets this product apart from other collaboration tools and allows it to target the “big fat middle”? In short, easy automation through templates. The base of the product is a to-do list and task tracking system that lets you assign work to yourself or others — either internal Sparqlight users or external non-users via email — setting due dates and reminders, commenting on tasks, and allowing you to track what’s outstanding and which steps have been completed. The result is an activity stream that can be filtered by project, importance, person or due date. So far, pretty similar to, say, Asana in its focus on following tasks rather than people and building a product that’s more about getting stuff done that breaking down barriers to information sharing.

The difference is a slightly more complicated set of enterprise-friendly additions like templates and analytics. Say you’re an HR person who routinely has to go through a checklist of activities for each new hire, from contacting IT to set up a new workstation, to putting together a benefits package. Sparqlight allows you to set up a template for that routine which, each time you use it, automatically inserts the relevant to-do items in your stream as well as the streams of collaborators—so in our hypothetical HR case, IT (either the group or a specific individual) would automatically receive a to-do item telling them to sort out the new hire’s tech tools. It’s also possible to automate workflow steps with Sparqlight. So after IT marks their task as completed, you can specify that a request be sent automatically to facilities to wheel over a comfy new chair, for example. Sparqlight also offers simple analytics that track how well users are doing at getting their tasks done in the free version and a heftier set of analytics tools, including key performance indicators for management, in the enterprise version.

Though Weir says individuals “see a lot of value just in creating to-dos and goals with associated to-dos and using templated workflow,” he concedes that the product “does start to add a lot of exponential value if you have other people on the system.” The product, in other words, is very much an enterprise tool that seems most useful when broadly deployed within a company. Sparqlight is planning on reaching out in the future to actively sell it to businesses rather than just rely on viral growth and small team adoption, Weir says.

The central premise behind Sparqlight — that routine work is boring and time consuming and automating these tasks frees up time for actual constructive and creative work  — will be immediately compelling to most knowledge workers. Who likes repetitive donkey work after all? To accomplish this goal, though, Sparqlight needs to be adopted, and whether the product is both powerful enough for enterprise and pleasant enough for individual workers to actually use remains to be seen.

Has anyone out there given Sparqlight a try, or if not, does this sort of automated workflow sound appealing?

Image courtesy of Sparqlight.

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The Australian software company offers tools to help teams build software and it’s had a phenomenal run of 40 straight quarters of profitability, pulling in more than $100 million in revenue last year (with exactly zero salespeople). Entirely bootstrapped for the first six years of its existence, the company is now rumored to be pondering an IPO. And president Jay Simons feels they’re just getting started. Why? Well, because software is eating the world.

“We chose early on to really focus on what we think is a strategic problem for all companies, which is how do you build software better?” Simons explained to GigaOM in an interview, “and one of the reasons that we’ve exploded is that we’re at the beginning of this digital revolution. Entire industries are being upended by software companies.”

Like Andreessen, Simons cites the usual suspects of Netflix, Amazon and Skype, but he feels that these well chronicled cases are only the tip of the iceberg, and that’s only good news for his company. “Brick and mortar companies in almost every industry are now having to differentiate their own products through software,” he says, offering the automobile industry as an example.

“If you watched the Super Bowl, it was oversubscribed with automotive commercials and each of those automotive commercials was actually advertising software. The car itself isn’t going to evolve much mechanically. What has totally changed is that software is now driving fuel-efficiency systems, safety systems, on-board entertainment and navigation systems. Google famously, and I’m sure the auto industry itself, is trying to figure out how the car is going to drive itself,” he says. “Your television set, your alarm clock, your garage door opener, your thermostat, you don’t think about those things as software products but they are or they soon will be,” Simons concludes.

This change, he argues, is literally and figuratively bringing software development out of the basement of companies and making it central to what they do, reconfiguring the workflow of everyone from customer service folks to marketing pros in the process, as they too find themselves involved in producing software. “Some of the creativity, business requirements and customer requirements are all going to come from non-engineers. They need to be communicated and shared and iterated with the engineers that are going to transform those into code. That’s a big difference today than it was five years ago,” Simons says.

Despite these promising trends, the growth of the company may not be without friction, as PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy points out. “Right now there’s a feel-good API stew of these up-and-coming social enterprise players all wanting to support one another, ” she recently wrote. “That’s in keeping with the consumer Internet world, where people generally believe it’s not a zero-sum game and there is room for multiple players. But in the enterprise world, where people pay for software, a land-war might develop between who wants to be the knowledge worker portal and who wants to be a mere API partner integrating into it.”

These lurking potential problems aside, Atlassian’s ten-year-old bet on helping engineers and non-techies build software together seems to be paying off for the time being. “What developers and what people create with code is in some ways limitless,” Simons says before mentioning the speculation about an impending IPO. “I’m personally excited about it,” he says. No wonder lots of other people are chattering about this potential IPO in the usually less than sexy world of development tools too.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ianmyles.

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The company announced today it has reached one million users, about 75 percent of which are students. The company also announced it is piloting a new premium service that allows clubs and other groups to apply their branding to Wiggio (pictured) and offers an administrator level with custom analytics. Previously the product was free to all users, but having decided against adding advertising, Wiggio has landed on this route to monetization.

So how did the company, founded by a team of Cornell grads in 2008, gain its sizable following? CEO and co-founder Dana Lampert explained that their approach is to make users’ lives incredibly easy and then set up the product to grow virally.  ”Students are kind of a different beast,” he told GigaOM in an interview. “If they have to learn anything, if they have to read anything, if they have to watch a video even, they will be completely turned off by the tool. And, if I’m in a group of ten people and only eight of them really get it, it’s completely useless. From the very beginning we’ve been really focused on streamlined simplicity.”

Lampert explained Wiggio uses a powerful testing technique to ensure the product is incredibly easy to use – they give it to fourth graders. “I took one of our features to a fourth grade classroom and I said, ‘how would send a text message using Wiggio?’ Basically we adopted the mentality that we wouldn’t put the feature out until these fourth graders can use it easily,” he said, though the technique has run into trouble recently. “Fourth graders are getting pretty tech savvy,” he joked, saying he’s had to call in less tech-skilled family members for testing reinforcements.

So once Wiggio decided to focus on simplicity and ensured their product met this goal, how did they spread the word? “We raised a Series A round about two years ago and we made the decision to use that money to focus on product and not distribution, so our growth has mostly been natural,” Lampert said. “What we found is if we can demo the product to some student and faculty leaders at a university they find it really valuable and they’ll end up doing a lot of promotion for us. We often times have schools and leaders on campus evangelizing the product and bringing it out to the groups.” Growth happens naturally from there, Lampert said, as “the average person is inviting about 20 new people onto the platform.”

Students graduate, though, so what happens to Wiggio fans after they get their diplomas? Lampert hopes they don’t leave Wiggio behind along with their black light posters and dorm room mini-fridges, providing the product with a stealth way into the grown-up collaboration market. “We try to promote bringing it into your jobs, which is how we have some traction within businesses,” said Lampert, noting adult social groups and alumni associations are also using the tools.

According to Lampert this softly softly approach seems to be working, but his company is playing in a very crowded space. How does he see the welter of collaboration options fairing long-term? “From what I’ve seen, a lot of players are trying to become best of breed of one certain feature. Asana has beautiful task management. Dropbox is awesome for file sharing,” Lampert said, but also argued that there is room for tools that do a little bit of a lot of things. “For some organizations and groups with more tech-savvy members, it’s very easy to have them all create accounts and get access to these one-off tools. At least for the groups we serve — the less savvy consumer groups who just need to get things done — I think consolidation is the trend. I’m not saying us, but in general though the tools that bring together what I need into a one-stop shop are the ones that are going to see themselves win this space,” he predicted.

Which collaboration tools do you see winning the war of attrition – narrowly specialized offerings, suites that pull together lots of features or some of both?

Image courtesy of Wiggio.

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Jacob Morgan, co-founder of collaboration consultancy Chess Media Group, recently posted his answer to this question on his blog. His perspective: we’re still waiting for a breakout collaboration product, and it should look like “WordPress for the enterprise.” Of course, there is an enterprise version of WordPress, but assumedly that’s not what Morgan means. He explains how the collaboration solution he’d most like to see is instead like WordPress in key ways:

What we need is a “WordPress for the enterprise” and before its acquisition I thought Podio was the closest to moving down that road.  When you think of WordPress you think of a content management and delivery platform but it’s more than that.  Take a look at how many millions of sites all run on WordPress, each with a unique look and feel and each with it’s own set of features and plugins that can be customized and added to make every site unique and individual.  Currently we don’t have anything like this for the enterprise.  Sure, some vendors have their own app stores where you can buy and download application specific additions but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Atlassian is probably the closest vendor out there to building a complete enterprise ecosystem with apps but even those are focused on the single platform.

He calls this vision of DIY collaboration suites supported by an extremely flexible platform “the widgetized enterprise” and says there are several roadblocks keeping us from this version of the future. One, “we don’t have collaboration standards for all the vendors out there to get them to speak the same language,” and two the market lacks a true platform vendor. But Morgan has hopes that we’ll see something like what he’s after soon. “Eventually we will get to a more widgetized collaboration platform that allows us to take the bits and pieces we want from every vendor and combine them together to make something that works for us,” he concludes.

What do you make of Morgan’s vision of the future of collaboration tools – have you already found a platform that’s flexible and customizable enough to meet your business’s needs, or are does WordPress for the enterprise sound like the solution you’ve been searching for?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Phil Manker.

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