Welcome to the post-normal age of work
In today’s world of work, companies that want to thrive need to shift from a business-process defined culture towards a more social network-shaped, cooperative one. Read more »
With hundreds of customers, Asana now seeks enterprise adoption
photo: Jordan Novet
Asana wants to help people around the world become more productive and efficient. New features for larger businesses and teams give Asana better credentials for enterprise adoption. How many enterprises will bite? Read more »
Firebase brings Google Docs-like collaboration to its real-time backend
Want to build collaboration into your new applications? You might want to check out Firepad from Firebase. Read more »
Microsoft’s vision of our future is big screens and big data
photo: Microsoft
Microsoft had a handful of journalists at its new Envisioning Center last week to show off its latest and greatest technology. Here’s what it demonstrated. Read more »
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 »
The man behind Google Docs is now trying to reinvent the web app at Box
photo: Google Ventures
Box VP of Engineering Sam Schillace talks about building the service that became Google Docs, then fighting for the service’s life, and now rethinking collaboration for the mobile web. Read more »
Polycom wants to build a modern conference call that doesn’t suck
Conference calls and collaboration needs an overhaul to fit better in this consumer-oriented VoIP, video and social age. Too many platforms, complicated dial-ins and keeping clients up to date, make the experience miserable. Polycom wants to change that, with new software. Yes, software. Read more »
Quirky to launch crowdsourced Apple gear, partners with Fab
New York-based social product design startup Quirky is launching its first product vertical around Apple and is partnering with design shopping site Fab to bring a line of community-created iPhone 5 accessories to market. Read more »
Shhhh, Huddle gets funding from CIA-backed In-Q-Tel
In-Q-Tel which finds and vets strategic technology for use by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, has given a boost (and some money) to Huddle, the UK provider of cloud collaboration services. Together they”re working on a version for use by US government entities. Read more »
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How emerging technologies will influence collaboration
Already, workplaces are changing because of trends like BYOD and gamification. But other emerging technologies are also altering what our workspace looks like and how we collaborate. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Data markets: in search of new business models
A number of new data markets have emerged in the past few years that provide access to data for decision making. It’s early days, however, with plenty of kinks to work out on both the technology side and with business models. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
5 Las Vegas startups you need to know
The Silicon Strip is coming along nicely, and although they’re mostly young and relatively unknown, Las Vegas’s startups aren’t hurting for good ideas. Some are even growing beyond their wildest dreams. Here are five of the city’s most-promising. Read more »
Branch aspires to be a simplified, successful Google Wave
As a hot, buzzy start-up in private beta, Branch has enjoyed advanced hype thanks to some high profile users and backers. But it also suffers from misconceptions as well because it’s not quite clear to the public what it will be. Is it a form of a […] Read more »
Pharmaceutical giant goes deskless
New ways of working demand new workspaces, a fact that pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline clearly understands. It’s building its second deskless office in Philadelphia, replacing cubes with fluid spaces, laptops and personal lockers, and saving money and speeding decision making as a result. Read more »
Study: Management should mandate co-ed teams
A new study reveals that we’re much more likely to choose others of the same gender to collaborate with and suggests that management should get involved to ensure teams are co-ed and chosen based on skills rather than personal comfort level. Is this really necessary? Read more »
Huddle raises another $24m to ‘really go for it’
Cloud collaboration startup Huddle is gearing up for a significant push, with a $24 million round of funding that CEO Alastair Mitchell says can help turn the company into a billion dollar business. Read more »
How Google is growing up into a real IT company
Of the dozens of meeting requests I received for this year’s Interop conference, the one I least expected came from Google. Interop is all about enterprise IT — networks, security, servers, stuff with gravitas. But in its own way, Google is becoming a serious IT company. Read more »
Squadmail drags email into the collaborative age
Squadmail’s idea of shared, mail-server-level folders is simple, but it may be the ideal way of moving on from inefficient tools like forwards and CCs Read more »
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Public, private or hybrid? How to move to the cloud
With more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Evernote & Pinterest just had a baby: Enter the new Springpad
Springpad has long been compared to Internet note-taking sensation Evernote, but starting today Springpad will likely be compared to another darling of the startup world, Pinterest. On Wednesday Springpad evolved into its third iteration, transforming the information capture service into a social networking engine. Read more »
One collaboration-killing mistake you’re probably making
Allowing team members to define their own roles sounds like a sensible way to empower employees and engage them with their work, but in a counter-intuitive post HBR pundit Tammy Erickson cites research showing well defined responsibilities are key to great collaboration. Read more »
Tracky wants to be your one-stop collaboration shop
If you’ve ever found yourself frustrated over the need to constantly switch between collaboration apps, Tracky wants to be your savior. The Las Vegas-based company, which just raised $1 million in angel funding, is opening its platform to the public later this month. Read more »
Dropbox bought Cove to help it grow like Facebook
With more than 45 million users already connected to his company’s cloud storage service, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston knows he has an infrastructure challenge ahead of him. That, Houston says, is a big reason Dropbox bought Cove, which brings with it Facebook engineering cred. Read more »
Rackspace buys SharePoint911 for (what else?) SharePoint cred
Rackspace buys SharePoint expertise and credibility with its purchase of SharePoint911, a training and consultancy specializing in the Microsoft collaboration software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 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 »
Why do some teams gel while others fail at collaboration?
Nowadays nearly every team aims for collaboration, but far from all succeed, often for emotional reasons as well as rational ones. Now a new study is aiming to figure out what sets teams that gel apart from those that fall apart, and you can participate. Read more »
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12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Groupthink: Not an argument against coworking
“Solitude is out of fashion,” declared author Susan Cain in the New York Times Sunday Review, arguing that our fetishization of collaboration is bad for introverts and innovation. Is coworking a symptom of this groupthink or a solution to it? Space owners weigh in. Read more »
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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. 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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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 »
LinkedIn open sources code from IndexTank acquisition
LinkedIn has announced that the technology behind IndexTank, the search engine startup it acquired back in October, has been released as open source software. It was pretty clear that IndexTank was bought largely for its talent, so it’s good news that its technology will live on. Read more »
Why cloud storage is passé and collaboration is king
Ask Box.net CEO Aaron Levie about his company’s cloud storage business, and you’ll hear a long, excited answer that probably won’t include the word “storage” at all. He’ll talk about sharing, collaboration and universal access — anything but the core storage infrastructure that makes Box’s service possible. Read more »
The values-driven startup
Dave Kashen of Quantum Leading calls for a change in startup culture. He believes that when we operate according to our core values and principles, in pursuit of a vision for the future that inspires us, we maximize our individual and collective well-being. Read more »
Prezi zooms forward with $14m from Accel
Cloud-based presentation service Prezi kicked up a fuss when it offered a dynamic alternative to dreary formats. Now, two years after launch, the Hungarian startup has scored a serious round of funding to take the battle to PowerPoint. Read more »
YouSendIt sends iPad, Android apps to cloud storage war
In the latest salvo in the ever-hotter cloud storage battle, YouSendIt added iPad and Android client apps to its cloud-based document sync, transfer and storage service, as well as updated iPhone and Windows desktop apps. A new Mac desktop version is in beta. Read more »
You can’t dictate which tools your employees use
Which applications are best for scaling a business from a tiny startup to an enterprise powerhouse? And how do you get your employees to use them? For most companies, success will come from adopting those which are easiest to use, and which employees are already using. Read more »
How to improve collaboration through performance measurement
How do you get the most out of collaborative teams? It helps if you can quantify their performance and provide feedback to workers. At GigaOM’s Net:Work 2011, executives from LiveOps and Rypple said measurement was key to improving collaboration between teams of contract workers and experts. Read more »
InterContinental uses hotels as incubators and relies on the cloud
InterContinental Hotels Group, the luxury hotel chain, has spent the last five and half years creating a technology platform for its business that helps it span multiple brands, cultures and continents, according to Tom Conophy, EVP and CIO of the hotel company. Read more »
Machines will help humans harness the power of social
Social is no guarantee of effectiveness in an organization because it creates unnecessary friction as people try to figure out how to work in new ways, according to David Gutelius, the Chief Social Scientist at Jive Software, speaking at the GigaOM Net:Work event. Read more »
