Traditionally, the Mac has made up an extremely small sliver of corporate PC purchases, but over the last few quarters, more and more of them have been incorporated into the workplace. And on the heels of this trend was an announcement from the analysts over at ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Kapture, a new start-up from an original member of Qwiki, lets business reward users for sharing pictures about their establishment through their social networks. It allows merchants to leverage user generated content to help spread the word about their businesses and strengthen their relationships with consumers. Read more »
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 »
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 »
The news that Facebook is planning an initial public offering that could value the company at $100 billion just reinforces how it has become a kind of social utility. How does that change the way we look at the network and what it does? Read more »
Ebay’s recent purchase of Hunch illustrates how social media has leveled the playing field for e-commerce recommendations engines. Mixing human-powered reviews with algorithm-powered recommendations will be a key driver of social ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Last week’s news of a potential Facebook phone built by HTC certainly got people talking. Regardless of who builds it and when that happens, the real question without an answer is: Do we really need a Facebook phone? We sound off in a GigaOM debate! Read more »
Google says it’s adding +1 recommendations to Google News. But has the web giant lost the social news market to Twitter and Facebook, or could the integration of recommendations with the Google+ network allow it to catch up and become a strong competitor? Read more »
A research study looking at over 60 billion connections between Facebook users found the degrees of separation between any two is closer to four than six. But what do we mean when we friend someone on Facebook, and how does that translate to the “real world”? Read more »
The GigaOM RoadMap conference on Nov. 10 gathered leaders and visionaries to discuss how, thanks to technological and generational shifts, society as a whole is becoming more connected — not only in the media we consume and the social networks we use but also in the way we interact with devices and manage our resources. This research note takes a look back on the event in order to analyze this new era of connectivity across various industries, from Jack Dorsey’s idea of becoming “more human,” not less, to the concept of “invisible technology” and data, the fuel of the new century. Companies mentioned in this report include Airbnb, Netflix 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 »
As is usually the case when Facebook adds new features, the rollout of its “frictionless sharing” has caused controversy because of privacy and oversharing issues. But more than anything, what Facebook’s changes illustrate is that we still need better filters for our growing signal-to-noise problem. Read more »
Social Passport is leveraging NFC and QR codes to create a social loyalty tool that enables consumers to socially interact with merchants and retailers in the real world, helping them check in, like, follow or tweet about their experiences, sometimes in exchange for a discount. Read more »
PayPal began as a way to help people pay their friends easily online. Now, it’s taking the logical step of enabling Facebook users to pay their friends using a new Send Money Facebook app. Users can send free payments to each other accompanied by an e-card. Read more »
Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the co-founders of Diaspora, has passed away at the tender age of 21, according to a report on Techcrunch. No further details were available. Our hearts and prayers go to his family, friends and the Diaspora community. Read more »
Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick is leaving his job at Read/Write Web to start a company called Plexus Engine, which he says will offer data-filtering tools he has used as a tech journalist. Kirkpatrick joins a growing group of bloggers who have left to join the startup world. Read more »
Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Plenty of people seem to be ready to pronounce Google+ dead in the water, or at least doomed to fail. But there are good reasons to believe that it will be around for awhile. If anything, it’s only beginning to show its real power. Read more »
In a smart essay on the technical origins of today’s social networks, Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski explores the idea of why the social graph doesn’t work in the way we need — and explodes it in the process. Read more »
Even with all the expert and amateur reviews available on the web today, people still like to get recommendations the old-fashioned way: asking their friends for advice — aka, polling the “lazy web.” That’s where a brand new iPhone app called Wikets wants to help. Read more »
Vevo gets into the real-time collaborative media consumption game with a new feature called Vevo Rooms that allows music fans to program playlists and chat with one another while they’re watching music videos together, Turntable.fm-style. Vevo Rooms is launched in collaboration with Chill. Read more »
Frontier Communications is trying to find new ways to provide value to subscribers and is rolling out one of the most comprehensive video portals online. With TumTiki, Frontier is bringing together more than 700,000 video assets from a combination of traditional broadcast TV and online sources. Read more »
The race to become the default identity platform for the social web continues to intensify, but while both Facebook and Google are determined to win and have substantial resources to throw at the problem, there are some compelling reasons to believe Twitter has the upper hand. Read more »
The fact that books are digital now means it should be easy to share our favorite books or passages, but competing rights, standards and platforms mean these features are available on a tiny fraction of books, and that keeps most readers inside proprietary corporate silos. Read more »
Users are outraged about changes that Klout has made to the way it calculates online influence, and some argue these scores are meaningless. But measuring “reputation rank” is clearly a huge potential market, and Klout is far from the only one interested in doing it. Read more »
New social networks — such as the newly launched Unthink, as well as the open-source Diaspora — are pitching themselves as alternatives for those who are upset with or afraid of Facebook. But as Myspace found out, a social network really requires one thing to succeed: utility. Read more »
Reports that Google will include social features in its new music service reinforce what the rise of Spotify and other services have already made obvious — namely, that Apple and iTunes are falling behind in the social-music race, which could have significant consequences for the company. Read more »
In an interview with GigaOM, UberMedia CEO Bill Gross — who is launching his new content-based social network, Chime.in, today — says existing social networks like Facebook and Google+ suffer from a signal-to-noise problem and a monetization problem, and that Chime was designed to help with both. Read more »
Entrepreneur Bill Gross is launching a content-focused social network called Chime.in that will compete with Twitter, Facebook and Google+, as well as link-sharing sites like Digg. He says there is a need for a better way of filtering content, but the odds are stacked against him. Read more »
Despite recent reports about a dramatic decline, Google+ still appears to be growing relatively strongly. But the network still has a substantial mountain to climb in terms of gaining a broad user base, and it’s not clear what Google has to offer that’s radically different. Read more »
Last quarter’s big headline in social media and real-time technologies came from Google, which launched Google+, its first social tech product that seems legit. In the third quarter, things were back to normal. Google+ is still growing, but Facebook’s platform update dominated the news. And as Google+ passed 25 million users and won some raves from the digerati, its competition with Facebook intensified. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Zynga, Salesforce, BranchOut and Foursquare. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Facebook has made some changes to the analytics it offers to brands, to try and get them to focus more on engagement with their users and customers instead of just looking at clickthrough rates. It’s a message that suits Facebook’s interests, but will advertisers bite? Read more »
Facebook’s recent launch of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless sharing” has caused a lot of controversy over whether the feature is an invasion of privacy. But the reality is that Facebook is simply adapting to the increasingly social way we are living our lives online. Read more »
Twitvid has raised a Series B of $6.5 million and plans to use the money to hire more people and build out its infrastructure. The company has managed to stick around while others gave up. But can it compete with a likely video play from Twitter? Read more »
The success of Tumblr — which has raised $85 million in funding and sees 13 billion pageviews a month — contains lessons for media companies, and the main one is that social sharing can be an incredibly powerful force if you make it as easy as possible. Read more »
The changes that Facebook launched this week have clearly upped the ante for Google, which desperately needs the signals that come from social activity to feed into its search and advertising algorithms. But Twitter is playing a somewhat different game than either Facebook or Google. Read more »
Since there isn’t one social network to rule them all just yet, I have at least a half-dozen apps on my smartphone to navigate the crazy social currents. But LiveGO for iOS aggregates Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ along with support for several IM services. Read more »
Cloud video editing startup Magisto is coming to market with a new service that will take raw video files and make them worth sharing with friends and posting on Facebook. The company is also announcing $5.5 million in financing from Horizons Ventures and Magma Venture Partners. Read more »
The fact that we all have technology at our fingertips has caused a disintermediation within traditional commerce, and significant disruption for retailers big and small. Innovation is no longer an option. Rather, it is paramount to survival. Read more »
Some critics say that Facebook is the new Yahoo: a giant web entity with hundreds of millions of users, but so lacking in creativity that it is reduced to copying Google+ and Twitter, and declining in popularity. But is there any truth to those claims? Read more »
The ouster of CEO Carol Bartz last week punctuated a disappointing couple of years for Yahoo, and nowhere is that disappointment more glaring than in mobile. Yahoo’s presence has waned as the iPhone and Android have fueled a surge in mobile data consumption. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s traffic on ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
