With investment souring on consumer-focused companies, 2013 will be more about the social enterprise, with a different set of companies driving innovation and perhaps a little disruption. Look for the likes of Salesforce.com, Jive Software, and other enterprise players to make headlines in the new year. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Welcome to the fast-growing world of work media, a class of social tools oriented toward the needs of enterprises. Their emergence is due to the shifting expectations of an increasingly social workforce and the sense that older approaches to work like email are arguably approaching obsolescence. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Asana, the startup that wants to help workgroups collaborate easily, is adding a new feature to its SaaS to attack what it calls a huge productivity suck: email. And it’s doing so with a new feature ironically called Inbox. Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
A simple emoticon can tell you wonders about the emotional state of your company. Socialcast experimented with such a test in a Japanese factory asking employees to rate their work day with a happy, average, or sad face. The simple question gleaned enormous insight. Read more »
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 Socialcast team at VMware has introduced a beta version of a new product called Strides, which aims to make task management an interactive experience. Think Basecamp, but more social, and with more visibility into what your colleagues are working on. Read more »
During VMworld this week, VMware introduced a new Dropbox-like application called Project Octopus that will let users safely store, access and share corporate documents. It all so sounded so promising, and then someone asked me whether it will actually get used. Read more »
Feed-based UIs are powerful because they encourage frequent usage and participation. They’re becoming one of the most important ways to present information, and are critical areas of competition in social networking and ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Socialcast, a social business start-up that was recently acquired by VMWare, has announced an update to its product that will support what the company calls the “extended enterprise:” the external contractors, partners, suppliers, clients and customers that all businesses rely on to get their work done. Read more »
Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Web-based communication systems for companies and groups seem to be all the rage these days. Such systems fall into two groups: the ones that are built around projects, tickets and the like, and enterprise microblogging platforms that are more like Twitter and Facebook. Read more »
Real-time social applications for the enterprise have real products and real customers and about 18-24 months of lead time, but 2010 is the year that startups making such apps will be faced down by the likes of tech giants such as Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce.com Read more »
Real-time communication and collaboration in the enterprise represents a significant shift in how employees, partners and customers interact and collaborate to drive organizational performance. The growth and acceptance of so-called “Enterprise 2.0” platforms and applications promise to break down closed communication and collaboration loops by moving discussions and data access from email, content management and rigid process applications to activity streams, wikis and API-based data access. This report looks at the history of this transition, the major players involved, opportunity and challenges for vendors in the space, and profiles the efforts of major enterprise collaboration tools to add real-time tools. Read more »
Recently, here at TheAppleBlog, we made some backstage changes. Over time we realized that Socialcast was great for sharing and discussing ideas, but not ideal for handling business related tasks. As a result, we made the jump over to Basecamp. It doesn’t have the microblog feel […] Read more »
Everyone has a different way of doing things. Fortunately, there’s a huge number of web services that offer groups different ways to coordinate their activities. Convos occupies a middle ground between basic group communication systems like listservs and Google Groups, and full-fledged project management apps. As […] Read more »
The enterprise social software market is emerging as one of the fastest growing areas of enterprise applications. As a young market it is full of small and dynamic players but existing enterprise vendors in the content management, communications, and CRM markets are taking notice. Social software is poised to not only disrupt existing enterprise application markets but also organizations and markets by flattening information flows.
As users shift to new modes of communicating on the open web, they are pulling these new models into the enterprise and ushering in cultural and organizational change. This report covers the underlying technological trends, the market and its drivers, and a competitive overview of the vendors. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Twitter’s meteoric rise in popularity – particularly over the last year – has been widely covered, and indeed the simplicity and flexibility of the 140 character-based microblogging platform continues to attract people all over the world in huge numbers, while a thriving community of developers build add-on services using its open API. We’ve also heard a lot about the power of Twitter as a communications, promotional and marketing tool.
Twitter and other microblogging services are radically shifting the ways in which people communicate and share information. And that shift is now entering the workplace on a large scale, particularly for web workers and for companies who are embracing the ways in which microblogging platforms can save time while increasing productivity. Read more »
