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Forecasting the future cloud computing market

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:00:31 +0000

During the period from 2011 through 2014, the worldwide cloud market is estimated to grow 126.5 percent, driven by 119 percent growth in SaaS and 122 percent growth in IaaS. This report takes an in-depth look at each of the three areas of cloud computing, using examples of companies like Salesforce.com and LivePerson to detail each sector. The PaaS segment is expected to nearly triple from a smaller base, although all areas of the sector will continue to grow immensely over the next two years.

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Apps that let you work like an executive

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:00:40 +0000

Plantronics updated its InstantMeeting app to allow iPhone (a aapl) users and enterprise users to connect to conference calls on their calendar with one click, much like Android and BlackBerry users have been able to for almost a year. The InstantMeeting app, which is pretty darn useful for those who handle a lot of conference calls, combs your calendar and shoots you a reminder when one is about to start. On a mobile phone, clicking through on the reminder allows the user to click to call or click to say you’re running late with the push of a button.

The update brings that same functionality to those on PCs by letting them click to call through Skype or Microsoft Lync. Gunjan Bhow, VP and general manager of New Ventures at Plantronics, says the goal is to ensure employees with VoIP clients and softphones can still take advantage of cheaper rates instead of going directly to their mobile phones and racking up big charges while traveling. It’s a pretty specific use case, but Plantronics is on the cutting edge of a shift in how people work, and how smarter and more personal computers, such as mobile phones, are allowing this shift to happen.

A personal assistant for everyone (no, it’s not Siri)

InstantMeeting on the iPhone

Apps such as InstantMeeting, Expensify and yes, Siri are taking mundane tasks top managers might have hired an assistant to handle and making delegating them affordable for all. In the case of InstantMeeting, it means I can work right up until a minute before my conference call or hop in the car knowing I’ll get a reminder when I need to get on the call, and will effectively touch a button to connect. I do have to manually enter some conference numbers because the app can’t read the bridge information, but it’s pretty solid. It’s similar to having someone outside my office connecting my calls so I can move seamlessly through my work until the exact moment I’m needed.

Expensify lets me snap a picture of my receipts and then automatically scans them for the relevant line items to create an expense report in a few minutes. The mobile app allows me to take those pictures on my mobile the moment I get my receipt and shoot them to the cloud, where Expensify does all the heavy lifting. My days of scrounging receipts from the bottom of my bag and taping them to copy paper are over, as are my efforts to then transfer that information to Excel.

Siri, of course, takes all kinds of dictation like a pro and helps find nearby restaurants, services and other items much like a real personal assistant would. Vlingo also does some of this for Android users. There are scores of other apps such as TripIt Pro making it easier and less time-consuming to book and keep track of travel, something those lucky souls who have worked at a company with a travel bureau will be glad to learn.

This isn’t just nice; it’s necessary

Just as computers helped drive productivity thanks to replacing typewriters with word processing software and calculators with spreadsheets, these new apps will help boost productivity for the masses who don’t have an assistant at their beck and call. And given that workers are being asked to do more in a day, gaining those two or three hours back each month that it takes to pull together an expense report, or the thirty minutes required to book a trip (or even avoiding the hours lost to flight delays) is a necessity.

And as we handle more and more information coming at us, it’s harder to sink into the uninterrupted flow of work, so being able to maximize that time knowing your phone can ping you when you have to join a call and then connect you can help you relax into work. Yes, these apps all take some time to set up and learn how to use (some may require you to invest in setting up rules so the app can better learn what you need from it), but much like training an assistant, the effort pays off. And thanks to advances in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, better data processing and algorithms, employees don’t have to pay quite as much to offload non-core tasks.

For more on how apps, computing and broadband will change the way people work, come to our GigaOM Net:Work event in San Francisco next week.

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Android or iOS: Who travels more? Tripit knows

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:41:54 +0000

One of my personal “must have” free travel apps, Tripit, gained both an Android upgrade and a paid version that removes ads on Thursday. Along with that news comes some interesting travel data from Tripit’s mobile user base.

For those not familiar with the app, here’s a quick summary. After booking online travel, you simply forward travel confirmation emails to plans@Tripit.com. The service quickly scans the mail and creates a full itinerary in the Tripit application. All of your trip information is available in one place, ready to share, and you use it to create a Google Calendar for your trips.

The latest update for Android, version 1.8, is available for free in the Android Market and brings a bit of facelift. That’s good, because while the app has always been useful on my Android phones, the iOS version always looked better and was a little easier to navigate. Tripit says the updated Android app looks cleaner — and I agree — plus the software takes up 30 percent less storage space, supports Google sign-in, and is ad-free for $3.99.

With a popular travel app for multiple platforms, Tripit has plenty of travel data. Apple iOS devices (and presumably, their owners) take more business trips than Androids. For those who take 15 or more business trips yearly, 21 percent use Android, compared to 23 percent using iOS. BlackBerry travelers take the most business trips, accounting for 36 percent of this high-frequency group.

So what about vacations and other leisure trips? Apple users take more time off for fun, according to Tripit, making up a higher percentage of those who take four or more leisure trips per year. Android outnumbers iOS for the group that takes one to three fun trips.

Something that might help explain the data are the age groups of Tripit users. The highest percentage of Tripit users on Android are the crowds in their late twenties and early thirties. BlackBerry and iOS users of the app tend to be older: Late thirties and early forties make up the largest groups for these platforms.

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LinkedIn launches job application plug-in

Colleen Taylor — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:37:29 +0000

LinkedIn has launched a new plug-in that allows companies to place an “Apply with LinkedIn” button on their job listings pages. The plug-in allows job hunters to apply for positions using their LinkedIn profiles as résumés.

GigaOM was the first to report on the development of the “Apply with LinkedIn” plug-in in early June. By the looks of it, the plug-in that has been deployed has many of the features we had heard about pre-launch: Companies can customize the look of the button, add up to three specialized questions, prompt for a cover letter, and utilize certain data tracking technologies.

Now any company can embed the plug-in by adding an eight-line code snippet to its corporate website, LinkedIn said. More than a thousand companies are participating in the plug-in’s launch by including the Apply with LinkedIn button on their job pages, including Netflix, TripIt and Photobucket.

In a post published on LinkedIn’s corporate blog Monday morning, technical project manager Jonathan Seitel explained the service from the job applicants’ perspective this way:

Once you click on the “Apply with LinkedIn” button, you’ll get a user experience that’s been optimized for the web. In addition to updating your profile real time, LinkedIn will also show you your professional connections that work at the company to increase your chances of getting hired through a referral.

If you don’t know anybody at the company, we’ll show you people who can introduce you to someone there. This is extremely powerful –- statistics show that referrals are the #1 source of external hires at companies.

Finally, we record all “Apply with LinkedIn” submissions in the “Saved Jobs” tab (under the Jobs category on LinkedIn) so you have a record of all the jobs you’ve applied to around the web, throughout your career.

Here is a YouTube video explaining how “Apply with LinkedIn” works:

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Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past

Om Malik — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 03:09:26 +0000

In Silicon Valley, history often repeats itself. Most often it’s the tale of a startup that captures the attention of millions and topples its bigger, incumbent competitors. Then it becomes hated monopoly, despised for the control it wields. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, this tale belonged to Microsoft. Now, a current wave of anti-Google sentiment — both inside Silicon Valley and inside the Beltway — is on the rise, and the search giant is in danger of becoming Public Enemy Number One.

Find More Events Through Social Event Discovery

Aliza Sherman — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:00:20 +0000

Looking for an interesting new event to attend? Having trouble finding events, other than the ones you and your immediate friends or colleagues already know about? Going the “old-fashioned” route of finding new events by doing a Google search? If so, you may benefit from social event discovery.

What’s social event discovery, you ask? Chances are good that you’ve attended an event in the recent past that used an event registration system called Eventbrite. Eventbrite provides an easy-to-use event registration system for organizers that handles both paid and free events. Eventbrite also provides social media integration tools to allow attendees to quickly broadcast their event plans to their friends, fans and followers as soon as they’ve registered for an event.

Because Eventbrite has been providing event-booking services with social media integration for several years, it can now add new features to help attendees who have previously registered for an event through the system find new, relevant events to attend. If you have bought a ticket or registered for an event using Eventbrite and linked the site with Facebook through Facebook Connect, Eventbrite canl now give event recommendations pulled together from data about your Facebook friends and the events they’re attending. When you click on the “Facebook Recommendations” tab, you are experiencing the power of social event discovery. If you are looking for new events that you can attend, where better to look for information than those with whom you’re connected on the social graph? Eventbrite also hopes to add more recommendation streams from other popular social networks such as LinkedIn sometime in the future.

Another tool that is gaining popularity is Plancast, a site entirely based on the act of sharing the events you are planning on attending. You can follow others to see what plans they broadcast, and others can follow you. You can add yourself to an informal attendee list for an event by clicking the “count me in” button, which all help to create an engine for social event discovery. While the travel site Tripit also has a similar plan-sharing aspect to it, it doesn’t get as granular as identifying the specific events you’re attending; it only shares planned trips based on cities where you’re traveling.

On Plancast, conversations ensue once people start connecting to event plans and posting messages about the upcoming event and related activities. For example, right now there is a great deal of chatter around Blogworld and New Media Expo happening in Las Vegas later this week. You can discover new events by seeing announcements of the plans of people you follow, and also through a list of related events on every event page. For example, from the Blogworld plan page you can link to Scott Stratten’s pre-Blogworld Tweetup.

I’m finding social event discovery to be useful to tool learn about new events that I may not hear about otherwise, particularly regional events and events in industries different from my own. And I appreciate the intelligent recommendations that come from mashing up event attendance and event plans with one’s social graph.

Disclosure: Plancast is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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TripIt Raises $7M for Travel Logistics

Liz Gannes — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:03:48 +0000

TripIt, the handy travel tool, has raised $7 million in a third round of funding led by Azure Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. “We were on a track to get profitable with that [previous] round but we’re just increasingly feeling like we’re scratching the service of the opportunity here,” CEO Gregg Brockway told us today. (TripIt has now raised $13.1 million, including its last round circa April 2008.)

The new TripItgroups feature shows corporate users when their employees will be in certain cities.

TripIt aims to help users organize and access their travel information, and derives its revenue from a paid product ($69/year for alerts and alternate flights), advertising and licensing deals with travel agents. The basic service formats all your reservations to be readable from mobile apps (including offline) through the simple mechanism of forwarding emails to plans@tripit.com. This week the San Francisco-based company ventured into the enterprise market, with a new product that enables users to contribute their itineraries to a company group. That’s currently offered for free, but Brockway said more premium options are on the way.

Brockway prefers to talk about TripIt’s growth by number of trips planned per month by its users: up to 230,000 in January of this year vs. 70,000 in January 2009. He said he aims to use the funding to make hires in mobile, business development, sales and marketing to add to TripIt’s 27-person, engineering-focused team.

While the idea of forwarding travel reservations to an email account is so simple it seems hard to justify $13 million in funding, the charm and promise is in TripIt’s integrations with accounts, services and devices, both internally developed and through its API. For instance, I’d love to see all the upcoming trips of my colleagues automatically plotted on our internal Google Apps calendar.

“Really the magic starts to happen when you aggregate information,” Brockway said. “When we take all the information we know about you and all the information we know about what’s going on in the world and give you actionable travel intelligence back.” TripIt competitors include WorldMate and Kayak.

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Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation

Kayak and Yapta Team Up to Help You Find Cheaper Flights

Liz Gannes — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:23:35 +0000

Yapta today announced a partnership with travel search site Kayak that will make its highly useful flight-tracking service a lot more accessible. Yapta has a pretty awesome, consumer-friendly premise: Airlines mess with flight prices all the time, so if you’re bargain shopping it’s hard to know when to make a reservation. And what could be worse than when the price of a flight drops dramatically right after you bought it for some ridiculous amount?

What Yapta integration will look like on Kayak's search results (not live yet)

Yapta helps tell you when to buy and when you’re eligible for a refund (which you are, if the price drops — and this happens about 15 percent of the time, according to the company) by tracking flights you’re interested in and flights you’ve already bought.

In the past, using Yapta required the installation of a browser add-on or telling the site about your travel plans directly; now Kayak’s flight search engine is directly accessible on the site. But more importantly, all search results on Kayak and its subsidiary SideStep will soon give you the option to “track price drops,” which will prompt users to sign up for Yapta. Being on every Kayak results page should give Yapta a nice bump in signups, and it’ll be a great value-add for people who already use Kayak. (In fact, the reason I’m writing about this is I’m a user of both services, and I’m happy I’ll be able to get them in one place and stop using the pesky Yapta Firefox add-on.)

~~Kayak~~ Yapta, which also recently integrated with TripIt, raised $2 million in Series B funding last summer in a round led by Voyager Capital.

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TripIt Adds Facebook Support

Simon Mackie — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:10:06 +0000

TripIt — the handy service that we’ve written about previously that organizes your travel itinerary by collating confirmation emails that you forward to it — has added Facebook Connect support. Facebook support was TripIt’s most-requested feature, and enables you to publish upcoming travel details automatically to your Facebook News Feed, which should be a useful way of letting co-workers, colleagues and clients know where you are going.

What travel or location services do you use?

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TripIt Launches Android App as Beta

Om Malik — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:10:35 +0000

[qi:gigaom_icon_google-android] TripIt, a travel aggregation service that is offered as an application on the iPhone and BlackBerry, is now available as a beta app for Google’s Android platform and can be downloaded from the Android Market. Just like us, our colleagues at jkOnTheRun, WebWorkerDaily and TheAppleBlog are all fans of TripIt, and the Android version will allow more people to use this fantastic service. TripIt recently launched an application programming interface for other developers to build their own web and mobile apps.

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