Elon Musk, David Sacks ditch Zuckerberg’s Fwd.us
Mark Zuckerberg’s immigration reform group Fwd.us is losing two big players this week: Elon Musk and David Sacks. A bad sign for the Valley’s latest political group? Read more »
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Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them
“Socialized business process” — the idea of adding social tools to traditional business processes — is unlikely to work in the long term. The enterprise is now transitioning to social network–based communication as introduced by social tools, and there is a fundamental conflict in communication models with business-process-centric business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
“Social customer service” refers to those services that provide customer support via social media channels. Providing such services is no longer merely a niche or specialty sideline. Challengers, or disruptors who were early with the new technology, are working to expand and integrate their offerings into enterprise systems and processes. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
Social business technologies remain in the foreground of discussions about business transformation, but the events of the first quarter of 2013 raised as many questions as they answered, or more. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The 2013 task management tools market
The task-management market is growing, in part because users need to coordinate with teams via mobile. In this case, heavier-weight solutions like Yammer, IBM Connections, and Podio don’t always suffice. But the demand for digital to-do lists that can be shared across project teams is increasing. Read more »
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Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back
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 »
Surprise! Consumer apps get IT approval in small businesses
Employees are driving business apps selection in many small and medium businesses, according to new research. A good percentage of productivity, social and collaborative apps now sanctioned by IT in SMBs were brought in by workers without IT knowledge. Read more »
Yammer’s Sacks: Raise as much as you can, and don’t be afraid to change
photo: Flickr/Robert Scoble
Struggling to stay on top, or think you have it all figured out? Either way, Yammer founder David Sacks thinks you should fundraise as much as you possibly can, since you never know what you can use the money for. And it doesn’t hurt for staying ahead. Read more »
5 most surprising things heard at Harvard’s Cyberposium
photo: Barb Darrow
Several hundred Harvard Business School students and others gathered on Sunday to hear technology company founders and visionaries talk shop. Here are my top 5 highlights. Read more »
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Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook
Social media technologies continue to permeate marketing and enterprise collaboration, even if investors felt let down in the third quarter by their consumer-facing businesses like Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. So B2B technology offerings in support of marketing and collaboration will soon steal all the social tech attention. This quarterly wrap-up analyzes these events, and provides a near-term outlook for trends, technologies and companies to watch in the next 18 to 24 months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Work media tools in 2012 and beyond
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 »
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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 »
New Microsoft Office ropes in Skype, Yammer, SkyDrive
As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off the company’s latest Office software Monday, he hit all the right marks — a touch interface, cloud storage, VoIP integration and social networking tie-ins. They had to. But a very different interface might spook current Office users. Read more »
Asana tries to end email frustration with Inbox
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 »
The social recruiting start-up wars heat up
With Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Yammer, it’s clear social has arrived. And what goes for internal communication goes for recruiting as well, writes Josh Bersin, CEO of consultancy Bersin & Associates, in an article laying out the feverishly hot social recruiting start-up scene. Read more »
Moped strips down and rebuilds Twitter direct messages
New messaging platform Moped is essentially a lightweight yet richer alternative to one of Twitter’s secondary features. But even in the increasingly crowded messaging space it might be unique enough to fly on its own. Read more »
Is Yammer worth $1B?
Microsoft’s reported deal to buy Yammer for its enterprise social networking savvy isn’t done yet, but the move — despite what many see as a too-hefty price tag — could make sense. Pairing Yammer with the Microsoft Office juggernaut could be a winner. 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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Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
Media issues like advertising and discovery along with commerce dominated the activity in social and real-time Web technologies during the first quarter. Google raised some hackles, Facebook responded to demands from traditional advertisers, and Yahoo got a new chief executive. Read more in the full report. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The case for manager as urban planner
How is the future of work changing whole organizations? A social business expert and the folks at Yammer weigh in on how we should re-jig our mental models of companies, conceiving of them more like cities with bosses playing the role of urban planner. Read more »
Social networking goes to work
As Salesforce.com trots out the integration of its social networking-oriented HR tools into CRM and Chatter, Microsoft is touting new research about why companies need to have workplace-oriented social tools. One problem: Some of these tools are more annoying than useful. 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 »
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Web startups: How to guard against security breaches
Growth phases at Web startups are invariably accompanied by attacks, as we’ve seen with sites like Facebook, Twitter and many other web-based companies. Here we look at which are the most brutal attacks and how companies and developers can guard against them in the future. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Enterprise social tools are garbage, says Red Hat CEO
Fans of enterprise social networking tools tout their ability to break down silos and pierce the executive bubble. But as hot a topic as these tools are, not everyone is a fan. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst thinks they’re “garbage,” claiming you can’t buy collaboration. Read more »
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Personal tools lead to practical business
Much of today’s business communication activity still happens in email, but that presents a problem for the current on-the-go workforce. This report, based on a recent survey of business managers, highlights some of the problematic areas around business content collaboration and provides options for working through them. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
3 popular ways to screw up enterprise social
Enterprise social networking may be a hot buzzword but it’s still in its infancy when it comes to adoption, which adds up to a frenzy of rushed roll outs by the inexperienced. What usually goes wrong? David Lavenda of harmon.ie has a few ideas. Read more »
Yammer time: Collaboration from the heart
Yammer has a sophisticated understanding of how customers come to value their tools. They understand that although executive leadership and groundswell support are important, it’s the heart of the company that has the greatest impact on how Yammer ends up being used. 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 »
Convore is reborn as Grove.io, a chat service for businesses
Group chat startup Convore had pretty good traction after launching out of Y Combinator last year. But in the competitive world of consumer social apps, “pretty good” isn’t enough. So Convore’s founder Leah Culver built a new, business-focused iteration of the group chat service, called Grove.io. Read more »
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Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business
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 »
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Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by 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 »
Email in the enterprise: entering its twilight at 40?
While it’s certainly premature to declare email “dead” as a technology, it’s fair to acknowledge that a new generation of communication tools is gaining traction as a more effective means of communication for the enterprise. Miguel Valdés Faures of BonitaSoft offers some alternatives. Read more »
Social technologies at work? What social technologies?
New research from Forrester doesn’t just reveal that consumer phones are invading the enterprise. It also confirms some realities we see under way at offices every day and undercuts other so-called trends often mentioned by media cheerleaders (including GigaOM). What are they? Read more »
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Focusing social platforms for enterprise collaboration
Social media is playing an increasing role in enterprise IT, with companies like Jive Software and Telligent jockeying with IBM, Microsoft and Cisco to tap into corporate IT spending. Today, they build social platforms customers use for both employee collaboration and consumer marketing objectives. Vendors need ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Building a better feed
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 »
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Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
IT managers now face a new challenge in the enterprise: the significant presence of a new generation, the Millennials, in today’s digital workplace. These young employees were born in the 1980s or later; they were raised with ever-present mobile phones and ubiquitous online access and social media, and they often demand access to those services and devices while at work. This report, the first in a two-part series, surveys Millennials about their use of technology at work, with a particular focus on how they communicate and learn and what they expect in regard to technology support. We aim to assist IT and tech-support management by pointing out the opportunities Millennials present and also the potential pitfalls. Companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Google 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 »
Why Google+ could find a home in the workplace
Last week, Google rolled out a largely well-received beta of its new social networking platform, Google+. Having played with Google+ over the last few days, I think that it may find a home in a perhaps unexpected market: the workplace. Read more »
Enterprise social media: offline company culture impedes implementation?
With Google again jumping into social with Google +, interest is incredibly hot on the consumer side. But while Facebook and co. blaze a trail for home use, in the workplace interest in social has been smoldering away for years without catching into a similar bonfire. Why? Read more »
The impact of social tools on the enterprise
Following the success of Facebook and Twitter in the consumer space, over the past couple of years we’ve seen a wave of enterprise social networking tools hoping to capture similar successes in the enterprise market. But how are these tools shaping the businesses that use them? Read more »
As email passes 40, is a midlife crisis in the cards?
A few weeks ago, electronic mail, or email as it’s now affectionately known, hit the respectable age of 40. Four decades since the first message – believed to be “QWERTYUIOP” – email seems to be going strong. But is it about to hit a midlife crisis? Read more »
