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Week in Review: WCM Goes Customer Experience, Top Social Platforms for Collaboration
Here we are waving farewell to another August and heading into a long weekend, not to mention, it’s still sunny (where I am at least). Things could be worse.
This week we kicked-off some of our summer cobwebs and got to work on our September editorial focus: Information Management Agility. While that topic was warming up, Enterprise Collaboration was still fighting for the spotlight.
Of course, Cisco’s multi-billion dollar efforts to acquire Skype drew many eyes, as did our round-up of leading social platforms for enterprise collaboration. The release of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management is always a source of chatter. Irina Guseva dissected the highlights, but gently reminded us that reports such as this are just one data point, and are absolutely not a substitute for doing your homework when selecting a CMS.
Editor’s Picks for the Week- Alert: What’s Coming for Open Source CMS in September 2010
Get the quick view on what’s happening with 20 popular open source projects. - What Does a Social CRM Process Look Like?
Love WEM but you’re new to Social CRM? Here’s the red carpet for getting started. - Cisco Moves to Acquire Skype for US$ 5 Billion
Rumors, rumors, lies and statistics. Arrington broke the tale of a US$ 5 bil. acquisition of Skype by Cisco. Here’s the story with a bit more enterprise collaboration context. - 4 Key Steps in Developing Requirements for SharePoint Projects
So a SharePoint project is on the horizon. Step back and check out Dux Raymond Sy’s guidance on avoid some common pitfalls. You won’t be sorry.
These articles were what you fancied most this week, according to Uncle G’s analytics data
- Enterprise 2.0: All Social Software is Not Created Equal.
Implementation and adoption challenges will continue to plague even the smartest of organizations who don’t take the time to understand what their employees really need. - What is SharePoint 2010? Vision and Reality
No doubt, the product has taken the information management world by storm. Here’s the quick synopsis of what it is and isn’t.
- Web CMS Market Predicted to Hit $1 Billion in 2010
New research on the size and growth of the the Web CMS market is good news for most vendors. Others need to get their brand shaped-up if they want to play in the big leagues. - Chromium 7 Has Arrived and It’s Not that Awesome
Chromium 7 arrived (not even a week after version 6 went beta), and the changes should hit Chrome fairly quickly. - The Importance of Context: Why Enterprise 2.0 Still Fails to Deliver Value
Don’t let the apparent inherent value of new enterprise 2.0 tools and culture fool you — success is not ensured. Here’s a take on why.
Here’s what’s been brewing for new jobs and career upgrades. Both seekers and employers, catch the best fish of the season in our industry job board.
Featured Jobs- Enterprise Sales Rep at Salesforce.com
- Copy Editor/Proofreader at Business Wire
- Senior Interactive Graphic Designer at NPR
- Sr. Marketing Intelligence Analyst at Sophos
- Content Manager at Expedia
- Project Manager at MBDC
- Senior Tech Writer at Microsoft
Wondering how to spend your time in the coming months? Fear not, our Industry Events Calendar will keep you busy.
Featured Events- Sep 19, 2010 – Oracle OpenWorld 2010 in San Francisco
- Oct 7, 2010 – HartmanEVENT 2010 - Social Media & Mobile Usability in Utrecht NL
- Oct 7, 2010 — Forrester’s Content & Collaboration Forum in New York
- Oct 13, 2010 – Day Software Ignite Conference in Chicago
- Oct 19, 2010 — Smart Content Conference in New York
- Nov 2, 2010 — Day Software Ignite Conference in Berlin
- Nov 2, 2010 — J. Boye Conference in Aarhus, DK
- …view all events here.
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Apple’s Ping Tops 1M Users in Two Days, but It’s No Google Buzz
Apple announced just a few hours ago that it’s new music-centered social network Ping has surpassed 1 million users in a mere two days.
While the announcement may seem impressive, if you consider that iTunes has over 160 million accounts tied to credit cards (and certainly a lot more if you include accounts without cards), I’m honestly surprised Apple didn’t hit the 1 million line in 24 hours.
According to Apple, one-third of people who downloaded iTunes 10 have signed up for Ping. If we’re counting 1 million users out of 3 million, Ping definitely appears to be more of a success. But it remains to be seen if that momentum will carry through as more users upgrade.
As a somewhat related comparison, Google’s Buzz social network for Gmail — which had around 170 million users at the time of Buzz’s release — saw tens of millions of users in two days. Before you accuse me of fanboyism, let me note the following: Yes, it was certainly easier for users to sign up for Buzz since it didn’t require downloading and installing new software, as well as going through a registration process. Buzz is also admittedly in no way a success for Google.
But at the same time, Buzz and Ping shared the same problem many budding social networks do — nobody knew what to do with them when they launched. Buzz was clearly a stab at Twitter-meets-Friendfeed conversations in Gmail, but aside from importing their current social networks into the service, I didn’t see many conversations actually taking place on the service. It was one of many services I’ve signed up for, but was never motivated to actually do something with it.
Ping, meanwhile, suffers the same “what now” problem. It’s easy enough to sign up for it, but then you’re faced with searching for your friends, and finding artists that you like on the service. Once you’re following people, you’re mainly seeing artists recommend their albums — something which I don’t think fans really need help with. Artists can also post photos and post cute messages, but at this point that’s something they can do better on MySpace or Facebook.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many users are signing up for Ping, but remain clueless with what to do with it. Apple needs to get its Facebook friend importing up and running again, and clearly define what people can do with Ping, before it can become a thriving social network.
Companies: Apple, Google
FastPencil’s New Publishing Effort Aims for Big-Name Authors
Campbell, Calif.-based FastPencil tries to democratize the book world with Web-based book creation and publishing tools. Now it’s trying to go up-market with a new publishing initiative that called FastPencil Premiere.
FastPencil new service is based on FastPencil’s basic technology, but it’s aimed at established authors and at successful FastPencil users who are ready for a bigger spotlight. Authors can use FastPencil’s collaborative writing tools, or they can just import their manuscript. The books can be published as e-books and also as paper editions through print-on-demand technology, and authors can share links to the books through social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. The books will be sold in FastPencil’s store, but also on Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s website, and iBookstore. The company said it’s also working on deals to bring the books into physical stores.
So why would an established author (the company is looking for writers who have sold more than 100,000 copies of their books) sign up? FastPencil says its advantages include speed (you can have a book on-sale within weeks, compared to the traditional publishing process of months or years), simplicity (the contracts are supposed to be short and easy to understand), and economy (since FastPencil’s overhead is lower, it can offer higher royalties).
Other websites have already shown that some big name writers want to bypass the traditional publishing process. For example, Scribd launched an online bookstore last year with authors like Tamim Ansary and Tim O’Reilly. FastPencil Premiere’s launch author’s include children’s writer Angela Sage Larsen and cartoonist Guy Gilchrist (whose work includes the Nancy comic strip).
Of course, publishers do more than offer a book for sale. FastPencil also offers editing and book design — though unlike a traditional publisher, it charges for those services. Authors can also work with their own editors and designers through FastPencil’s collaborative tools.
Companies: FastPencil
People: Angela Sage Larsen, Guy Gilchrist
Google Will Pay Out $8.5M Over Buzz Privacy Snafu
Bad buzz over a faulty service can exact a price from an Internet giant. But what’s the real cost?
Google has settled with plaintiffs over the privacy concerns stirred up by its attempt at a Twitter-like social network, Buzz, to the tune of $8.5 million — only $2,500 of which will be paid out to the individual users that filed the lawsuit.
For a company with revenues of $25 billion a year, that payout is peanuts.
The rest will go to attorney’s fees and organizations that promote privacy for Internet users and education on privacy concerns. Google has also agreed to tweak its privacy policies.
Google Buzz launched in February this year, and was designed to integrate seamlessly with the inboxes of users of Google’s Gmail email service. The integration worked a bit too well, stirring up a hornet’s nest after users discovered any Buzz user could see their entire list of contacts.
While the privacy settings could be tightened contacts were visible by default — causing Buzz to be universally panned. About a month later, Google said it had misstepped and had designed the service without enough thought.
While the financial cost was relatively small, the episode caused many to ask if Google had lost its way in a world of social media dominated by Facebook and Twitter.
Companies: Google
YouSendIt Raises Additional $15M to Bypass Email Attachment Limits
File-transfer startup YouSendIt, which allows users to bypass the limits that most email services put on file transfers, announced it raised an extra $15 million in its fourth round of funding on Friday. New investor Adams Street Partners led the round, along with former investors Emergence Capital, Sigma Partners and Alloy Ventures.
YouSendIt allows users to send files sized up to 2 gigabytes through email — though the files aren’t actually transferred via e-mail, but hosted on YouSendIt’s servers and the email recipients are allowed to download them.
But YouSendIt isn’t the only player hosting large files for transfer — RapidShare, MegaUpload and drop.io, among others, also offer hosting services for large files.
The Campbell, Calif.-based company does boast 13 million registered users and more than 210,000 subscribers, and reportedly delivers 15 million files a month. Reuters, Salesforce, Rheem and Ritz Camera are listed as clients for the company.
Robin Murray, partner of Adams Street Partners, was named as an observer of the YouSendIt board of directors. The file-sharing company raised $14 million, $10 million and $4.7 million in earlier rounds of funding.
Companies: Drop.io, MegaUpload, RapidShare, Reuters, Rheem, Ritz Camera, salesforce, YouSendIt
People: Robin Murray
EMC Offers RSA Cloud Security and Compliance Solution
The Cloud clearly isn’t going away. But the concerns over security, privacy and compliance over Cloud computing haven’t gone away either, which have hindered adoption of Cloud computing by CIOs and other IT decision-makers.
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See, YouTube Ads Can Be Awesome: A Hunter Shoots a Bear
Nice timing. Just a few hours after The New York Times reported that YouTube’s ad revenues have grown to the point that the Google-owned video site will be profitable this year, I spotted a video that demonstrates why some of YouTube’s potential as an advertising platform.
Called “A hunter shoots a bear,” the video was apparently uploaded last month, but is starting to get noticed by sites like Metafilter today. It’s an ad for Tipp-Ex brand correction fluid, reportedly created by French agency Buzzman, and it features a hunter refusing to shoot a bear, reaching outside the video to grab Tipp-Ex from the ad running alongside, changing the video title, and asking the viewer to offer suggestions about what happens next.
It’s definitely possible to stump the ad with words or phrases that it doesn’t understand, but it recognizes (and plays videos to illustrate) a lot more words than I expected. (My favorite so far: “A hunter is a bear.”) And if you’ve got a dirty/sophomoric mind, Tipp-Ex has you covered, too.
These kinds of interactive ads aren’t unprecedented. The most well-known example is probably the Subservient Chicken, a Burger King ad that run on its own site. And the Old Spice YouTube campaign from earlier this year was another illustration of how humor and interactivity can lead to hits. But I think the Tipp-Ex video offers a great example of how advertisers can actually use YouTube to their advantage.
Companies: Buzzman, Google, Tipp-Ex
‘Earth-like’ Exoplanet Could Have a Comet’s Tail
When the super-Earth COROT-7b was discovered in 2009, it was heralded as the rockiest, most truly Earth-like exoplanet yet. But a new study suggests it’s more like a comet.
In a paper to be published in the journal Icarus, an international team of astronomers led by Alessandro Mura of the Italian Institute for Interplanetary Space Physics in Rome argue that, given the planet’s likely composition and distance from its star, COROT-7b probably loses its surface elements to space in a long, comet-like tail of charged particles.
COROT-7b is less than twice the size of Earth and about five times Earth’s mass, and orbits a sun-like star about 390 light-years away. Because COROT-7b’s density is similar to Earth’s, astronomers hailed it as the first rocky exoplanet discovered and one of the best candidates for hosting extraterrestrial life.
But the rocky world also sits almost 100 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the sun, and it orbits its star once every 0.85 Earth days. The temperature on the daylight side of the planet is a scorching 4000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough for minerals on the rocky surface to break down and release charged particles into space, where they would be picked up and blown away by the stellar wind.
“We expect that the stellar radiation pressure and the plasma environment will cause the build-up of an elongated comet-like exosphere,” the authors write. Depending on what the planet is made of, and whether it was once the rocky core of a “super-Neptune” as some have suggested, the tail could be composed of elements like sodium, oxygen, magnesium or silicon oxide.
The researchers compare this vision of COROT-7b with Mercury, which has a similarly antagonistic relationship with the sun and also leaks charged particles in a long tail.
“The planet appears to be more like a ’super-Mercury’ under much extremer environmental conditions,” the researchers write.
The team suggests that a tail composed of sodium or calcium could theoretically be detected on COROT-7b from ground-based telescopes. Although detecting such a tail would probably eliminate COROT-7b as a candidate habitable world, “this project would be the very first attempt to learn something of the mineralogy of a rocky planet orbiting another star.”
Image: 1) Artist’s impression of COROT-7b, ESO/L. Calcada. 2) Model of COROT-7b’s proposed sodium tail, assuming the planet is 4000 degrees Fahrenheit at its surface. A. Mura et al, Icarus 2010. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2010.08.015
See Also:
- Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet
- At Last! First Real Evidence for a Rocky Exoplanet
- Astronomers Closer to Exoplanet ‘Holy Grail’
- Mercury Flyby Maps New Territory
- This Just in: Mercury More Exciting Than Mars
Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.
Jigsaw Brings Real-Time Contact Data to Salesforce.com
When Salesforce.com (news, site) pulled out its checkbook for Jigsaw last spring, CEO Marc Benioff said, “With Jigsaw, we’ll make it as easy as Wikipedia to source data, as easy as iTunes to buy data, and as easy as Facebook to stay updated as the data changes." A tall order, yes, but this week’s reveal proved that it wasn’t just talk.
Read full story...
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Augmented Reality Coming to DC Bus Stops Today (Photo)
Gov 2.0 advocates have printed a run of QR (2D barcode) stickers they will stick at bus stops all over Washington DC today, allowing mobile phone users to quickly get up-to-the moment bus progress reports, post traffic status updates, and more. This augmentation of the physical world with real-time data from the ether strikes me as accessible and useful. The project was one of many ideas discussed at DCWeek this June and is being implemented by the Research and Development group in Office of the CTO, DC Government (on Twitter: OCTOLabs).
O'Reilly's Gov 2.0 correspondent Alex Howard shared a link to this photo on Twitter this morning. Smart phone users will use QR reading apps to snap a picture of the codes, then their phones will be shown relevant real-time information corresponding to the bus stop they are at. (That makes more sense to me than NYC's new QR codes on the back of garbage trucks, but hey - they point is, these things are growing more mainstream in the US.)
Here in my home town of Portland, Oregon, the ability to check "time-to-arrival" for busses by phone is much appreciated. Augmenting that kind of data with a richer experience, launched by QR code, sounds great. Santiago, Chile added similar QR codes to 4,000 of its bus stops this Summer.
"See" also this audio interview earlier this week with Bryan Sivak,
Chief Technology Officer at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) in the District of Columbia.
YouTube Loses in German Court: Held Liable for Copyrighted Videos
According to a German court in Hamburg, Google's YouTube can be held liable for damages when it hosts copyrighted videos without the copyright holder's permission. This case centered around three music videos by classical crossover soprano Sarah Brightman, but this ruling will likely have far-reaching consequences for YouTube's operations in Germany. YouTube will now have to block access to these videos and disclose how often its users accessed these streams. YouTube will also have to pay damages based on the number of plays. Google plans to appeal the ruling.
The German court ruled that simply asking users whether they have the legal rights to the material they are about to upload does not relieve the company of its legal obligations.
"The court concluded that YouTube was treating content uploaded by its users as its own. That leads to a more strenuous duty to check out the content. The court came to the conclusion YouTube did not fulfill this."The complaint against YouTube was originally filed in October 2009. At that time, Google argued that it "works closely with many thousands of copyright holders worldwide to make sure that they can manage their rights on our video platform. Our state-of-the-art Content ID tools go beyond what the law recommends by empowering rights holders to block, authorize or monetize their videos on YouTube in a way that is simple and straightforward."
In this case, though, it seems as if Google's Content ID tools failed. In their complaint, the plaintiffs argued that they repeatedly asked YouTube to take the videos in question down but never received a reply from YouTube.
In an interview with German news agency dpa, a spokesperson for the court today noted that "the court concluded that YouTube was treating content uploaded by its users as its own. That leads to a more strenuous duty to check out the content. The court came to the conclusion YouTube did not fulfill this."
Smaller Cable Networks at Risk of Being Squeezed Out?
A Week in Google: Happy Birthday Chrome, Welcome Back Wave
This week Google celebrated the second birthday of Chrome with a new stable release, and Wave’s life was prolonged by at least four months.
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Glint of Starlight Could Reveal Liquid Oceans on Exoplanets
The sparkle of starlight off water could be the clincher for finding oceans on extrasolar planets. And it could be observable with the tech that will be deployed in the next generation of space telescopes.
“A glinting planet looks different from a non-glinting planet, and it’s detectable with current technology,” said Tyler Robinson, a graduate student at the University of Washington and lead author of a new paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “This is one step toward proving there’s liquid water at the surface of an extrasolar planet.”
The proposed technique for finding wet worlds takes advantage of the same effect that makes sunsets on the Pacific coast so spectacular. The idea was suggested by Carl Sagan in 1993, and has been used to confirm the presence of liquid lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan.
“The oceans do a really good job of reflecting light like a mirror,” Robinson said. “Especially when you have the sun really low on the horizon, most of the sunlight comes reflected off of the water towards you. The same thing happens on the scale of a planet.”
Robinson and his colleagues showed that when a planet appears crescent-shaped to an Earthly observer, starlight reflecting off oceans can make the planet appear up to twice as bright as a planet with no oceans. They also showed that the sparkle of starlight off oceans looks different from light scattered through clouds.
Most other proposed techniques for finding water on an extrasolar planet rely on taking its spectrum, or detailed measurements of the planet’s atmosphere, and looking for the chemical fingerprint of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. But this strategy would show only that the planet hosts water vapor, not liquid oceans, and the technology is still a long way off.
“To get a good spectrum would require a big telescope that is still 10 or 20 years away from being designed or launched,” said exoplanet expert Darren Williams of Penn State University, who has also studied ways to search for exo-oceans but was not involved in the new work. “That’s really becoming a long-range, futuristic sort of thing.”
Robinson and his colleagues proved that the glint effect could be observable with the telescope touted as the successor to Hubble: the James Webb Space Telescope, slated to launch in 2014. If the telescope is accompanied by a shield to block starlight, as suggested in the New Worlds Observer mission concept, it will be sensitive to the light glinting off extrasolar oceans.
To test whether the glint would be visible to the new space telescope, Robinson imagined he was an alien observer looking back at Earth. He used data from weather satellites and NASA’s EPOXI mission to build a computer model of what Earth would look like to a distant observer, including weather patterns, seasonal changes and wind speeds over the oceans that would influence the height of waves.
The model “does explain what we can observe on our own planet from other spacecraft in the solar system, so you can trust the model that they’re using to do these calculations,” Williams said.
Unfortunately, even the James Webb Space Telescope won’t be able to take sharp enough images of exoplanets to tell whether the planet is in a crescent phase, much less directly see a glint. The telescope will just see a dot of light getting brighter and dimmer as it circles its star.
“We have to look for evidence of this glint when we just have this pale, tiny speck of light on our camera,” Robinson said.
So Robinson and colleagues added up all the light reflected by the model Earth to see if the glint would light up the whole planet enough to be seen from space. They found that Earth in the crescent phase would be twice as bright with a glint as without it. “That’s significant,” Robinson said. “A factor of two is a really big deal.”
The researchers also found that the glint effect is strongest in the near infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, just beyond what the human eye can see. These wavelengths of light are not as badly scattered as they pass through a planet’s atmosphere. Conveniently, they are also the wavelengths that the new space telescope will be most attuned to.
“The James Webb Space Telescope is really well suited to do this,” Robinson said.
Looking for the glint would not be the first line of investigation, however. Rather, Robinson imagines the technique could confirm that a good exo-Earth candidate, a plant that is about Earth’s size planet and lies the right distance from its star to support liquid water, actually does have oceans at its surface.
“We would first worry about whether the planet is even remotely Earthlike before looking for the glint,” he said.
“What’s nice about this result here is that we have a chance of doing interesting things with Earthlike planets with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is basically sitting on the hangar waiting to be launched into space,” commented Williams. “We can do that in our research lifetimes. That’s the most exciting thing about this.”
Image: 1) Astrophysical Journal Letters/Tyler Robinson. Left: NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory. Right: Earth and Moon Viewer. 2) NASA
See Also:
- The New Exoplanetology: ‘I Learned It by Watching You, Earth
- Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet Found Right Next Door
- Kepler Shows Exoplanet Is Unlike Anything in Our Solar System
- Photo: Shining Lake Confirms Presence of Liquid on Titan
- The Lagoons of Titan: Oily Liquid Confirmed on Saturn Moon
Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.
Hyland Acquires Web CMS Provider Hershey Systems
Hyland Software (news, site) added to its inventory of content management (ECM) solutions with the recent acquisition of Hershey Systems, a provider of Web-based ECM solutions to the higher education market.
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