Salesforce buys Jigsaw for $142M, Happy Earth Day!, Microsoft and Facebook team up to create Docs.com

April 22, 2010  |  Thursday at Three  |  0 Comments

Salesforce, a provider of CRM cloud computing services, announced an agreement to buy Jigsaw, a “data-as-a-service” company. The price tag – $142 million – may seem hefty, but the price will be worth it for Salesforce. Jigsaw just doubled its revenue for the fourth year in a row. Once the deal is approved, Salesforce customers will have access to the 21 million contacts at the 4 million companies currently listed on Jigsaw.

Earth Day is about working together to improve the environment and that is exactly what Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund is doing. On Earth Day, the non-profit launched the Renewable Energy Atlas of Vermont, a GIS web-based application that allows Vermonters to identify and analyze potential sources of renewable energy at a specific location down to the town-level. This free web app is the first of its kind in the U.S. and will help in educating, preparing and directing energy committees, small businesses and entrepreneurs to local renewable energy resources.

At the F8 developer conference yesterday, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced a partnership with Microsoft to develop Docs.com, an innovative new application that will allow Facebook friends the freedom to create, edit, and share any Microsoft Office document over the social network. This new platform paves the way for Facebook to ultimately become the defacto leader of, well, pretty much everything performed online.

Wow Google, way to be a late adopter; are you scared of Bing?

December 8, 2009  |  Blunders, Tech Worth Talking About, Today's Headlines  |  1 Comments

If you Google Obama right now, give your search results roughly 10 seconds, you’ll notice some new things in your search window.

On Monday at a media event in Mountain View, CA, Google geeks unveiled search in real-time. So for example, when you Google a topic, you’ll not only see what is on the web, but you will also be able to view what is being written about in real-time on sites like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. [Note: Facebook's FriendFeed property and public profiles only]

This notion of real-time search isn’t anything new. Niche search sites like Collecta and Crowd Eve currently offer the same thing, minus the robust Google search results. Microsoft Bing also has a Twitter tool that does something similar.

This development of course is nothing less than Google’s attempt to grow its market share that Bing has been eating away at. Google currently owns 65 percent market share and is fighting hard to keep it after new deals like the Microsoft and Yahoo partnership that gave Microsoft control of almost 30 percent of search.

Google users can click on “Latest results” or hit “Latest” from the options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other content scrolling right on Google. Users can also filter results to see only “Updates” from microblogs like Twitter, FriendFeed and Jaiku. Latest results and the new search options are also accessible via the iPhone and Android phones.

The look and feel of Google search is still the same, very simple and very mathematically complex. Real-time search results appear in the middle of the search results page in a small box with a scroll bar where users can go back to any tweets or other results that streamed by too quickly to click on. There is also a pause button to hold the stream in place.

A fun spin on real-time search?

I think this was expected of Google months ago, but my guess is these partnerships took a bit of negotiation.  I will say this greatly improves my Internet stalking results.  No, just kidding. But there are implications for both the PR and HR industry.  Now you can easily check just one site to reputation check a potential hire. And in that very same way you can also reputation-manage a brand or executive. Find out what is being said in real-time. For example, imagine if you Googled “Tiger Woods” right now.

The new features will be rolling out in the next few days and will be available globally in English only.

Trouble for VMware?

December 7, 2009  |  Today's Headlines  |  0 Comments

A not so startling but informative fall 2009 server study came out today from TheInfoPro* showing a depressed hardware market caused by the recession and the impact of consolidation and rise in virtualization. Like I said, not surprising.

What was an interesting component was the how the study shows threat to virtualization giant VMware hegemony as customers plan parallel deployments of Microsoft and other types of virtualization alternatives.

Does this spell danger for VMware, no. According to TheInfoPro, while just over 75% of users report having VMware in use today, nearly two-thirds have tested a hypervisor other than VMware, with Microsoft and Citrix most often mentioned. Of those who have tested an alternative, 27% plan to use the alternative, while an additional 20% report they use it.

The report also cites that when VMware customers were asked if they would switch to an alternative, only 2% cited firm plans, while an additional 9% were considering it. The analysis reveals that VMware users aren’t switching away from VMware, but are probably embracing competing technologies in heterogeneous deployments. Yeah, like Microsoft.

VMware is still the leading vendor in use and in plan for server virtualization, and few users report firm plans to switch from VMware to Hyper-V. However, this parallel deployment of Hyper-V, Citrix and Red Hat virtualization capabilities could signal a challenge to VMware’s dominance; this implies that heterogeneous environments will be commonplace, where VMware is used for production, and Hyper-V may grow through deployments for development and testing.

TheInfoPro’s Managing Director Bob Gill said: “Much of the strength of the VMware story is predicated on a homogeneous population of VMware servers under control of VMware management utilities. The more heterogeneous the environment, the less VMware is positioned in the central infrastructural layer in the data center.”

TheInfoPro’s Wave 8 Server Study is based on detailed one-on-one interviews with server professionals at 300 large and midsize enterprises in North America and Europe that were completed in fall 2009. It provides detailed plans about usage patterns for 43 server technologies. Check out more on the server data available here.

*denotes TheInfoPro is a client.

Am I a Mac or PC?

December 2, 2009  |  Advice for local companies, Tech Worth Talking About  |  3 Comments

Clearly, I’m a Mac.

But for the past 15 years, I was a PC.

I never even thought of switching to a Mac until I went out on my own and my husband convinced me to convert. Yes, I was dazzled by how beautiful of a machine it is and the iPhone was of course the smartphone of choice once I left my BlackBerry behind. It took awhile to learn the new OS, but once I got the hang of it, we added our own Apple network and backup system, and starting managing multiple accounts – I became a devoted fan.

Start up companies often contemplate which direction to go and what the major issues are with each. This post is not to convince you to change over to Mac – which by the way as an average price point of $2500/pp.

Quite the contrary. Steve Jobs may be a god and I hear he runs a tight ship over there in Cupertino. If you want to read something great, learn how Jobs starting shopping the iPhone and told many wireless service providers to go jump in a lake.

While we‚Äôre all dazzled by the Apple Store and convenience of iTunes, we have to remember that Apple doesn’t make many products — six Macs, variety of iPods, two iPhones, and a debatable-even-worth-it, Apple TV. Oh, plus accessories. A recent Forrester analyst made this point: ‚ÄúIf Apple tried to build a car, it would take it three years just to design the dashboard. Now it would be an extraordinary dashboard, but Job’s fabled micro-management would stall the delivery of a finished automobile.‚Äù

There are limitations for BtoB companies if they’re thinking of turning into a Mac shop. And this isn’t even about cost. The biggest problems with piecemeal approaches to your IT infrastructure is that at some point these systems won’t work flawlessly together. We even have problems working with a “Mac-friendly” Brother printer, consistently resetting itself because of difficulty working with our network and the Mac OS. That’s ok for us small shops, but for larger companies a printer or network breakdown can mean major loss in productivity.

As I mentioned, I was dazzled by the branding and simplicity of the machine. I look at Dell and HP laptops today and think ‚Äì ‚Äúthose bulky things.‚Äù And the PC product lines are trying harder and harder to be like Apple ‚Äì take the Dell Adamo line for example. At the heart of it, Apple designs for the consumer and the creative. There don‚Äôt have complex systems or IT problems. I also know developers love their Macs, but let’s face it — even internally at large enterprises the dev team works their own rules.

Jobs runs a highly specialized, super focused business on design and speed. It’s why he packages so many software elements into each Mac – he knows it will work and work the way he wants it to. That might always be the best fit for an enterprise.