Roambi announced a pro version of its iPhone application this week that syncs with Salesforce.com and other cloud-based services or on-premsie sales environments. It’s a visualization application, providing mobile workers with a pretty cool way to see sales information. Integration is by far one of the most significant trends we are seeing in the enterprise space. It’s a wave, really, marked this week by Salesforce.com and its move to turn the Force.com development platform into a service that makes all of its applications social. Sponsor A good example of this trend are small companies like Roambi that can now reach into the enterprise by integrating with Salesforce.com and other cloud platforms like Google Apps. We caught up with the founders of Roambi for a quick demo of their new pro product and how it syncs with both on-premse applications and SaaS services. Discuss

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An iPhone Visualization App That Syncs with the Cloud

Once the service for those serious enough to pay for the privilege to post, TypePad recently released a free “Micro” service. The company made the decision to offer a free product realizing the demand for a platform more formal than Twitter and less formal than WordPress or Typepad’s original product . ReadWriteWeb compared TypePad’s Micro against 2 other leading light blogging tools. Below are our thoughts: Sponsor TypePad Micro : In addition to being able to blog via email, iPhone app , “Blog It” bookmarklet and the general WYSIWYG dashboard, this tool also allows users to cross post to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook. My only complaint with TypePad is that there are only 2 design themes to choose from. For someone like me with very little design sense, it’s a long process to find something right. As well, if you’d like to add another blog or add new design themes you are required to pay for a monthly subscription service. Tumblr : This service offers users publishing via iPhone app , desktop widget, the Tumblr bookmarklet, text message, email, AIM and even via audio call-in. Tumblr’s theme gallery offers hundreds of options for design . Users can also add their posts to Facebook and Twitter via the free customization. Tumblr allows users to create more than one blog and add more than one contributor for free; however, all edits show up in the same dashboard in chronological order. This means you may have to dig to revise an older post. Posterous : Posterous is the original email publishing microblog. Users can email posts, publish them via the web editor or upload them from the PicPosterous iPhone app . The service allows users to set up auto posting to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress and Xanga. You can also choose to post to just one service in addition to your Posterous account by emailing flickr@posterous.com to specify Flickr or twitter@posterous.com to post to Twitter. Of the three services, Posterous offers an advantage in its ease-of-use and while it’s lacked design abilities in the past, the company recently launched themes and theme import from Tumblr . Other notable light blogging services include Soup.io , Vox and Noovo . If we’ve missed your favorite service let us know in the comments below. Discuss

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Three Great Light Blogging Tools Compared

It appears that the time for freemium music services in the US has passed. Earlier this week streaming music site Imeem sold to MySpace for under $10 million dollars while laying off a large number of staff. For a company with all four major record labels signed, more than 15 million uniques a month and well over 5 million tracks in its catalogue, it came as a sobering blow to the industry. While many companies move to a subscription model, 8tracks continues to forge along in what some describe as a convenient loophole. As of this weekend the company is publicly launching its API for Boston’s Music Hack Day . Sponsor Similar to the original concept for Muxtape , 8tracks allows users to trade 30 min (8 track) playlists. But unlike Muxtape, because 8tracks songs are not identified prior to play, the company is treated as an internet radio station. This status as a radio station means that it avoids the high licensing fees plaguing the streaming music sites. While Muxtape was forced to close in 2008, 8tracks continues to thrive. This weekend 8tracks is publicly launching its music playback API in the hopes of leveraging the collective brain power of Music Hack Day attendees. Some of the tools already built using the API that will be demoed include an iPhone player, a player widget for Facebook and a weekly Hype Machine mix . For those interested in getting involved with 8tracks on Music Hack Day, the developer API is available tomorrow at developer.8tracks.com . Discuss

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8tracks to Launch Playback API and Developer Program

The Web constantly changes and evolves. That, of course, is what makes the Internet so exciting, but it also means that finding older versions of a website is hard. The current push towards the real-time web is making this problem even more apparent. Memento , a project based at Old Dominion University, wants to make it easier to access older versions of a web page without having to go to the Internet Archive. To do this, the project is using a relatively obscure feature of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Sponsor The Memento project wants to give browsers a ‘time-travel’ mode. Currently, the only way to find these pages is the Wayback Machine . According to an interview with Memento’s Herbert Van de Sompel, the mission of this project is to make it far easier for users to find older pages without having to go through the hassle of putting the right URL into the Wayback Machine’s search engine. HTTP Content Negotiation To do this, Van de Sompel and his colleagues are exploiting a feature in the HTTP content negotiation specs that allows them to add date-and-time negotiation to the standard negotiations that already happen whenever your browser connects to a web server. Instead of just asking for the current page, a Memento-enabled browser can also ask for an older version of that page. Some servers and content management systems already offer this feature and the Memento project has developed a demo that shows how this feature would look. According to Van de Sompel, it only takes four extra lines of codes in Apache to make this work. While it is relatively easy for browsers to ask for an older version of a web page, content owners would have to store these older versions of their sites on their servers as well. With static sites, this is easy to do, but today’s highly dynamic web doesn’t make it easy to create an archival version of every page. You can find more technical information about how the team envisions the future of the Memento project in this paper . Discuss

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Memento: Protocol-Based Time Travel for the Web

The semantic Web has long been heralded as the future of the Web. Proponents have said that Web experiences will some day become more meaningful and relevant based on the AI-esque computational power of natural-language processing (NLP) and structured data that is understandable by machines for interpretation. However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web’s ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the intelligent personal agents that are able to process this structured data still have a long way to go before becoming fully actualized. Sponsor This guest post was written by Alisa Leonard-Hansen. Rather, meaningful and relevant experiences now are born out of the context of our identities and social graph: the pragmatics, or contextual meaning, of our online identities. My Web experience becomes more meaningful and relevant to me when it is layered with contextual social data based on my identity. This is the pragmatic Web. We need to better understand our identity as it begins to define our experience of the Web and the networked-enabled world we inhabit. Our online identity will increasingly be defined by three “pillars”: who I say I am, what I do and say, and who I connect to (and who connects to me). To clarify, our online identities are comprised primarily of three specific kinds of data: Explicit or prescriptive data (i.e. the data that I input about myself: name, age, occupation, etc.); Activity or behavioral data (i.e. what I do and say online); Relationship data (i.e. my social graph and what my connections say about me). If we consider the power of this pragmatic Web (a highly relevant and individualized Web experience based on the ubiquity of our identity data), we find that it not only impacts individual user experience, but that it opens up entirely new opportunities for business online. The future is not “business as usual.” Business models will be based on what Elias Bizannes of the Data Portability Project calls the “information value network-economic value,” derived from services that focus on activities with comparative advantage and that leverage free access to data. Consider this: as media companies scramble to identify new and innovative ways to advertise to the sea of nameless, pixeled users who graze through their content each day, a rich supply of highly valuable identity data lies just beneath the surface, left unmeasured and unmonetized. Facebook is nothing more than perhaps the largest single database of this kind of online identity data: explicit, activity and relationship data. With the development of Facebook Connect, which allows for the “open” exchange of Facebook user data between Facebook and third parties, Facebook could conceivably (and will) create an Facebook Connect ad network (read: data exchange), supplied by the valuable and highly targetable user identity data that is currently siloed on Facebook’s servers. This identity data within Facebook is what makes the activity in “social media” so valuable. But the centralization of identity data on one or two major networks (such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace) won’t realize the vision of the pragmatic Web. So, how will the pragmatic Web come to be? How do we realize the power of a dynamic Web that is based on our identities? We do so by empowering individuals to access and control their identity across any site or service, through standards that enable data portability and open Web inter-operability. The resulting vision is that of a highly personalized, dynamic, relevant and remixable Web experience, yielding greater access to information through discovery, communication and collaboration. For enterprise, this could mean the rise of innovative new business models, based on data-driven value exchange. One final note on identity data as it relates to enterprise. As Bizannes points out, the value of this kind of identity data rests on the key factors of time and timeliness. Essentially, identity data is valuable only if it is recent. Facebook wouldn’t be able to sell your (permissions-enabled) data to advertisers if it used your explicit data from a year ago rather than from today. So, Bizannes argues that real-time “access” to someone’s identity matters most, and it’s no longer about data “capture.” Thus, as new business models arise out of monetizing permissions-enabled identity data, the value of the business models will depend on these entities having real-time access to the data. Guest author: Alisa Leonard-Hansen is a digital strategist and Social Media Evangelist at iCrossing , a leading global digital agency. She is also the Communications Chair for the Data Portability Project and blogs about the social Web on her blog, TheWebisSocial.com . Follow her on Twitter @alisamleo . Discuss

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The Future Is All About Context: The Pragmatic Web

Writing a book will never be easy, but FastPencil’ s mission is to make things easier for authors by bringing this process online and to collaborate with others. FastPencil takes writers from idea to published book. The service offers features for collaboration, editing and design, as well as professional consulting services for authors. One cool feature of FastPencil is that it can import blog posts and turn them into books and e-books that bloggers can then sell through all the major book distribution channels. Sponsor Features The areas where FastPencil exceeds are online editing, collaboration and distribution. Fast Pencil offers a surprisingly comprehensive online editing suite. While this editor isn’t quite as fully-featured as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or Apple’s Pages – there is no feature to create headlines or tables of content, for example – it’s more than enough to power the service’s online collaboration tools. In it’s latest update, which launched earlier this week, FastPencil introduced a number of interesting new features. These include new templates, new roles for collaborators (co-authors, project managers) and forums for prospective authors to meet and discuss their work. Turn Your Blog Into a Book If you import your blog feed, FastPencil will turn every blog post into a chapter. The service also imports images from these posts. These images have to be inserted at the beginning or end of a post, however. You can’t have your text flow around an image. Publishing: Hardcover, Paperback, E-Book Once you have finished your book, you can publish it as an e-book and printed book. These services, however, do cost . These paid services include printing, obtaining ISBN numbers, and organizing the distribution of your book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram Digital and other retail partners. FastPencil also offers a number of editing services like design, illustration and editing services. Besides printing hardcover and paperback books, FastPencil can format books for virtually any digital platform, including DRM-free ePub e-books and the Kindle. Don’t Need All These Services? Try SmashWords If you don’t need all of these services from Fast Pencil – or if you have already finished your book – another service worth looking at is SmashWords . Smashwords specializes in e-books. Thanks to deals with Barnes & Noble and Sony in the US and Indigo Books & Music’s Shortcovers in Canada, self-published authors can get their e-books into traditional distribution channels, or sell their books directly on SmashWords. Smashwords acquired the New Zealand-based e-book self-publishing service BookHabit earlier this week. Discuss

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FastPencil: Turn Your Blog Posts into a Published Book

It’s the morning after the big Chrome OS event where Google executives and engineers revealed a myriad of details about the company’s first attempt at creating their own operating system. The highly anticipated news conference was tracked all over the web, liveblogged by technology sites, and Twittered so much that it’s still listed as a “trending topic” as of this morning. But now that the news is out, has Chrome OS lost its shine? People had high expectations for Google’s new operating system but the end result doesn’t look like the revolutionary, “change the world” product many had hoped for. Sponsor Yes, Chrome OS is Different Don’t get us wrong – Google’s OS is different than whatever Windows, Mac, or Linux build you have running on your computer today. The new OS does away with desktop applications entirely – everything you use on Google Chrome OS runs on the web. Of course, the company hopes you’ll use a lot of Google products like Gmail and YouTube , but it doesn’t limit you to just Google-branded services. In the built-in applications area, there are also links to other web apps like the online TV streaming service Hulu.com and music sites Lala and Pandora . To be fair, Chrome OS even links to Yahoo and Microsoft’s webmail offerings right out of the box. Google’s major goal with Chrome OS is to moving computing off our personal hard drives and into the cloud…the Google cloud. To accomplish such a feat, they’ve made the web browser the OS. Everything you need (in theory) is accessible through the included Google Chrome browser , the same browser the company currently offers to Windows users with Mac and Linux versions expected by the end of this year. As exciting as that vision is, we have to wonder if people – especially the mainstream netbook users the OS is aimed at – are ready for this big of a switch. And more importantly, is the technology itself ready to make the change a comfortable and seamless experience? …but is it Better? After digesting yesterday’s news, some lingering questions remain. Was this the OS everyone was hoping for or has Google let us down? You Can’t Just Install Chrome OS – You Have to Buy a New Netbook To begin with, one of the more surprising reveals that came out of yesterday’s news is that the OS cannot be installed on your own computer. Oh sure, there are downloads available that use Google’s open-sourced code to create bootable builds tech-savvy users and developers can play with, but the official word from the search giant is that anyone wanting to use the “real” Google Chrome OS will have to purchase a new netbook to do so. You cannot simply download it from the web and install it on any machine. Part of the reason for this restriction is driver support. Google is working with carefully selected manufacturers to offer a handful of netbooks running the OS in the coming year. By going this route, they don’t have to provide an entire ecosystem of drivers for every piece of hardware out there – they can pick and choose which ones to support. They’ll likely limit the number of peripherals supported, too. According to what was said yesterday, the company will support “mass storage devices” (think USB flash drives and digital cameras) but were cagey on how they plan on offering printing support. All they would say is that they’re planning on an “innovative approach” when it comes to printing, whatever that means. Hopefully, they’re planning to do something more than just integrating with Kinko’s and FedEx’s online document services, for example. Printing, (sorry Google) is not a web app just yet. No Other Web Browsers Supported Another big disappointment is the company’s decision to limit all web surfing to the one included browser, Google Chrome. Firefox and Safari users are out of luck – no other browsers will be supported. But before you cry out “antitrust!,” be warned – Google has this covered. The code base used to build the OS is open-source – that means anyone take the code and create their own version of Chrome OS. As was carefully – and haltingly – explained by Google’s VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, other browser makers can take the code and build their own OS if they want to. But let’s get real – Firefox Chrome OS? We don’t think so. The reality is that fans of other browsers are simply out of luck if they want to use this operating system. Offline Access is Limited. Your New Netbook is Now a Brick. One of the questions that got glossed over during the Q&A session at the end of the event is how Google’s OS plans to deal with offline access. The world is not blanketed in Wi-Fi yet, so what can this web-based OS do without the web? Surprisingly, the answer given didn’t refer to any subsidized deals with cellular providers regarding deals to offer built-in 3G connectivity for the new netbooks. Instead, Pichai explained that the OS was built for use with Wi-Fi. Of course, a handful of Google products use Google Gears, a technology that makes websites available offline. For example, Gmail uses Gears to create an offline version of your webmail inbox which you can use to read and respond to email until internet connectivity becomes available again. At that point, all the changes are synced back to Google’s servers. Although Google didn’t specifically refer to Gears when answering the question, there’s no reason to doubt that it will work in Chrome OS’s web browser the same as it does now in the standard Chrome browser. However, Pichai did make note of Chrome OS’s support for HTML5, an upcoming revision to the core markup language used to build the web. In the new specification, a key feature is offline support for web apps. However, web application developers will have to rebuild their apps in order to use HTML5, so users will be dependent on each individual company to make this change. While it’s believed that one day this spec could make the whole web an offline app, the reality is that most developers have yet to implement this technology in their services yet. Even by Chrome OS’s launch next year, there’s no reason to believe the landscape will have changed significantly by then. Do You Really Need an OS or Just the Chrome Web Browser? Finally, the big question regarding Chrome OS is why ? What can the OS do that any operating system running the Chrome browser cannot? Based on what was shown yesterday, the answer is very little. Chrome OS’s brand-new features consist of two things: application tabs and panels. The panels are persistent windows that pop-up in front of your web browser’s main window. For example, Google Chat, the company’s IM service, can live in a panel that stays on top no matter what window you’re viewing. Application tabs, meanwhile, are special tabs that give you easy access to your most frequently used web apps from the browser. Any page tab can be made into an application tab with one click and the resulting “tab” is represented with the colorful icon for that site or service. While that’s certainly a cool feature, it alone isn’t a major selling point for the OS. That would be like saying you have to buy Mac OS X because of the dock or Windows because of the taskbar. You need a million of these little features combined to add up to a compelling reason to buy an OS. That’s not to say that Chrome OS itself doesn’t have worthwhile features of its own – like its built-in security mechanisms or its auto-update system, it’s just that these aren’t the kinds of things that sell it to an end user. The questions consumers want answers to are what does it do that’s special? What does it look like? And for now, the answer is “it’s basically just a web browser.” Revolution? Maybe Not Just Yet. At the end of the day, Chrome OS is an exciting, but not fully realized, vision. Although it has potential, the world may not be ready for a web-based netbook right now. Also, the technology needed to make the Wi-Fi only netbook useful without an internet connection isn’t up to full speed either. At the end of the day, the netbook will be marginally more useful than an iPod Touch – when connected, it’s amazing. Offline, not so much. While you might not rush right out to buy a Chrome OS netbook when they first launch, there could come a time – sooner than you think – when it becomes a reasonable choice. When the majority of apps work offline and you’ve fully transitioned away from desktop apps, a web-connected netbook, especially one that’s affordable, could easily become your everyday computer. That day hasn’t arrived yet. For now, Chrome OS is an exciting glimpse at the future of computing, but not a practical device for the majority of users. Disclosure: Sarah Perez freelances for Microsoft’s Channel 10 blog, but is not a Microsoft employee. Her primary web browser is, in fact, Google Chrome which she uses exclusively. Discuss

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Was Chrome OS a Disappointment?