The smart phone is not a phone. It's a computer. It's like your desktop or laptop. It stores data. It connects to the Internet. It runs applications. It's a computer, not a phone. The real challenge for the enterprise is to shift its thinking about how it will move beyond the carriers and one day become an entirely data-centric organization - an organization that gives information workers the ability to work entirely on an IP infrastructure, be it for Web-based productivity applications or on a VoiP network. Forrester Research issued a report today that calls 2010 the year of the smart phone. That seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? To its credit, Forrester does use the report as an opportunity to explore how the enterprise can make the smart phone a part of the daily work life for as many employees as possible. Sponsor There are many reasons for the enterprise to adopt a smart phone culture: There is no excuse anymore. Workers have to be connected. The big weave on the social Web is getting richer. Billions of threads are being added by the day. How can we even tolerate not being connected? Collaboration depends on being connected. You can't be fully connected without a decent smart phone strategy. People are not working at the office as much anymore. They need a smart phone to keep up with their work. As illustrated by Forrester, the trend is already in play: It does not have to be that expensive to adopt a smart phone culture. People want to use their smart phones for both their personal lives and work, too. They will pay for their data plans. Forrester agrees. From the executive summary by Ted Schadler: "Employees, aka consumers, are mad about smartphones, attracted by the ability to email, collaborate, and work with documents from anywhere. Fourteen percent of information workers across the US, Canada, and UK already use smartphones to do work today, and another 64% would like to. That demand, coupled with the willingness of some employees to share the cost of a monthly mobile plan, sets the stage for a surge in the use of personal smartphones for information work. Information and knowledge management professionals should immediately call for a formal bring-your-own (BYO) smartphone strategy, establish a sliding scale for when to reimburse employees, and pressure mobile carriers to cut costs across corporate-liable and personally liable plans." Forrester's BYO recommendation makes sense. But he does not explore how smart phones can be treated as computers. This discussion can create a new level of discourse in the enterprise between IT and business users. Forrester points out that IT recognizes the importance of smart phones. Many companies are already developing policies for how the devices should be treated. Collaboration tool are not being heavily used but this could change if smart phones were treated as tools as much as communication devices. MobileIron follows this approach, offering services that give IT managers the ability to be more like change agents than police forces. In MobileIron's view , information can be tracked with a data-centric approach. Applications can be monitored. Users and administrators can view a social graph that shows usage. That's a smart approach. It stimulates thinking and moves people to start exploring how a fully data-centric approach can be adopted over time as VoiP matures in the enterprise. Discuss

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"Smart Phone" is a Misnomer: It's a Computer, not a Phone

The Nexus One is another smart phone that we will inevitably see inside the walls of the enterprise. Smart phones seem to have a way of being used for all kinds of work activities. So, what are the pros and cons of using the Nexus One in the enterprise? First off, anyone using the Nexus One in the enterprise will be using a rogue device. That's just the way it is. Perhaps that may change when the enterprise wakes up and realizes that people born after 1982 want to use any device to connect in any way they want. But that's the future, unfortunately. In the meantime, let's look at reality. Sponsor Compliance The Nexus One was not built as a device that meets compliance requirements. As with almost any device, compliance is a reality in the enterprise world. We doubt, though, this will stop most users. You Can Make it Compliant Dan Dearing of Trust Digital has a few points of advice for the IT manager with the foresight to deal proactively with the inevitability that the Nexus One will become his or her problem to solve: Make sure that the device can be locked and swiped of its data if a user loses their Nexus One. Make sure Exchange ActiveSync is installed on the device so permissions for accessing data can be set up according to the policy set by the enterprise. Provide the ability to configure the device to remotely provision application clients and device interfaces used to reach the application source (e.g. Wi-Fi, VPN). Allow for PKI support that allows Android devices to receive and ingest digital certificates. The use of certificates helps automate connectivity to enterprise applications via Wi-Fi, VPN and web by making authentication transparent to users. It's Not an iPhone The iPhone has tight security features baked into it, and hardware encryption, too. Applications are tightly controlled with a centralized point for distributing applications. This may prove to be a temporary advantage for the iPhone over the Nexus One. According to Dearing: "The Nexus One is less secure than the iPhone 3GS. Nexus One is currently running on Android 2.1, the latest update, so is equivalent to iPhone 1.0. The iPhone 3GS provide the most comprehensive security controls with the addition of hardware-based encryption." "The iPhone is much more mature in this area than the Nexus One. iPhone configuration profiles provides business IT with a way to configure the iPhone over the air and according to corporate policies. In addition, the iPhone 3GS provides device encryption to help meet corporate compliance requirements, ensuring the protection of sensitive corporate information." Hooray - It's Not an iPhone The Nexus One is a cloud-connected device, making it a true web-based, data-driven device. This to us is a huge advantage. Apple is playing catch up in developing a cloud infrastructure. Google may lose a bit on security but the ability to use the computing power of the cloud may be what shoots Google way ahead of Apple. Tim O'Reilly goes as far to say that at some point, Apple may never catch up. A Strong Start The Nexus One represents a very strong start for Google. It's not designed as an enterprise phone but generally smart phones are meant to be used universally. We expect that as more smart phones enter the market, an ecosystem of middleware providers will emerge. These services will provide filters, treating the device as a computer, much like desktops and laptops. Discuss

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The Pros and Cons of the Google Nexus One As An Enterprise Phone

Chances are that you are getting at least a few emails and IMs with links to YouTube videos every day. While watching these alone can be fun, Synchtube turns this into a far more social experience. Synchtube allows you to share and discuss a video in real time with up to four of your friends. The first person to enter the room controls the playback and also has the ability to change videos. Sponsor Features To get started, just head over to Synchtube.com and copy and paste a link to a YouTube video into the box in the lower right corner. Then send out the link to the room to your friends and start the video once they have arrived. In our tests, the service worked just as advertised. The chat room itself is basic, but it fulfills its purpose without getting in the way. The video sync sometimes lagged behind a bit by up to 4 seconds. This is definitely within an acceptable range, however. Just like these commenters on Reddit , we would love to see a few additional features in the app, including the ability to create playlists, search for videos within the app or give control over the room to another user. The developers have promised to continue to work on this app and plan to add more advanced features in the near future. Verdict For now, if you are looking for an easy way to watch YouTube videos with your friends without having to install a desktop app like DeskTube , Synchtube is one of the easiest apps to use. The app has some limitations, but for the vast majority of users, the current version should work just fine and most of the current issues will surely be fixed in the near future. Discuss

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Synchtube: Watch Synchronized YouTube Videos With Your Friends

Demand for cloud-based storage and backup is creating some lucrative opportunities for companies servicing large telecommunications providers. We are seeing a number of carriers offering cloud-based services. Orange Business Services announced today that it will be offering cloud storage and other cloud-based services for its customers. Verizon announced earlier this month that it is offering a number of cloud-related services. Telecommunications companies are partnering with services like Nomadesk to give customers the ability to do their own cloud-based online backups. Sponsor Belgium-based Nomadesk is an online backup and syncing service for small business owners and personal users. It provides unlimited storage and sharing. The company announced this week a partnership with Bell Canada to provide its millions of customers with online back up for their mobile devices. Nomadesk is a virtual hard drive on your desktop. It's very simple. We downloaded the application, made some simple configurations and immediately had the ability to drag and drop files into the virtual hard drive that sits on the desktop.The hard drive is connected to the cloud and syncs when updates are made. Your data is secured and encrypted. It can be shared with any number of users and synced across the community. Applications can be backed up. Access to documents are available online or offline. Nomadesk CEO Filip Tack is touting the service as a better alternative to Box.net and Mozy . We agree that Nomadesk is easy to use, but as a collaboration platform it has some way to go. For example, Nomadesk does not have an advanced search capability like Box.net. We view enterprise search as a key feature for collaboration services. Tack said the company will offer search as a feature in the first part of 2010. Companies in this space are showing big market gains as larger providers seek revenues from the petabytes of data being produced every day. Mozy, for instance, just announced a partnership with Cox Business. Mozy is also partnering with China Telecom, McAfee and Vodafone to deliver cloud-based backup to customers. What is the amount of data that is produced every day in the enterprise? We know this can vary wildly but even small businesses are starting to produce exponential amounts of information compared to just a year ago. As this amount of information continues to grow, services like Nomadesk should stand to do very well as providers for large telecommunications companies. Nomadesk service for small businesses starts at $15 per user, per month. Discuss

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Nomadesk: Cloud-Based Backup Providers Doing Quite Well

TechSmith , the makers of powerful screencast recording software Camtasia and screen capture app SnagIt, announced this morning that a beta version of SnagIt is now available for the Mac . The Windows version costs $50 but the Mac beta is free for now. It's great. If you've used Skitch or Little Snapper , SnagIt seems much more full-featured. The best parts I've seen so far are far more font options and really easy composite image creation. Sponsor The company's demo video is below. This is just beta software and hopefully it will be more stable and less clunky than early versions of TechSmith's free cross-platform video and image product Jing Project. The recently released Camtasia for Mac was very well done and appears quite stable. One thing that's missing is the ability to quickly post an image to Flickr or any other online site. That would be nice and is a feature that competitors offer. Easy click and drag resize is something that SnagIt could pick up from other services as well. All in all, though, this looks like a very nice product. Discuss

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SnagIt Goes Mac: Check Out The Best Screen Capture App Available

A storm of news points to a future of frictionless publishing and subscription, across platforms. Google just announced that its FeedBurner RSS publishing service now supports automatic publishing to a Twitter account. If you're among the many people who use the service Twitterfeed (like CNN, the WhiteHouse, ReadWriteWeb, etc.) then you may very well find that startup expendable starting now. That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this and a series of related announcements over the past few days. Sponsor The new feature looks relatively sophisticated and will use a new URL shortener, goo.gl . FeedBurner has not proven the most reliable service in recent years and is now part of the ad network AdSense, but the little startup Twitterfeed isn't always reliable either. It does, though, have more incentive to innovate and work in user's interests. Ultimately, the service you use to publish content updates to Twitter is just a small part of a much bigger story. The Twitter/FeedBurner integration uses secure OAuth authorization, so you don't have to give Google your Twitter password. It will check the links coming through that shortened URL for malware and bad sites. Right now other apps won't be able to use Goo.gl, just Feedburner and Google Toolbar, but that might change in time. Consider this announcement side by side with the WordPress announcement this weekend that WordPress blogs can now be posted to and read from Twitter clients , the rumor today that Facebook is experimenting with its own URL shortener , this afternoon's announcement that the ability to expose your geographic location is now live in Google Toolbar and now longer a Labs product and last week's go-live of real-time search on Google. All of this combined says one thing to us: the web is getting a whole lot faster and much more free of friction, quickly. WordPress, Google, Twitter and Facebook will force each other to agree to common standards for reading and writing content updates, those updates will be delivered in real time and the standards will allow an ecosystem of 3rd party client software to proliferate and play along with the big guys. Authentication is being done by OAuth, real-time feeds by RSS, Atom, PubSubHubbub. WordPress is the wild card because it is huge, more supportive than anyone else of Open Source and it could force everyone else to open up to interoperability. The next step? This morning Google's Marissa Mayer said in an interview that Google is working hard on intuitive search , the ability to show users what they want before they even have time to search for it. Publish once and your content is everywhere, immediately. Open your browser and it will show you just the kind of content you need, from all around the web, targeting your particular circumstances like clickstream, social graph and geographic location. If that's the kind of platform that's coming - how will people innovate on top of it? The foundation is being laid right now for a whole new web in the near-term future. Discuss

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Google, Twitter, WordPress & Facebook: Publish/Subscribe Matrix Could Explode Into Glass-Smooth Platform

Who does not love to make predictions? Tis' the season, right? We posted our Top 10 Enterprise Products for 2009 and so it feels like a good time to provide some perspective on what the enterprise can expect in the year ahead. Sponsor Mashups Mashups are going through a renaissance thanks to the incredible power of cloud computing. These mashups are popping up in any number of ways, especially as business users look for more ways to get answers to problems that previously required technical help from the IT department. Examples are everywhere of this new renaissance. Microsoft is launching Dallas Project as part of Windows Azure. It will give users the ability to combine data from different sources such as data.gov. Even old-school enterprise technologies are getting the treatment. indicee and companies like FusionOps are offering mashup services to pull relevant data from ERP systems. Collaboration Collaboration may be the big daddy, the mega trend to watch. We will see if Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 really holds up to its hype. Expect the market to shake out a bit. We're starting to see some vendor bloat out there. There are just too many players competing for a piece of the pie. Real-Time Enterprise Email overload is perhaps one of the most common issues we hear about. It's part of the data silo conundrum that plague companies. The real question is how real-time technologies will evolve in the year ahead to help make information more transparent. We are already seeing its evolution. Tibbr is Tibco's new real-time technology. It is defined more by subject than following people. That's in contrast to Salesforce Chatter which serves as an internal social network, aggregating data from Facebook and Twitter. We expect real-time services to deepen in the enterprise with some really interesting potentials for its integration with business intelligence technologies. For instance, the ability to use predictive analytics to notify people in a real-time stream of trends to watch. Think of the financial services world as an example. Data aggregated in the cloud, mashed up and delivered in a real-time stream. That's powerful stuff. The Mobile Enterprise We posted today about IDC's forecast that 1 billion mobile devices will be connected to the Internet by 2013. What that means for the year ahead is a further increase in enterprise apps for mobile devices, and a host of issues that companies must face. Interestingly, Lenovo just bought back its mobile phone group it sold 18 months ago for $100 million, twice its original selling price. Lenovo sees its entire desktop market changing with the advent of mobile devices. In fact, the new desktop is really a smart phone, a netbook or other sub-notebook mobile devices. Mobile spending is up and enterprises are looking at devices like the iPhone. That means a layer of services will be required to protect the enterprise. Expect data security to be a hot issue. Software-as-a-Service Integrations The SaaS market will take another turn next year as the rush continues to integrate third-party applications into any number of platforms. Dashboards that show information from multiple data sources will become increasingly important. These SaaS platforms in many ways may serve as replacements for intranets by providing better ways to connect the enterprise to the social Web. Coming Up in Part 2 A look at API's, web-oriented architectures and the emergence of community management as a required job function in the modern enterprise. Discuss

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5 Enterprise Trends to Watch in 2010: Part 1