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Google Docs: Now for Storage as much as Collaboration

cgseo — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:51:24 +0000

Google is extending Google Docs , allowing any kind of file to be uploaded up to 250 MB in size. The move signifies how Google Docs is now a storage service as much as a collaboration platform. Enterprise customers may now store large files on Google Docs for free or a small cost. Additionally, the documents may be backed up using third-party applications. Sponsor Google is promoting the service as a way for enterprise customer to store files without the need for a thumb drive. That's a clear sign of how traditional storage devices may be bypassed by online alternatives. Until recently, a thumb drive served as the best way to transport large files. But now, large files can be accessed from anywhere and can be used in a collaborative context. For example, Google Docs users may store files in a shared folder for group collaboration. The capability to upload large files will be ready within the next few weeks. Users receive 1 GB in storage. Enterprise customers will also have the capability to add additional storage for $3.50 per GB per year. Companies may use the Google Documents List API to sync files and provide additional backups. Google is partnering with three companies to provide additional services: Memeo Connect for Google Apps is a new desktop application that offers an easy way to access, migrate, and synchronize files to Google Docs across multiple computers. Syncplicity offers businesses automated back-up and file management with Google Docs. Manymoon is a project management platform that makes it simple to organize and share tasks and documents with coworkers and partners, including uploading files to Google Docs. Google Docs is emerging as the strongest player in the storage and collaboration space. Competitors like Box.net provide similar services but are far smaller than Google. This is a trend to watch as cloud computing becomes more predominant and the concept of collaborating online becomes more palatable. This will be especially true as it becomes apparent how documents can be accessed anywhere on any device with potentially significant cost savings. Discuss

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Google Docs: Now for Storage as much as Collaboration

New Firefox Release…One Last Time?

cgseo — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:30:00 +0000

As we reported last week , Firefox's latest version of 3.6, release candidate 1, has been released to the general public . This time around, however, Mozilla has issued a more general release, as the new version will not only be available for download but also part of an automatic update for those already running Firefox. The release is one more sign that we're getting closer by the day to a full-on sparkly new version of Firefox. For those of you worried about updating, Mozilla has assured us that "over 75% of the thousands of Firefox Add-ons have now been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6," so go ahead and take that leap. But what will you find on the other side? Sponsor Firefox 3.6 RC1 Features In addition with offering this release as an automatic update, Mozilla has offered a synopsis of what it sees as the most important new features to be found in what the company hopes to be a near final version. Users can change the browser's appearance with a single click using Personas . Firefox 3.6 alerts users about out of date plugins to keep them safe. Changes to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability. Improved automatic form fill provides better options from your form history. Open, native video can now be displayed full screen , and supports poster frames . Support for the WOFF font format. Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time. The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times. Support for the HTML5 File API Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies. While wallpapering Firefox with the latest blockbuster movie may be an attractive addition, we are looking forward to a faster and more stable Firefox. Loading scripts asynchronously should speed up some page load-times dramatically by letting faster scripts run while slower ones continue to do their work in the background - something our computers have been doing for a long time now. And the changes to third-party software integration should offer a huge boost to the browser's stability by keeping the core components of the browser safe from being modified. For the web developers out there, increased support for CSS, DOM and HTML5 is always a welcome addition, and the addition of the WOFF font format may further help page load-times and give web designers a greater range of choice. Discuss

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New Firefox Release...One Last Time?

Is Twitter a Mental Vacuum?

cgseo — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 23:30:00 +0000

When we talk to our less technologically-inclined friends about Twitter , we often run across the objection that they really don't care what so-and-so ate for lunch today or what movie they are seeing tonight. And every time, we try to extol all the other benefits of the world's most popular microblogging service. But could we be wrong? Is Twitter mostly people talking about themselves and what they ate for lunch? Well, SemanticHacker , the blog of contextual ad platform Textwise , has crunched some numbers and we may have to eat our hat. Sponsor Parlez vous Twitterspeak? The blog used Twitter's streaming API to gather nearly 9 million tweets from over 2 million individual users. Before looking at the data for meaning, the company first took a look at the language distribution of their sample. While the SemanticHacker team expressed their surprise at the language distribution, particularly the strong showing of Portuguese, we at ReadWriteWeb couldn't help but wonder about the 10% labeled as "Unknown/Misclassified." Are these tweets simply so horribly misspelled that the language-guessing program they used on the data could not venture a guess? Or could it be that 10% of the Twitter populous is now writing in that contracted form of text message Twitter-speak that it could no longer be classified as a recognizable language? (If you're looking for a good example, find a 12-year-old and exchange text messages or just give Sarah Palin's Twitter a look.) What We're A-Twittering About The folks at SemanticHacker then took a random sample of 1,000 English-language tweets and broke them down into eight categories. According to their findings, it seems that Twitter really is full of people talking about themselves. A full 57% of the sample falls into tweets about what a person is doing, or private conversations between individuals. That leaves just 43% for other purposes, but when we take a look at that, the findings seem to become even more dismal. If we take away another 8% for "Other Messages" and "Unknown," and another 8% for "Spam" and "Advertising," we're left with a mere 27% of the information on Twitter having some sort of value. Maybe it isn't as bad as it looks, though. We're willing to bet that if we wrote down everything we said in a day, the meaningful parts might not even reach the 27% mark. Oh, did I tell you about the tasty lentils I had for lunch today? Discuss

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Is Twitter a Mental Vacuum?

TweetDeck for iPhone Now Supports Lists and Geotagging

admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:17:21 +0000

TweetDeck 's iPhone app just got a much-needed update . Version 1.3 brings a slew of new features that finally bring TweetDeck back on par with its competitors on the iPhone. The app now supports Twitter lists and Twitter's new geotagging API. The app now also offers optional support for Twitter's new retweet style and the TweetDeck team has made a number of smaller tweaks and fixes that make the app faster and more stable. Sponsor Lists TweetDeck for iPhone keeps the app's well-known column-style layout and still syncs any changes directly with the desktop app. It's great to see that TweetDeck now supports lists. Unlike other apps like Tweetie 2, however, TweetDeck for iPhone doesn't allow you to create new lists or even add new users to an existing lists. Location In today's announcement, the TweetDeck team puts a lot of emphasis on the new geolocation features in the app. You can now choose to geotag all of your tweets automatically or just add your location info to select tweets only. The app can now also display a map with an overview of all geotagged tweets in any given column (including columns that display persistent searches). Just click 'more' in the bottom right corner and the option to see all the tweets on a map will appear. Given that very few people currently tag their tweets with location data, however, chances are that your map will look rather empty. Over time, though, as more apps start to support this feature, these maps will hopefully fill up with more tweets as well. For now, this is an interesting feature, though it is probably only useful for a small group of users. Discuss

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TweetDeck for iPhone Now Supports Lists and Geotagging

TXT.IO Takes Minimalist Microblogging to the Extreme

admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:35:14 +0000

Once upon a time, microblogging was all about simplicity. Today, even services like Posterous that started out as very simple and easy-to-use tools have begun to add more and more features . Microblogging, however, can't get much simpler than TXT.io . The service offers nothing more than a simple text interface. No more, no less. You log in with a Google account, type your message and hit "post." Sponsor For users who want to do a bit more with their text (link, underline, italicize, HTML headers, etc.), TXT.io offers support for the Textile markup language . Features? What Features? Besides this, though, TXT.io offers almost no other features. The service, for example, doesn't allow you to add images to a post and developers won't find an API to add to their tools. What TXT.io does offer, however, are RSS feeds and a mobile version of the site . TXT.io is an experiment in minimalism and won't appeal to everybody. Indeed, "elitist microblogging" is the service's tagline. Sometimes, though, simple tools like this are exactly what it takes to bring us back to the basics. Minimalist text editors like Ommwriter or WriteRoom , for example, are popular because they only focus on one thing and do it extremely well. Discuss

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TXT.IO Takes Minimalist Microblogging to the Extreme

Search, Monetize and Fact Check YouTube Transcripts with Speakertext

cgseo — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:00:00 +0000

You've probably never heard of Matt Mireles and Bjorn Liljequist but with a $4000 dollar budget and an engineering team paid in iPhones, the two already have Meebo founder Seth Sternberg as their advisor and praise from VC Fred Wilson . The duo's filtering service Speakertext will launch at tomorrow's New York Tech Meetup and the concept is a simple one - to make video interesting. Sponsor Like Tubechop , Speakertext allows users to omit the boring parts of a video; however, the service's transcription component offers a new and important twist. Says CEO Mireles, "At some point, longer videos become useless. It's the metadata and the fact that we're allowing it to be indexed that make this a great tool." The service uses the YouTube API and replaces the YouTube player with a Speakertext player. Users can search video text for relevant quotes and embed the linked quote or the Speakertext player and video into their blogs. To index your own video with the system, you can either transcribe it yourself or opt into a

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Search, Monetize and Fact Check YouTube Transcripts with Speakertext

5 Enterprise Trends To Watch in 2010: Part 2

admin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:21:26 +0000

In our first post about trends in the enterprise for the coming year, we looked at five forces that will rise in importance in 2010. In part two, we picked five more trends that we feel will have importance in the enterprise for the year ahead. The more we look at the space, the more we see how mobile looms over all of these trends. It will help shape IT spending in the years ahead as smart phones and other devices increasingly become part of daily work life. Sponsor API's The use of API's will come on strong in 2010 as more companies adopt web-oriented architectures that reflect the growing importance of using social technologies as communication and productivity applications. For instance. you may know OpenSocial as a consumer-facing service for Google gadgets to integrate with Ning, MySpace and LinkedIn. But its true potential may be in the enterprise. Just before Christmas, OpenSocial announced it had written a white paper on a number of enterprise vendors. The paper lays the framework for an API infrastructure that customers may use for integrating Google gadgets. Companies participating in the effort include Atlassian , SocialText , CubeTree , Cisco , IBM , SAP , eXo Platform , Alfresco and of course, Google. Each of these enterprise vendors is integrating with OpenSocial to extend its products and for purposes of interoperability with other enterprise vendors. We expect that in 2010 more companies will develop API road maps to push information out to customers. We'll be watching companies like Sonoa Systems and Mashery as barometers for API adoption in the enterprise. Web Oriented Architecture The concept of web oriented architecture (WOA) first emerged a few years ago. Gartner's Nick Gall developed the concept and it has since grown in scope. Dion Hinchliffe recently wrote a WOA "un-manifesto," detailing the 17 principles that guide it. The future of WOA does not mean the end to service oriented architecture (SOA) but it does point to a shift in views about the way the Web works in the enterprise. As he always does, Dion Hinchliffe accurately illustrates the concept: WOA's influence can't be underestimated. Enterprise architects are looking to data-oriented services. Traditional SOA is still important to many organizations but the trends clearly point to the deeper availability of Web service components. And with this comes an increasing volume of applications that can be easily developed. Application architectures will be increasingly perceived as dynamic, configurable items, like pieces loosely joined. Community Management Social media has to be one of the most over-used phrases of the year but it should not reflect on the increasing need for community management practices within the enterprise. We expect community management to become an increasingly valued role. You only need to look as far as the proliferation of API's to understand what is happening. As pieces of information spread to communities across the web, the need to create a stronger bond will only intensify. The idea being that as more communities engage, the need to service them will change. The processes for spreading and aggregating information will become further automated but people with communications and technical skills will be increasingly needed to keep the communities cohesive. VoIP VoIP will move deeper into the enterprise. The days of closed, siloed telephony systems are coming to an end. The freedom of web-based communications will be far more clear to the enterprise customer this year as the sheer volume of applications and features enter the market. Again, this trend in many ways stems from the move to WOA in the enterprise. The move is to the web. Voice will also heed the call. A number of factors point to this trend. Google's intentions to enter the enterprise are pretty clear. Google acquired Gizmo5 , the web-based service for making calls from your computer or your mobile phone. This is a service that Google is expected to provide as a business service. Bandwidth.com recently unveiled its nationwide voice IP-network. Skype is making a play for the enterprise. Cisco and Skype have a partnership to offer Skype's service to customers. Avaya is said to be close to a deal with Skype. The signs are all there for VoIP to be a trend to watch next year. The Big Sync Finally, cloud computing will continue its pace as a trend to watch. But with it will come a battle that will leave some players bruised and battered. Microsoft has to be the most vulnerable. Joe Wilcox of Betanews makes an interesting point about this in a post about the need for Microsoft to do a better job in syncing mobile devices to the cloud. Here's why: Syncing has real importance with the advent of the mobile enterprise. Take the Blackberry as an example and its ability to sync to your email. Now, we have applications that update all the time. Syncing is critical in order for these applications to work on your mobile device. Wilcox makes the point that Google seems to get this and has done a good job in providing the ability to sync on the mobile. Ironically, this is in large part thanks to Microsoft, which licensed its "ActiveSync," technology to Google. Soon after, Google used ActiveSync in "its e-mail, calendar and contact synchronization from its cloud services to iPhone and Windows Mobile handsets," writes Wilcox. "Google also used the technology to provide Exchange Server sync with Google Apps, so that businesses could use the hosted service instead of Outlook." Google has it right. Apple seems to get it. But Microsoft does not have a clear path for syncing updates across a wide network of applications to a mobile device connected to the cloud. Conclusion As we look deeper into trends, it's evident that Google is getting a lot of attention. But the attention is deserved. Google took advantage of the recession to invest in research and development. Microsoft keeps promising big things but its direction is confusing. How data is accessed and delivered is the name of the game in 2010. It's a disadvantage to keep information in a silo. Monolithic applications and static documents will be less valued, replaced by a mobile enterprise fueled by web-based services. We saw massive adoption of the social Web in 2009. Next year will be the year where WOA and mobile technologies become core parts of the infrastructure for the enterprise. Discuss

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5 Enterprise Trends To Watch in 2010: Part 2

iPhones Share Data with SwapKit Protocol

cgseo — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 01:55:55 +0000

Emanuele Vulcano is making waves with his latest Infinite Labs release . The grad student recently released SwapKit - a new iPhone OS exchange protocol that allows developers to share data between locally installed iPhone apps. Sponsor SwapKit is a unique protocol in that it allows developers to transcend the walls of the iPhone OS and pluck information from across a local network. In his own Mover application, Vulcano allows iPhone app users to add photos, videos or contacts to Mover's table. From here you can slide your various forms of media to nearby Mover app users. The result is a Bump -like application interface that allows for easy flow between devices. The Mover app will ship with SwapKit support in its next update. In this case, the application will use SwapKit's built-in UI to identify the sending and receiving app using a grand total of two lines of code. SwapKit is available as a binary package or you can view the source repository in GitHub . The API documentation is also available on Vulcano's Infinite Labs site at infinite-labs.net/swapkit/docs/api . Below is Erica Sadun's TUAW demo video of the protocol. Discuss

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iPhones Share Data with SwapKit Protocol

Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features

cgseo — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 23:29:16 +0000

One of the best things about Twitter is its wildly creative ecosystem of applications built by people outside the company. Those apps have been constrained, though, by technical limits imposed on retrieving data from Twitter. Those limits are just about to be raised much higher and developers tell us that a whole new world of applications and features may become possible. Twitter's Director of Platform Ryan Sarver followed up on earlier public announcements this weekend with an email to developers explaining plans to raise the limit on the number of times an application can request information from Twitter for a single user to 10 times what it is today (from 150 req/hr to 1500/hr) and to offer everyone the same kind of paid access to the full "fire hose" of user updates that Google and Bing enjoy. People who build cool Twitter apps say this is very big news. Sponsor Twitter developers say the new changes could lead to: Richer functionality for apps and services, beyond new user interfaces. More development around new features like Retweets and Lists. More real-time user experiences. Improved viability for the Twitter API. The Twitter API gets hit every time an application wants to look up a user's friends, their updates, their bio information and more. If you're building an application that analyzes, cross-references and offers useful and fun insights and features based on those types of information, then current API limits are a constraint on how much analysis you can perform, bake-down and present to your users. Raising the limits on developer access to user information will enable more processing to be done behind the scenes and more magic to be presented to end-users of Twitter apps. We spoke to some of our favorite developers about both the API limit increase and the fire hose access. Here's what they had to say. Iain Dodsworth, Tweetdeck "Not wishing to overstate the case but these changes will allow for the next generation of Twitter app. So far the ecosystem has mainly concentrated on providing numerous new UIs onto Twitter (with pretty good success I might add). Potentially the 10x API will signal a shift towards richer functionality & service development: Twitter 2.0. [emphasis added] "We're already working on functionality which mines and analyses Twitter data within the application layer which wouldn't be possible without a 10x API limit. I'm interested to see how the API scales with these new API limits." Loic Le Meur, Seesmic "The increased API limits allow apps to come up with new interaction models for Twitter, and also to catch up on all the new features Twitter added (new RTs, lists), which couldn't be supported properly with 150 requests per hour. " Justyn Howard, SproutSocial "On the 10x increase - Not too many people bump into the authorized limit today unless they run multiple apps, but that was by design. All of us developers built in controls to limit the calls, which has left power users constantly slamming the refresh button. So this does a couple of things: 1. It allows developers to loosen the logic throttling API calls which will create a closer to real-time experience for the end-users. 2. Also opens some new opportunities on cool things we can do which require the user API vs. Search (some things you can't get from the open API's, you need to use the user's account to do them). 3. Will open the doors for more secondary apps, where users previously couldn't have more than one or two [different Twitter apps] open without hitting rate limits, you'll see more people using niche apps in the background if they provide some capability beyond what Seesmic, Tweetie and Tweetdeck offer." On Access to the Firehose for Everyone Kevin Marshall, co-founder of innovative social graph parsing application provider Wow.ly , builds apps that have a clear need for increased rate limits. "This is great," he told us, "because the 150 per hour limit in conjunction with various API features (for example, the social graph API) makes it very difficult to pull off some more 'advanced' features I would like to build." On offering the Firehose to everyone, Marshall had an unusual and interesting response that demonstrates the maturity that this ecosystem is developing. It's not a simple matter of everyone chasing thoughtlessly after the real-time stream. "The more I do with and around social data, the less interested I seem to become in 'realtime' and the more interested I become in 'over time.' When I first started hacking on Twitter (and Facebook) apps, I was in love with the idea of parsing and analyzing data in real-time and I was very link/content focused. But the more I build and use these tools, the more I see the value in the history and the trails of the data set - especially when you consider that we are all living in a more asynchronous world then ever before thanks to things like blogs, Tivo, Hulu, iTunes, and other media-on-demand stuff. I don't think it's really so much about 'what are you doing right now' as it is 'what have you done that's interesting to me right now?'...and I think you get that by aggregating and analyzing." None the less, many developers will welcome the opening of previously selective fire hose access. Mailana founder Pete Warden says even his seed-funded company is looking forward to ponying up some cash. "This may sound counter-intuitive as a starving entrepreneur," he told us, "but the best guarantee the API will stay open and available is if Twitter makes money from it." "It gives developers the chance to move from being charity-cases to paying customers, and so gives Twitter a lot more reasons to listen to what we want. Anyone who wants to deal with the flood of data from the firehose already has to invest in some beefy hardware, (my server and bandwidth bills are thousands of dollars a month) so reasonable fees from Twitter shouldn't raise the barrier to entry by much." These changes are expected to go live soon and we look forward to seeing what they enable new and old Twitter apps to do. You can find and follow the RWW team on Twitter here . Discuss

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Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features

The Perils of 3rd Party APIs

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 23:00:00 +0000

In 2006, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake coined the term "BizDev 2.0" when looking at the phenomenon of supplying commercial API keys to startup partners. Said Fake, traditional business development meant "trying to get hopelessly overbooked people to return your email. And then after the deal was done, squabbling over who dealt with the customer service. [It's] much, much better this way!" Three years later, many are finding that while APIs are great biz dev tools for the larger provider, startups can often suffer under the thumb of their platform keepers. Sponsor In November ReadWriteStart spoke to

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The Perils of 3rd Party APIs