What exactly from Office Web Apps and Office Mobile 2010 can you use on your mobile right now and what will be available when the product ships next spring? Mary Jo Foley does the best job of outlining what is happening here. Let's take a sky high look and see if we can make sense of things so you know what to do if you really have an interest in giving Office a try on the mobile. Sponsor First of all, Office Web Apps is now in beta and available for download. It is free. Here is the first point of confusion and in our book goes to the heart of the issue. The Office Web Apps you download today is NOT the Office Web Apps that will ship next spring. What you download today is actually the business version, which is the paid version of the product. We expect that if you download the application today then you will have to download a new one when the REAL Office Web Apps launches next spring. Let's move on to the next issue. What is exactly available with Office Web Apps ? According to Foley, it works with the following phones and apps: * IE on Windows Mobile 5/6/6.1/6.5 * Safari4 on iPhone 3G/S * BlackBerry 4.x and newer versions * Nokia S60 * NetFront 3.4, 3.5 and newer versions * Opera Mobile 8.65 and newer versions * Openwave 6.2, 7.0 and newer versions Hold on one more time. There is more we need to explain. According to Foley, you can only view documents in Office Web Apps. You can not write to

Zoho is making another move to serve as the IT department for the small business market. Its latest offering is a service for staffing agencies and human resources to automate the process for hiring people. The new service, available now, is an applicant tracking system that helps staffing agencies and recruiting departments track job openings, resumes and candidates. The enterprise is stil heavily dependent on email and manual processes for any number of practices with human resources being no exception to the rule. Sponsor Zoho's strategy is to create a level of automation that makes a human resources functions manageable, a model they have used for the services they offer for sales, marketing and other functions in the enterprise. Zoho Recruit has a number of features including web forms; the ability to aggregate resumes from social sites and ways to track the status of a client within the application. Activity streams are emerging as a standard for new social enterprise products. In Zoho Recruit, though, the activity streams look more like simple views into the status of a job opening, profiles of other people on the team and the interviews on schedule for the day. Here's an overview of Zoho Recruit: It's clear that Zoho s gunning for the enterprise market with a focus on the small business sector. The company is increasingly perceived as a competitive threat to larger, more established companies. This is illustrated by a Microsft executive's remark earlier this month that Zoho is a "fake" Microsoft office. Zoho responded with FakeOffice.org , featuring a video they made in September, renaming it "Fake Office - the Movie." Zoho is a challenger to Salesforce.com in the small business market, whic has moved up market in the past few years. That approach has worked for Salesforce but in these markets the company faces deep pressures from larger competitors such as Oracle. Zoho faces its own competition but it has a unique approach. Its products are varied, giving customers the feeling that they are using a service that is customized for their particular needs. Plus, we like their videos. They explain their products. How about that? Discuss

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Zoho Makes Another Move to be the IT of the Small Business Market

Salesforce.com launched a social enterprise application here at Dreamforce today that will allow companies to create their own private, social networks and integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social applications. Dubbed Salesforce Chatter , the application serves as a secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform. Sponsor The application models social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Salesforce.com Chatter provides the capability for customers to have profiles, feeds and groups. It will also integrate Twitter and Facebook so people may get these respective feeds into their social network environment. In addition, developers will have access to the 135,000 applications on the Force.com platform. Some of the features with Salesforce Chatter: Profiles: Includes contact information, area of expertise, work history and a photo. We are seeing more profile features in Enterprise 2.0 applications. Starups like CubeTree are using profiles as an anchor for customers to connect. Status Updates: A real-time activity stream - another sign that the real-time web is becoming a standard technology in the enterprise. Feeds: Content and applications will be part of the activity stream. For example, when an update is made to the Salesforce CRM environment, it will ping the feed to notify subscribers. Groups: Users may create their own groups to share content and updates. Social Content: Documents such as spreadsheets can be integrated into a user's feed, similar to how a photo is shared on a social network like Facebook. This has to be one of the more significant developments in how the enterprise is adopting the consumer web. It's another sign of the pervasiveness of social networks in people's lives. On a broader front, this can only help the cause of Enterprise 2.0 style companies. Users benefit in terms of having another option for how they use the social web in their daily work. Discuss

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Salesforce.com Launches Social Enterprise Application at Dreamforce

At Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference , Seesmic's founder and CEO Loic Le Meur just announced that the company will release a native Windows version of its popular Twitter client later today. Seesmic developed this client on top of .NET . As Le Meur told us yesterday, the new client will be faster and use significantly less memory than the current AIR client. In addition, Seesmic will now also feature a Firefox-like plugin infrastructure that will allow developers to extend the application through a new, built-in API. Sponsor As usual, Seesmic will first make this new Seesmic for Windows client available to members of its Team Seesmic beta test community. Signing up for Team Seesmic is easy and you will immediately get access to all of Seesmic's public beta products. Le Meur told us that a native Windows client was something that Seesmic's users had been requesting for quite a while. The Seesmic team worked on this new client for the last few months, though the company managed to keep this development under wraps and today's release comes as a surprise. While there are quite a few good native Twitter clients for OSX, the most popular Twitter clients on Windows are currently AIR apps. Features Being a native client, Seesmic can now also make use of some of Windows' built-in features like a system-wide spellchecker or Windows 7's location services . While Twitter hasn't launched it's location API yet, Seesmic will now be able to tab into this data quickly. The new client will also allow users to drag and drop their friends' avatars into user lists. Just like the current beta version of its AIR app, Seesmic for Windows will support Twitter's userlists and while the look and feel is similar to the AIR app, the Windows client also features vertical tabs in the sidebar that allow users to quickly switch between different views (all, accounts, userlists and searches). Plugins for Seesmic For developers, of course, the new plugin infrastructure also means that they can now offer their services directly in a Twitter client. The current version already showcases plugins from TweetMeme and MrTweet. According to Le Meur, this will also allow other Twitter-like services to build their own plugins and build their own columns in Seesmic without having to establish a formal relationship with the company. In a few weeks, Seesmic will launch a plugin gallery to showcase these extensions. What About the AIR App? Seesmic will continue to develop its Adobe AIR client for the time being, though chances are that the company is also looking at developing a native Mac client. Discuss

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Seesmic Goes Native: Launches Windows-Only Twitter Client

From a group calling themselves Electronic Civil Disobedience comes the Transborder Immigrant Tool , a simple mobile application intended to aid and abet border-crossers from Mexico to the United States by mapping the safest routes to take. This GPS app is built to work on the cheapest cell phones available. It brings to mind every petty-but-illegal transgression the casual user could commit and stretches the boundaries of the permissibility of tech's uses for plausibly illegal means. The next time you use P2P or bit torrent clients to download media or use an iPhone app to detect police radars, think about this mobile application and how it reflects on American law and the Internet. Sponsor UPDATE: According to the Transborder Immigration Tool website, the application uses Spatial Data Systems and GPS "for simulation, surveillance, resource allocation, management of cooperative networks and pre-movement pattern modeling (such as the Virtual Hiker Algorithm) an algorithm that maps out a potential or suggested trail for real a hiker/or hikers to follow." In addition to allowing would-be illegal immigrants quick and simple access to map information, the application's creators hope it will "add an intelligent agent algorithm that would parse out the best routes and trails on that day and hour for immigrants to cross this vertiginous landscape as safely as possible." On startup, the app finds GPS satellites. Once the user begins moving, the app acts as a compass that shows the direction the user is heading and also shows the direction a user must travel to reach a "safety site." The app seems to originate from a hacktivist group out of UCSD - hardly a historical hotbed of technological innovation, but close enough to the US-Mexican border to have a significant impact on the politics of technology in that area. The group also advocates DDoS-like digital sit-ins to bog down the resources of websites it deems offensive. In an interview with Vice Magazine, the app's creator, Ricardo Dominguez, said, "We looked at the Motorola i455 cell phone, which is under $30, available even cheaper on eBay, and includes a free GPS applet. We were able to crack it and create a simple compass-like navigation system. We were also able to add other information, like where to find water left by the Border Angels, where to find Quaker help centers that will wrap your feet, how far you are from the highway - things to make the application really benefit individuals who are crossing the border." Hundreds of would-be immigrants are killed each year while trying to enter the United States. Check out this Border Patrol YouTube video on the newly installed double-layered fencing between the U.S. and Mexico, a fence that stretches between 700 and 800 miles along the Rio Grande. The application is currently in an alpha state of development. Dominguez hopes that, through working with Mexican communities, churches, and other organizations, the app will be ready to use soon. So, what do our readers think? Is this Dominguez a political dissident or a legitimate academic researcher - or both? And is a mobile app enabling illegal Mexican immigration to the U.S. a live-saving tool for those who seek better opportunities, or is it simply another law-breaking tool developed by tech hackers for life hackers, a workaround to cheat the system? Discuss

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Illegal Immigration: There's an App for That