In the first generation of the social Web, the marketing groups and public relations teams would develop reports to provide metrics for a particular campaign. They were pretty much the sole users of "social media," technologies. That's a problem as far as WiseWindow is concerned. Social media is a poor label for describing how comments, blog posts, updates and other opinions can be leveraged to gauge views across social networks and thousands of Web sites. "Labeling of it as social media has limited its potential up to now," said Marshall Toplansky, president of WiseWindow. "That is why we are calling it mass opinion business intelligence and not social media analytics." Sponsor Now, the social Web is a real-time engine. Cloud computing is a reality and a new era is upon us that allows the enterprise to mine the vast sea of comments, reviews, updates and blog posts from millions of people. We're entering an era where the social Web will serve as the main territory for performing predictive analytics. WiseWindow is using artificial intelligence technology, web crawlers and the processing power of the cloud to get real-time results for enterprise customers. For example, this means that companies may leverage the social Web to make sales forecasts and gauge the opinions of mass society to immediately understand the current opinions about its brand or those of competitors. WiseWindow calls the product Mass Opinion Business Intelligence, describing it as a service that goes beyond keyword search and click-throughs to predict market movement. According to WiseWindow, sentiment analysis has failed as a strategic research tool. When matching words, the context is lost. People use words differently to describe their sentiments. The mass amount of data available makes the process overwhelming. Instead, the WiseWindow web crawler will search for comments and other opinions across thousands of sites that are not blocked by privacy restrictions. The artificial intelligence trains itself to look for a particular topic. It brings back all related opinions. The information is then distilled for the client or made available through a web portal where the data can be analyzed. Recently, WiseWindow worked with a client from the film industry. WiseWindow used its technology to research 400 films, generating 4.5 million comments from 70,000 sites. They distilled the data to lean what is hot and what is not. As another example, , WiseWindow did research for the film, Marley and Me , starring Jennifer Anniston and Luke Wilson. The pre-release promotions featured Luke Wilson. But the comments from the Web demonstrated that Anniston had greater appeal than Wilson. As a result, the trailers were changed to feature Anniston more than Wilson. WiseWindow was founded in 2007 by Rajiv Dulepet. He has an impressive background. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford's School of Management and Engineering, spearheading the development of presidential prediction projects for both the 2004 and 2008 elections. WiseWindow started developing its technology in 2007 and began working with clients last year. The company has four patents for its web crawling, auto-classifications of opinions, relevance recognition and in statistical language applications. Discuss

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Gauging Mass Opinion: Don't Label it Social Media

The Web 2.0 world may seem at times like a glamorous, hip place. Services get wild attention. The names are something out of the space age. The companies work out of coffee shops and lofts. But the money has a way of running out before the entrepreneur can find a way to make a profit. No wonder the enterprise world can look so enticing to a Web 2.0 company. So, we thought it might provide some perspective by looking at companies that are showing signs of reaching into the business market or have made the big switch. Sponsor Posterous is a stylish miroblogging service that has gained attention for its ease of use, especially the simplicity in it as a publishing tool. We corresponded with the company today and were told that it will launch a "Posterous for Business," service. The news follows an update to Posterous that allows multiple users to create group blogs that allow users to post to a group page on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. A company logo may be placed in the Posterous blog with a description. That's a big deal. Facebook group pages are becoming important for business users. It can be a bit clumsy trying to update to group pages from outside Facebook. This is an important development for the microbogging service, pointing to its entrance into the business market. Box.net started as a consumer service for people to store online files. In 2007, the company turned to the enterprise and has not looked back. In February, the company launched a new interface. Today, their client roster includes companies such as Nike, Oracle and Marriott. Its direction is pretty clear. The enterprise is where box.net sees its future. Xobni launched in January of 2008. The company billed itself as a social network for your inbox. Cool service. Today, Xobni places a good bit of its attention on the enterprise market . Xobni offers a service that allows administrators to provide Xobni for employees. It can be customized and has features to make it regulatory compliant. Control features are built into the service. In November, the company announced its integration with Salesforce.com. Xobni's future looks more and more like an enterprise play. No Going Back There is no looking back once Web 2.0 companies switch to a business focus. The business market is so entirely different than the consumer world. Free services can remain intact but once the move happens, it's rare to find a small company that can manage to dive deep into the enterprise while maintaining its focus on the Web 2.0 world. Some have been able to do it. WordPress is an example of a company that has had success with both consumers and the enterprise. Perhaps that will be the case with Posterous, too. Discuss

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Forget the Web 2.0 Glamour - the Money's in the Enterprise

Dyyno, which allows its users to stream and record live video from any application on their desktops, is launching a major upgrade of its service today. The company's service will now allow users to stream live and recorded video streams in full 1080p HD resolution. Dyyno has also dropped the price for personal accounts - which can stream HD video - to zero. These personal account support up to 100,000 concurrent viewers. Previously, these accounts started at $10 per month. Sponsor For the time being, Dyyno can only stream videos from Windows PCs. The company does offer a browser plugin for watching these videos on the Mac and Windows. The company's CEO Raj Jaswa told us that a Mac client is on the company's roadmap. We took a closer look at the service's features when the company launched in August. While the desktop client has evolved since then, the basic features remain the same. In our tests, the service worked just as advertised and the image quality of the 1080p streams was very high. It takes a decent broadband connection to work well, however - the HD video streams take up about Broadcast at 3Mbps. Dyyno supports up to 30 frames per second and encodes its videos in H.264. The company does not automatically scale the video streams down for users with slower connections, though for on-demand video, content owners can choose different bitrates for their videos. Running Dyyno's desktop client is very easy. After installing the application, you just have to drag the Dyyno logo from the client to any window on your computer and it will automatically start to stream this video on your personal Dyyno page. In addition to live streaming, users can also create a "WebTV" channels that plays videos at a set time. Requires a Plugin The fact that it takes a browser plugin to run the service could be a roadblock for some potential users, however. On the other hand, no other service that we are aware of offers free 1080p live streaming. Pricing As Dyyno's platform is based on a P2P architecture, it only makes sense for the company to offer the live streams for free. After all, the more users watch the stream, the easier it will be for Dyyno to deliver the video. The company does charge users who want to store more than 1GB of video for on-demand streaming on Dyyno's servers $10 per month. Dyyno does not charge for bandwidth. The P2P architecture doesn't lend itself for on-demand streaming, so Dyyno chose to charge for this aspect of its service. The company also offers business channels for $100 month, which include a total of 10 video channels and up to 100GB of storage. The company's high-end account, the Dyyno Broadcast station costs $1000 per month and allows users to store an archive of up to 1000GB of video and broadcast more than 100 concurrent video streams. Both the business and the broadcast accounts are stripped all Dyyno's branding. Dyyno plans to offer an ad revenue share model to companies that subscribe to these higher end accounts and who want to make use of the Dyyno's on-demand streaming solutions. Discuss

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Dyyno Launches Free 1080p Live Streaming Solution

Developer Toby Padilla was one of the first to defend music content resolver Playdar when it was released to developers. Since then Padilla has contributed more than just his morale support. The former VP of Desktop and Client Software at Last.fm has since built Playgrub - a bookmarklet that scrapes supported sites for music metadata in order to create playlists. Sponsor View Full Screen Padilla's Playgrub is one of the missing pieces in the Playdar puzzle. In early November we wrote about Playdar - a project created by former Last.fm founder Richard Jones and XSPF music playlist format creator

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Playgrub: Music Playlists for the Playdar Content Resolver

Two years and a month after announcing that it would launch a more professional-looking developer platform than the wildly successful one at Facebook, LinkedIn today finally opened up a series of application programming interfaces for other companies to build on top of. Make no mistake about it, though - there's some good news and there's some bad news. LinkedIn holds an incredibly useful body of data about its users - not just because of the relatively high net worth it brags about its users having but because employment information is a very useful way to put a person in context on the web. That data is now available for an ecosystem of other developers to incorporate; TweetDeck, Posterous, Ribbit and several other applications already have. Sponsor The Good News It's easy to get started. After two years of waiting, unreplied emails and heartbreak - developers should now be able to get an API key within minutes and start building on the LinkedIn platform. That's great news and not something that could have been taken for granted. The API allows search. That's great because with a little disambiguation done on the client side you can find the LinkedIn accounts of people you're connected to on other networks. Unfortunately, no one is doing exactly that yet - but isn't that the biggest value proposition here? I see a person on Twitter, on Facebook, on some other social network and I want to see what they do for a living. Let the app collect and expose that data from LinkedIn! Disambiguation of people with the same name and privacy limitations regarding who gets to see who's information are both complicating factors. The coolest use of the search API we've seen so far is Salim Ishmael's Knx.to . That service is limited to your own connections so far, but it's definitely a keeper. The API uses OAuth . That means that 3rd parties can offer fast, secure, standardized authentication into your LinkedIn user account. That's great. Activity updates are now parsable by type. The API allows developers to pull in just one type of the many updates a person gets on LinkedIn. Will someone please build an app that just shows me when my contacts change jobs and leaves out all the status messages, friend connections and other cruft? That kind of granular control has a lot of potential and is reminiscent of the vision behind the proposed user activity data protocol Activity Streams . And Now For the Bad News... The first use-cases make it look like LinkedIn is trying to be Twitter. Tweetdeck and Posterous are the most high-profile early adopters of the new API; Tweetdeck will give you a LinkedIn column (too bad LinkedIn contacts can't be integrated into other columns) and Posterous will let you publish links to updates on that platform over to your LinkedIn contacts' streams. Jobdash looks like Tweetdeck just for LinkedIn and job-hunting, but it doesn't yet offer features like limited display of notifications by type - it's just a big stream of updates. LinkedIn is not Twitter! LinkedIn's Adam Nash told us this morning that he loves the Twitter and Twitter-like integrations but "integrating messaging isn't the goal, there's a wide range of business applications that will benefit from it. Twitter is hot so people are jumping to that but there are far more compelling business cases." Two years after the business-oriented platform was announced tiny Tweetdeck was just so hot it out-maneuvered all the business applications that could have been built to showcase? I don't buy it. Just like the formal partnership between Twitter and LinkedIn earlier this month , I worry that this API is built with marketing, promotion and broadcast functions best served. Terms and Conditions are unclear, restrictive and changing. The API terms say that you can't build applications that compete with LinkedIn. API management service Mashery CEO Oren Michels (disclosure: RWW sponsor) had this in response to say: "It appears that you can't create a new experience around LinkedIn, an iPhone app for example. You might create some interesting bolt-ons to other services that might drive users to linkedin.com - but that's a very 5 years-ago approach to an API." "The signal from this is that they aren't encouraging developers to take the social graph and deep knowledge of peoples' professional lives and create new UIs for interacting with LinkedIn because they are explicitly concerned about competition," Michels said. "LinkedIn has amazing assets and a great business model - get out of the UI business!" Likewise several developers have expressed concern around the commercial limitations on the API. LinkedIn's Nash clarified with us that those terms simply prohibit charing people extra money for access to the free LinkedIn service and building an advertising network on top of LinkedIn profile data because of privacy concerns. Finally, the terms of the API aren't very clear. Nash said they were a work in progress and likely to be changed. Some of those changes appear to have been made in the 3 hours since the API launched . Likewise, Michels points out that rate limits on accessing the API aren't made explicit - only that there will be rate limits and that a developer can email LinkedIn to request a personal expansion of their limit. Not playing nice with others: LinkedIn is exposing what it calls an Activity Stream, but it's not at all related to the standardized format that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others are now publishing. LinkedIn publishes some Microformats but has been entirely absent from the wide-ranging community discussion of Activity Streams formats, we're told. Michaels may have said it best: "There are some really smart people over there at LinkedIn. If this is what we waited 2 and a half years for, it's a bit disappointing." It is a bit, but not entirely disappointing. We look forward to seeing how the platform evolves and what kinds of applications are built on top of it. The web has been waiting a long time for a LinkedIn platform - now let's see what happens. Discuss

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LinkedIn Finally Opens Platform: The Good & Bad News

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