According to a new study , enterprises continue to deploy social networking tools at an increasing pace. At the same time, though, this Cisco-sponsored study also found that a surprisingly small number of businesses have implemented formal processes and policies related to their use of social media. IT departments have also been left out of the loop when it comes to the adoption of social media tools. Only 10% of the respondents currently involve their IT departments as primary decision makers when it comes to choosing technologies for externally facing social networking initiatives. Sponsor This study was sponsored by Cisco and carried out by the IESE Business School in Spain, the E. Philip Saunders College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the U.S. and the Henley Business School in the United Kingdom. The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 100 companies in Europe, Asia and Africa. These businesses were selected because they were early adopters of social media tools. Most of the interviewed companies are using social networks (75%) and micro-blogging tools (50%) as their primary tools to reach their audiences. The study found that social networking tools like blogs, Yammer, Facebook and Twitter are now being used by almost every department in these businesses. The Honeymoon is Over As Neil Hair, assistant professor of marketing at Rochester Institute of Technology and one of the lead researchers of this study told us yesterday, it is also important to note that “the honeymoon period” for social media in the enterprise is coming to an end. Early projects were often led by one or two early adopters who were enthusiastic about the possibilities of using social media tools in their companies. Now, more and more companies are seeing social media as an integral part in how they communicate with customers and vendors. Missing Pieces: Governance and IT Only 1 in 7 companies have formalized a process for adopting and deploying these tools, however. Only 1 in 5 of the interviewed companies have created internal policies that govern the use of these tools by their employees. As the researchers noted, quite a few companies struggle with finding the right balance between “the social and personal nature of these tools while maintaining some amount of corporate oversight.” Very few companies (1 in 10) report that their IT departments are directly involved in their social networking initiatives. As these tools become more important, however, the the demand on IT to integrate these tools into the existing infrastructure will surely rise as well. Discuss

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Businesses Need to Formalize Their Social Media Policies

As some of our readers know, I was clumsy enough to hack off a chunk of my finger while making dinner a couple nights ago. This incident has severely curtailed my blogging activity, but it’s led to a fortunate inspiration, as well! For those of you who are differently-abled – temporarily or otherwise – or for those of you who are simply too lazy to type, here are a handful of resources for hands-free Internet use, from blog posting to Twitter updates to straight-up voice-to-text transcription services. I hope you find these apps as useful as I have. Sponsor Jott Jott is a transcription service that takes your speech and converts it to text. With tiered subscription plans that run a modest gamut of around $4 per month to $13 per month and a pay-as-you-go option that seems perfectly geared toward casual users, Jott is competitively priced for both a satisfied userbase and profitability. The site allows users to set in 15- or 30-second snippets of audio to be converted into text. Jott also offers services for consumers (voicemail transcription) and the enterprise (a Salesforce integration ), as well. The company started in Seattle in 2006. Since then, they’ve integrated Twitter functions and a suite of mobile apps for various devices. QuickTate A similar service we found is QuickTate. This service allows users to leave audio messages for themselves via phone; the messages are then transcribed to text and delivered to the user via SMS or email, depending on one’s account settings. Text messages are also available on the web. QuickTate also allows provides a voicemail transcription service and has a handy iPhone-optimized widget. It too offers tiered subscription plans, with a convenient free option for occasional users and monthly plans ranging from $3.50 to $30 a month for up to 200 transcribed messages. We actually tested this one firsthand and found the vocie-to-text process both quick and extremely accurate – Google Voice transcription this was not. Each word was correctly spelled, and sentences were adequately punctuated. TweetCall TweetCall was another simple, free and accurate service we tested for posting updates to Twitter. There are many similar apps on the market, including TwitterFone (still in private beta after more than a year and a half since inception), but we appreciated the quick and easy nature of TweetCall. Signing up for the service took no more than a minute, after which we were able to dial 1-877-TweetCall, enter an optional PIN and leave a message to be transcribed to a 140-character tweet. The service worked just fine, and the text of the message was transcribed beautifully: We were not too surprised to learn that TweetCall is, in fact, powered by QuickTate. We were curious enough to dig around to find out why each product had such quick and accurate transcriptions; we found both are affiliated with iDictate , a long-standing figure in the space that employs actual human beings to get voice messages into text formats. It might not be the most technologically innovative or scalable solution, but these two apps certainly did everything we needed them to, and with a higher degree of accuracy than similar applications that rely on machine transcription of messages. Audio Blogging on Tumblr Lots of blogging software applications have tools for audio posts, but few are as simple as Tumblr’s. Tumblr has the distinct advantage of giving users a completely free offering, as well. Early last year, Tumblr gave users the ability to post audio entries to their blogs. While this function doesn’t provide any text transcription, it does do the trick for most casual bloggers who might need to call one in on occasion. We tested it out , and weren’t too disappointed. The sound was a little muffled, though, and it’s definitely not a feature that would be of any use to professional or enterprise bloggers. Visual Voicemail For an extensive and thorough look at voice-to-text voicemail transcription services, check out this post from Baratunde Thurston . I did not test voicemail transcription services because I, dear reader, make a point of not checking my voicemail, ever. Although Google Voice and similar services’ audio message (mis)translations can be humorously wrong, they’re often helpful for getting the gist of a communiqué without having to reroute through the labyrinthine depths of one’s voicemail inbox. Let me know your favorite voice-to-text apps in the comments – I’ll need them while I’m resting up and trying to regenerate my finger down in the basement of the ReadWriteLabs. Discuss

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Voice-Activated Internet: Text-Free Tweeting, Blogging & More

Less than a week ago, Google introduced its own Android phone, the Nexus One . Over the weekend, we got a chance to take the phone through its paces and while we aren’t quite ready to give up our iPhone yet, the Nexus One is a formidable challenger. Apple will clearly have to step up its game with the next iPhone if it wants to hold off Android’s momentum. In terms of features, the Nexus One is already on par with the iPhone platform and beats it in many areas. When it comes to the overall user experience, the iPhone is still a step ahead of the Android platform, but that could easily change in the near future. Sponsor Hardware For the sake of this review, we won’t look at the Nexus One hardware in great detail. Suffice to say, the 1GHz Snapdragon processor makes the phone extremely fast and the 3.7 inch AMOLED screen simply looks gorgeous. While it isn’t much bigger than the iPhone’s screen, the difference in resolution (800×400) is quite noticeable. We didn’t get a chance to formally test the phone’s battery life, but unless we made extensive use of the GPS, it easily got through a day’s use without needing a recharge. The phone’s five megapixel camera works just as advertised – though the camera app isn’t the prettiest app on the phone. Picture quality was generally on par with pictures from the iPhone 3GS, though the built-in LED flash gives the phone an important additional feature that Apple doesn’t currently offer. In the long run, the big difference between the two platforms isn’t the hardware but the operating system. After all, the iPhone 3GS is also quite fast and we haven’t heard a lot of complaints about the iPhone’s screen. Android 2.1 isn’t a major step up from version 2.0, but it does introduce some notable new features, including the ability to use voice in every application that brings up the built-in virtual keyboard. Android 2.1 While the Nexus One isn’t an iPhone killer, it’s already on par with Apple’s phone in many regards. As Google and the developer community that has grown around Android continues to improve the OS, it is only a matter of time before Apple will have to react with an updated version of its iPhone OS. Here are some of the features that make the Nexus One and Android 2.1 a winner in our opinion. We should note there are some unresolved customer service and hardware issues that have made headlines over the last few days. We didn’t experience any of these problems ourselves, but your mileage may vary. Nexus One and Android 2.1 vs. the iPhone Google Navigation : When it was released for Android 2.0, we described Google’s own GPS application as the first “killer feature” for Android. Google hasn’t really updated this app in 2.1, but it remains one of the signature features for Android. This is also one of the many apps that showcases Android’s ability to multitask. On the iPhone, for example, you have to exit the GPS app while you check your email. On an Android phone, the app simply continues to run in the background and continues to give you voice prompts. Voice Recognition : We were quite skeptical about this feature at first. Every time Android 2.1 brings up the keyboard, you now have the option to dictate text into the phone. This works surprisingly well and makes writing a quick email or tweet very easy. Some apps, including Google Navigation, can also handle more complex voice commands. On the iPhone, the newly updated Dragon Natural Speaking app works similarly well, but suffers from the fact that it isn’t integrated into every application on the phone. Multitasking : Other smartphones like the Palm Pre also feature multitasking for third-party apps and handle switching between these apps better than Android. At the same time, though, one of the iPhone Achilles’ heels is its inability to run more than one non-Apple app at a time. No such problem with Android, though running a lot of apps in the background can put a lot of strain on the battery. Back Button : Besides the volume controls, the iPhone only features one button. The Nexus features quite a few more (back, menu, home, and search, plus a trackball). The back button is likely the most useful of these and works just like your browser’s back button. On the iPhone, whenever an app takes you to a browser, the app quits and opens up the browser, leaving you no easy way to get back to the app. On Android phones, you simply click the back button and you’re back to where you started. Google Voice : If you use Google Voice, you are surely aware of the controversy around getting the Google Voice app on the iPhone. On Android, it’s simply a built-in feature and works perfectly. You can even set up the phone to route international calls through Google Voice by default. Photo Gallery : Google worked with CoolIris to integrate the company’s signature 3D-view of your photos into the Android photo gallery app. This is easily the prettiest and most useful default gallery app we have seen on any phone to date. Google Integration : If you are heavily invested in the Google universe, then setting up Android is as easy as it gets. When you first start up the Nexus One (or any other Android phone for that matter), the phone will ask you for your Google Account credentials. Once you enter these, the phone will set up all the Google apps on the phone for you. The phone sets up your email accounts and downloads contacts from Google Contacts. The gallery app connects to Picasa and the calendar connects to Google Calendar. Areas for Improvement But there are also some areas where the iPhone is still a clear winner: Music : For now, Android’s music app doesn’t come close to the iPhone’s native iPod app. While it’s not woefully bad, it also doesn’t come close to the design and functionality of the iPhone. User Interface : While Android 2.1 looks pretty nice and offers some cool new eye candy like animated wallpapers, Apple is still one step ahead of Google when it comes to the fit and finish of the built-in apps. Also, while we love the back button on the Nexus One, using the menu button isn’t very intuitive and quite a few people we showed the phone to struggled to understand its functions. App Store : No doubt, Apple’s App Store features far more applications than the Android Market. Especially when it comes to games, Apple beats Google hands down. OS Updates for Everybody : You can reasonably assume that the iPhone you buy today will be supported with OS updates for the two years of your contract. With Android, you can’t be so sure about that. It’s still a moving target and quite a few early adopters are still stuck with Android 1.5 because their vendors never updated the phone or because their phones don’t feature the necessary hardware to run later versions of the OS. As we pointed out last week, the Nexus One and Android 2.1 aren’t quite ready for the enterprise yet, and Google has to work on the security features of the phone and software before it can become a major player in this market. Google, however, is aware of this and is already working on an enterprise version of the phone. Verdict Overall, we were very impressed with the phone’s hardware and software. Android 2.1 could still benefit from some design work, but in terms of features and functionality, Android can now easily compete with the iPhone. Disclaimer : Google provided us with a loaner unit and a working SIM card free of charge. Discuss

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Nexus One and Android 2.1: Apple Better Watch Out

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we report on a new “superphone” launched by Google, take a look at how the Web is transforming personal finance, give you 5 reasons why RSS Readers still rock, get a first look at the new startup of ex-Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, analyze the trends that emerged from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (our daily resource for entrepreneurs). Also read on for details of the newly released printed edition of our current premium report , about the Real-Time Web. Sponsor Now Available: Printed Edition of The Real-Time Web Report At the request of the librarian community and people that just like paper , we have made The Real-Time Web and its Future report available in print . For those of you that prefer it digitally, you can still download it . Don’t forget about our Community Management Report . It too is coming in print soon, so watch out for it! Web Trends How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Today, free online tools like Mint , moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track financial information. So you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before. Editor’s note : This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . 5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock Recently we wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. We noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments. What we learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters Recently, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How did we know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told us. Nozzl Media unveiled this week a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records. Web Apps Meet Consumer Electronics at CES The 2010 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show ( CES ) saw a big trend emerge: web applications being ported to consumer electronics , from the technology inside cars to Web-enabled TVs. Earlier this week we noted that online music service Pandora will be made available in cars , courtesy of a new Pioneer device that will begin selling in March. Other evidence of this trend can be found in Ford’s announcement of a new in-car system and Samsung’s latest Internet-connected TV . SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise , devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations. The Pros and Cons of the Google Nexus One As An Enterprise 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? ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. 5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed. Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Los Angeles Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn’t the first place you’d think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like Demand Media and Docstoc call Southern California home, it’s not surprising that the community is emerging as one of the country’s hottest startup hubs. SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL Web Products Live Blog: Google’s Android Press Gathering Google held a press event this week to showcase the new Nexus One , which it described as “Where Web Meets Phone.” Google calls this a new category of phones – the “super phones.” The Nexus One apparently “pushes the limits of what is possible on a mobile phone today.” Google will sell the phone in its own web store. Check out our live blog coverage for more details. Droid’s December Boom: Metrics Show Device Use Doubled in One Month The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December’s stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption. In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests. Facebook’s 1st CTO Launches His Next Company Adam D’Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company’s first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora . Built by D’Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself “A continually improving collection of questions and answers.” Skype: Coming to a Couch Near You Starting this spring, you won’t need to gather the whole family around a 15-inch laptop screen to talk with cousin Joe on the other side of the country. As a matter of fact, you won’t even need to get up off the sofa after the evening news, because Skype is coming to the big screen – the big TV screen, that is. Skype announced this week that they have been working with LG and Panasonic to embed Skype in Internet-connected widescreen HDTVs. SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss

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Weekly Wrapup: Google Nexus One, CES Coverage, Online Finance, And More…

Let’s say you want a list of every Fortune 1,000 CEO in the United States, along with a picture and contact information. You can look through Google. Top page results may help a bit. But to get the granularity you need, top page results can only go so far. What’s the best way to go about discovering and collecting information that is so often scattered and fragmented? Crowdsourcing works but you need a process and a way to organize the information. Sponsor Smartsheet provides a way to use wikis and spreadsheets for crowdsourcing information from services like Mechanical Turk and Live Works . Smartsheet recently integrated with Google Apps. Clients can work from Google Apps to crowdsource information through Smartsheet. Let’s say you have a list of the startup companies from the top 10 metro areas in the United States. You have the names of the companies in Google Apps. But you are lacking the name of the CEO and any contact information. So, you add some columns and open the Smartsheet application directly from Google Apps. You may now make your request to have the work done for you. Smartsheet opens a service such as Mechanical Turk. You describe the job, what you need and set your price. As the tasks are performed, the new information pops into the spreadsheet. You can then import the spreadsheet back into Google Apps. Smartsheet integrates with a wiki environment. For example, Smartsheet works with Brain Keeper . Structured information from Smartsheet may be imported into the wiki, providing the crowd-sourced data to anyone with access. Crowdsourcing is a classic example of how the enterprise can get information almost immediately that could take hours to collect if done manually by one person. The cost savings alone makes Smartsheet an application worth giving a try. SmartSheet is a subscription service. Pricing starts at $9.95 per month on a per-user-basis. Discuss

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Smartsheet and Google Apps: Crowdsourcing Made Easy

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 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