If all your interests and skills were reduced to a scannable set of tags and thumbnails, what would your ego look like? That's the question startup YouTego attempts to answer with their web-based app that asks users to spend a few minutes in navel-gazing self-definition to create a snappy page of terms and related images. It's simple, social and actually quite fun once you get the hang of it. Sponsor The thing that impressed us about YouTego is that it's part of a growing trend of simple self-tagging systems such as Glue that allow users to claim mastery of or affinity for concepts, objects, groups, places, and people. With relatively little "profile" information, users are able to identify themselves within the context of the universe around them. In YouTego, the UI isn't quite as intuitive yet, but the results are pretty slick. Users have the option of telling the app a little bit about themselves, then they can identify "tegos" (tags for the ego, according to the site) to show what they can do, where they work, where they go/went to school, what they love and more. For the visual component, the user is asked to select a thumbnail for each tego. These images are found through a lightbox-type feature in the app and can come from any number of sources, including Google search or a specific Flickr account. Once tegos are created and elaborated upon through expressions and impressions, the user can be matched to others on YouTego or other users' content, can "star" other users' tegos and can add TegoMates or friends. It would be cool to see the service integrated with Facebook and Twitter, which it doesn't appear to do currently. And the app is very young and has its bugs. For example, it doesn't play well with Chrome at all. Still, it's gathering a lot of good data about related tags, tags related to images and how people connect over expressions of their own personalities. Discuss

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YouTego: An Addictive App for Self-Visualization

Collaboration services targeted for the small business market often seem more like software suites than web-based services with deep linking capabilities and tag-based environments. For example, the new offering from HyperOffice focuses on features that are fundamental to small business operations but lacks the advanced capabilities that we see from a number of Enterprise 2.0 services. Is this a good thing? Is this due to the domination of document-based systems that have traditionally been such a part of the small business world? Sponsor We are torn on this one. We see a number of companies offering services such as real-time collaboration environments. Still, the portal mindset seems to have such a hold on the small business market. HyperOffice looks like it is providing a service that has value for the small business. But like others we have seen, HyperOffice feels monolithic. It provides the capability to create personal and group environments but extensions to the web are limited. In some respects this may be just the right approach. HyperOffice users may not want the capability to build data mashups and tie into services like Twitter. The company points out that the market is flooded with Web 2.0 style point tools. The HyperOffice platform is a one-stop shop. This may be smart as the company is targeting Microsoft Sharepoint and Lotus Notes users. A SaaS like HyperOffice may be enticing, perhaps even more because it has similar functionality to the offerings from the big players in the market. The HyperOffice UI resembles a Microsoft Office environment. The main page includes icons such as desktop, mail and calendar. The features are basic but provide a clear functionality for the user. HyperOffice has personal and group settings. Groups may share calendar items, collaborate on documents and other tasks. Additional features include tasks, notes, a wiki and the ability to search Google and Yahoo! from within the application. Here's an overview of the service: Google Apps and Zoho provide a deeper web experience than HyperOffice. But there is definite value here for the company looking for an affordable, CRM service. Pricing starts at $7 per user, per month. Discuss

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Why Do Small Business Services Sometimes Lack Sophistication?

German company apnoti.com has today launched what it claims is the world's first mobile price search engine with integrated barcode scanner. It's an iPhone app called iBARCODE , which enables users to scan product barcodes and find the best prices. It currently only works in the U.S., U.K, Germany and France. To scan, the user simply holds the iPhone over a product's barcode. The integrated camera in the iPhone essentially takes a photograph of the barcode, from which the app recognizes the product and finds the best offers on the Internet for it. Sponsor These are located via the recently launched real-time price search engine smart.apnoti.com , which the company says has more than 65 million product offerings from more than 10,000 online shops worldwide. The mobile application recognises the following kinds of barcodes: UPC8, UPC12, EAN and ISBN. These barcodes can be found on a range of products, including cameras, audio and hi-fi devices, computers, furniture, books, DVDs and medicines. The iPhone app also enables users to store and send product watchlists. Last year we ran a series entitled The Scannable World: Barcode Scanning In The Real World . But we're only now beginning to see user-friendly consumer applications that allow scanning of barcodes via mobile phone. Next page: screenshots of iBARCODE Discuss

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iBARCODE: Real-Time Price Search Engine Launches

In the world of IT, social buzzwords can be a real way to kill any interest in adopting applications that give the enterprise access to the consumer Web. You have to speak their language. Social media? No way. Social middleware? Oh, yeah - now we are talking! Socialware talks in a language that IT can understand. The company is offering social middleware products that help companies integrate social networks with a level of control that makes them comfortable that the access is compliant with government regulations and IT policies. Sponsor In many ways, companies have set up their own iron curtains to keep social interaction to a minimum. It's also fair to say that many companies are eager to let their employees engage with the social Web. But they want the risk managed, especially when it comes to interacting with social networks. Socialware believes the missing component for the enterprise is a bridge layer that helps companies connect its people, processes and systems with the open, social Web. Socialware offers feature access control to social networks. An admin panel allows the IT manager to block access to different features on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. For example, users may access LinkedIn but there may be features that the employee is not permitted to access. The feature is flagged with a message that tells the user they do not have permission to use it. Socialware provides the security layers and controls that give corporate IT the comfort that the risk in exposing social networks can be managed with rules that reflect the policies of the organization. Socialware is funded by Mike Maples, Jr. , who is an investor in Twitter. It is also funded by Silverton Partners and G51 . The management team members have backgrounds in Web 2.0 and the enterprise. That's a mix that can make for a winning combination in the enterprise space. Socialware's technology is reflective of that experience. We'll be interested in seeing how the company develops in the year ahead. Discuss

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Social Media? No Way. Social Middleware? Oh, Yes

My6sense just anounced a new version of its iPhone application that can automatically highlight the most relevant tweets from the users you follow. The mytweetsense feature learns from the user's implicit and explicit actions and builds a model of what is interesting to the individual user. Mytweetsense works best for tweets that include links. The app's features are clearly geared towards these kind of tweets and include previews for links, videos and images. Sponsor The default view in the app displays all the recent tweets you received according to relevancy. You can also switch to a chronological view of your timeline and the app allows users to easily reshare content on Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed, as well as by email. Finding Relevant Tweets The app trains itself. My6sense just watches what links you click on and which articles you retweet or share on other social networks. It takes a little bit of training, but if our experience with the my6sense RSS reader is any indication, the results are surprisingly good. We got a chance to talk to Barak Hachamov, the company's founder and CEO at LeWeb earlier today. According to Hachamov, my6sense creates an extremely detailed personal profile of every user. It's important to note that mytweetsense mostly looks at the content of the links that you receive in your Twitter stream. While the app has an option to turn on the relevancy algorithm for tweets without links, the service works best when it can work with the additional information that is implicit in these links. Twitter lists and smarter real-time search engines have made it easier to keep up with the constant stream of updates on Twitter, but this is still a random stream of information. My6sense's iPhone app may not replace your favorite Twitter app right now, but it's a great tool to catch up on your tweets if you have been offline for a few days. You do, however, have to use it for a few days before you can get the best experience. The app first has to get to know you, after all. Discuss

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Finding Tweets that Matter to You: My6sense Launches New iPhone App

Apple has just booted a major iPhone developer out of the iTunes App Store along with their catalog of 1,000+ apps, a number so high it represented almost 1% of all the apps in the store. The developer, Molinker Inc., has been accused of attempting to game the ratings system where application users are allowed to review the various programs using a 5-star system. As discovered by an unnamed internet user and a reader of the iPhoneography blog , the ratings scam involved a set of iPhone application reviewers who only rated Molinker apps, giving them each a five-star review. Most of the apps in question ended up with 50 or so of these five-star reviews, representing what was clearly an attempt to boost sales by pumping up ratings through artificial means. Sponsor According to the user who unearthed the scam , the highly ranked reviews were poorly written and the reviewers in question had only rated applications from Molinker. Despite this fact, one of the applications ("ColorMagic"), had made it to the front page of the App Store where it was featured under the App Store "Staff Favorites" section. (On a side note, this makes us wonder whether those "Staff Favorites" are genuine picks from Apple employees or if there's some sort of automated algorithm that simply highlights high-rated applications.) In a detailed letter to Phil Schiller , Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, the accuser noted that the developer was likely using their promo codes (every developer receives 50 per app) on 50 of their own accounts to create the reviews. Shortly after receiving the letter, Schiller confirmed that this was indeed a scam and the developer apps "have been removed from the App Store and their ratings no longer appear either." Cheating Won't Get You Ahead, But What Will? While obviously we don't support unscrupulous developers who attempt to game the system in order to get ahead, we do understand the temptation. At present, the Apple iTunes Store houses over 100,000 applications and development shows no sign of slowing down. Developers who have invested their time, energy and money into building an iPhone application business are becoming desperate for ways to make sure their apps get noticed. The problem has become so bad that an entire ecosystem of "app discovery" services and websites has risen up to fill the void. Although Apple recently launched an " Apps for Everything " section on their website to allow for category-based discovery and extended their "genius" recommendation technology to include the App Store back in September, none of these solutions have really addressed the discoverability problem. For some developers, it has become a case of "desperate times call for desperate measures," apparently. We wouldn't doubt for a second that this ratings scam is the only one of its kind. It probably won't be the last one either - developers will just be more careful to not be as obvious as Molinker was. Unfortunately, the real losers here aren't the cheating developers, but iPhone owners. Without a trustworthy ratings system in place, it's harder than ever to pick out the best app from a handful of similar applications. Can you count on the stars as an indicator? Are the reviews out-of-date? Are the complaints referring to problems fixed ages ago through updates? Is the download count a true indicator of popularity? As more and more applications filled the virtual shelves, users will need a better ranking system than what's currently in place. We hope the geniuses at Apple are working on something like this right now. Discuss

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Apple Kicks Cheating Developer Out of the App Store

2009 may be remembered as the year that enterprises truly understand the importance of social software. This manifested with the rise of enterprise collaboration services, cloud computing technologies and the growing importance of mobile technologies for the enterprise. Web-based services are moving fast into the enterprise, raising questions about document-based environments in a world increasingly influenced by real-time information. We saw this time and again as the year rolled on. It played an important factor in how we developed our top ten list. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009: Our list includes three companies that made the list last year. We expect that this list may have some surprises. We welcome your feedback on the products that made the top 10 and your thoughts on ones that didn't make it. Microsoft Windows Azure and Sharepoint Microsoft has made huge strides with Sharepoint 2010. It is expected to continue its march into the enterprise this coming year. It may not be a best of breed application by any means, but its API is attracting a healthy number of third-party vendors. These companies are developing services to bring a level of transparency to enterprise data, which has historically been trapped in data silos. But Windows Azure is Microsoft's most exciting development. Ray Ozzie unveiled the cloud-based platform at the Professional Developers Conference last month and it is living up to its promise. It supports Ruby on Rails and MySQL, another sign that open-source is welcome on the Azure platform. Dallas, its mashup service, embraces the computational power of cloud computing, giving developers the ability to create their own applications that they may sell via the Azure platform. All in all, the services Microsoft is providing makes it a natural fit for the Top 10 list. Jive Software SBS 4.0 This Portland-based company continues to make strides into the enterprise. Earlier this Fall, the company unveiled Jive SBS 4.0 , its most significant update to date. SBS 4.0 is Jive's latest version of its enterprise collaboration technology. Jive may be the most threatening competitor to Microsoft Sharepoint. Its platform integrates with Microsoft Office, the iPhone and provides a social layer that users find compelling. Jive recently raised $12 million in venture funding from Sequoia Capital. Salesforce.com Salesforce.com took a deep dive into the social space this year, culminating with Salesforce Chatter , a real-time service that acts as an internal social network for its customers. It was the culmination of a big year for the cloud-based service. Force.com, its application platform, saw significant growth. To date, developers have launched 135,000 applications on the platform. Further, a growing number of third-party services are integrating with the platform, showing again how important Salesforce.com has become in the Enterprise 2.0 space. SocialCast Social Business Intelligence One of our favorite companies in the web space, SocialCast is one of those services that just seems to understand the market and execute accordingly. What sets it apart is the user interface and SocialCast Social Business Intelligence , its sophisticated analytics environment, which will be a critical aspect to any service providing a real-time feed in an enterprise environment. Google Apps Google is making a clear move into the enterprise in a number of ways. Most recently, it enhanced its integration with the Blackberry. Google Sites recently had a major upgrade. Overall, Google is investing heavily in features to give enterprise customers more incentives to switch from Microsoft Office. We'll see how 2010 turns out for Google, but the path looks pretty clear for Google Apps to make further gains in the enterprise. Next page: Top Enterprise Products of 2009, 6-10 MindTouch MindTouch continues to find traction with its open-source services. Its most recent offering, MindTouch Cloud , is an open-source alternative to Sharepoint. Its ability to stitch together different data elements gives MindTouch an advantage in the enterprise, as customers seek additional ways to create dashboards that provide views into their internal systems and external environments. Cisco Collaboration This choice may be a bit of a surprise, but we feel that Cisco's investments in VOIP and collaboration services position it as a major player in the market. The company is acquiring Tandberg, it launched a social network service for internal use in the enterprise, and its VOIP service is now integrated with Salesforce.com. We see 2010 as the year that Cisco must tie it all together. It needs a glue to connect all of the services that it offers. Unlike Microsoft or IBM, Cisco lacks an underlying data structure. Still, the company's deep commitment to collaboration technologies in 2009 shows how it is transitioning to a new market that is built in many ways upon a social fabric. Socialtext The Socialtext story dates back to the days before Web 2.0. It began as a wiki provider and has since transformed itself into a collaboration service with real-time, microblogging integrations. In the past year, the company has continued to innovate - most recently with SocalCalc , the spreadsheet service that allows for multiple users to collaborate simultaneously across multiple documents. The challenge for Socialtext is to move past its perception as a wiki provider. The market is far larger for a collaboration platform and Socialext knows it. It will face steep competition in the enterprise against entrenched players like Microsoft and newcomers like Jive Software. present.ly Another company that may be flying under the radar to most, but is taking a smart approach with enterprise customers. Present.ly is an enterprise collaboration service that provides a real-time activity stream. It is profitable and growing, by taking the steps required to gain the trust of enterprises. Its security is tight and it offers the choice of an on-premise solution. present.ly is one of those elegant services that we admire for its smart fit with services like Twitter; and its compatibility with an array of mobile and web-based services. Apple iPhone Perhaps one of the mist revolutionary consumer products of our time, the iPhone is now also having a dramatic impact on the enterprise. Waves of business users have adopted the iPhone, creating demand for a new generation of enterprise applications. It's the Web that matters. Apple understands that dynamic far more than RIM and its Blackberry, which has a tough fight on its hands in 2010. There is no slowing down the iPhone - it's quickly becoming the app of choice for the enterprise. In Conclusion In 2009 we saw the rise of collaboration services, the maturing of cloud computing and advances in SaaS platforms. The rise of mobile technologies will continue in 2010. And social technologies in the enterprise? Well, they're here to stay. ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009: Discuss

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Top 10 Enterprise Products of 2009