MUCHBETAS

Open Education: Projects and Potential

2009-11-13T09:25:00.000-03:00

View more documents from Stephen Downes.

Zimmerman Keynote Mindmap DevLearn 09

2009-11-12T15:53:00.000-03:00

Eric Zimmerman spoke on games as the second day keynote at DevLearn. In it, he talked about how systems thinking was important, how games are systems of rules and consequently develop systems thinking. He talked about how our play brings meaning to the rules, and that creating spaces of possible outcomes allow us to explore.
He ended up advocating that we design for possibilities of unexpected outcomes to create meaning for our learners.

Source: Learnlets

McAfee Keynote at DevLearn 2009

2009-11-12T12:54:00.001-03:00

Andy McAfee gave us a lively and informative presentation on his view of Enterprise 2.0. Punctuated by insightful examples, he defined Enterprise 2.0 as “”use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals”, and characterized it more simply as ‘bringing web energy into organizations’.

Along the way, he emphasized points about emergent behavior, inherent altruism, emergent process, developing innovation, the intelligence of crowds, and real business benefits. A 20% improvement in innovation was one concrete result. He also warned us of the ways to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

BTW, Cammy Bean’s has posted a prose recitation of the talk. With no further ado:

Source: LearnLets

Cloud computing in plain english

2009-11-12T12:46:00.000-03:00

Common Craft explains Cloud Computing in Plain English. It’s a (very) broad overview of cloud computing, explaining it from the perspective of a business owner. But it seems unsatisfying and too simplistic. Most internet users have experienced some aspect of “the cloud” (in some ways, the cloud is a return to mainframe computing where storage and computation are not local) in their daily online interactions. Major software companies are pushing their data and software online – Google Docs is a great example…and Microsoft is releasing an online version of Office in 2010 (I initially thought Live.com would be MS counter to Google Docs, but the service only allowed users to upload and share documents, rather than collaboratively edit).
Cloud computing is a nebulous concept – is it a service? a concept? a technology? a series of protocols?. Currently it basically means “whatever our software company is doing right now” – just like web 2.0 in the mid 2000’s.

Source: George Siemens

The new SocialGo Concierge Plan

2009-11-11T14:53:00.004-03:00

The history of the Internet

2009-11-11T14:30:00.004-03:00

ZORAP Demo

2009-11-11T14:18:00.003-03:00

Local Dirt Demo

2009-11-11T14:00:00.002-03:00

Adding Google adSense to a Blogger Blog

2007-05-25T14:04:00.001-04:00

Create Your Own MTV Music Channel with YouTube and SplashCast | Tubetorial

2007-04-29T15:17:00.000-04:00

Create Your Own MTV Music Channel with YouTube and SplashCast | Tubetorial

A tale of two web 2.0 conferences

2007-04-27T11:37:00.000-04:00

A tale of two Web 2.0 conferences and mashups by ZDNet's Dion Hinchcliffe -- I've just come off a whirlwind conference tour that started in San Francisco last week with Web 2.0 Expo and ended with the Web 2.0 Kongress yesterday in Frankfurt. I was fortunate enough to be able to speak at both conferences and it was fascinating to see the differences in focus between the two events, as well as some of the apparent trends they had in common.

What is Enterprise 2.0

2007-04-27T08:15:00.000-04:00

Online Tools to engage students

2007-04-27T08:07:00.000-04:00

Massively multiplayer object sharing

2007-04-27T07:48:00.000-04:00

Zeus Jones web 2.0 expo slides

2007-04-27T07:36:00.001-04:00

SecureZIP

2007-04-26T04:48:00.000-04:00

SecureZIP

100 web 2.0 ideas for educators

2007-04-25T15:25:00.000-04:00

Yahoo Pipes Tutorial

2007-04-13T14:51:00.000-04:00

Bloglines - It Really Is Really Simple: RSS for Educators

2007-04-06T07:00:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Infinite Thinking Machine

It Really Is Really Simple: RSS for Educators

By infinitethinking@gmail.com (Infinite Thinking Machine) on RSS

Teachers often ask me "how do you find these things?" or "how did you know about this?" Much of the time I don't have to find or even look for innovative new things, because the news comes to me... and not because anyone is sending it to me, but because I'm using a tool called RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Once you learn about RSS, learning about other new tools becomes much easier, which makes RSS a potentially very important thing for educators (and students) to understand.

What is RSS?

RSS allows you to subscribe to online news and updates that are important to you. Once you subscribe to a source, you no longer need to visit that individual web site to check for updates... the updates come to you. Searching or browsing the web is a good way to locate sources initially, but once you've located them there is no need to return to them over and over. If they offer an RSS feed, all you need to do is subscribe.

TIP: Subscription, by the way, is FREE.

What is an RSS feed?

An RSS feed is really just a file (on a webserver) that includes information about the updates you are interested in. RSS is a lot like HTML, the programming language behind websites. Web browsers (like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari) can read HTML code and display a web page for you. RSS code is very similar, but must be read by an RSS aggregator (or reader), which can then display the update for you, including any enclosured files such as PDF documents or podcasts.

What is an RSS aggregator (or reader)?

An aggregator, sometimes called a reader, collects (or aggregates) all of your subscriptions in one place, like a magazine rack in your house or classroom. Once you subscribe to few sources, you no longer need to visit each site, you simply open your aggregator to read any new updates. The experience can be a lot like reading email, but can also be thought of as reading your own customized newspaper.

TIP: Web based aggregators such as Bloglines and Google Reader are particularly popular with teachers because they let you check your feeds from any computer, while aggregators like NetNewsWire (Mac) or FeedReader (Windows) have more options. iTunes (Windows or Mac) includes an aggregator for subscribing to Podcasts.

How do you subscribe to a feed using your aggregator?

Most aggregators have a subscribe button of some kind. Generally, all you need to do is locate the web address of the RSS feed (see the tip below), copy the address, click on the subscribe button in your aggregator, and then paste in the address. From then on, any new updates will appear in your aggregator and save you the trip back to the website.

TIP: Most sites with an RSS feed provide a link on their main page, often in a side column, and often indicated by an icon such as the orange one pictured above, or such as the ones here at the ITM, depicted (and annotated) to the right. Notice that sometimes a direct link is used for subscribing to a particular aggregator such as Google Reader.

Why do you need RSS?

Now that it is as easy to create online content as it is to consume it, the amount of information available online can be overwhelming. Once you find a trusted source, you want to be able to take advantage of future updates. However, you don't want to waste time checking sites when they haven't been updated... and on the flip side, you don't want to miss a potentially important update because you haven't checked back in a while. Ultimately, RSS saves you time by brining the updates to you when they are available.

What can you subscribe to?

RSS was initially intended to help people subscribe to news updates. Not surprisingly, many news sources have RSS feeds (also called news feeds). Check out all of the specialized feeds available at CNN.com, including an Education feed.

Blogs may be the most common source of RSS feeds. Almost all blogs have an RSS feed of some kind, if not several. As you can see the ITM offers a feed. If your students are blogging , you an subscribe to your student's blogs. For instance, if I were teaching high school English again right now, I wouldn't want to visit 180 student blogs to see who had answered their reflection questions, I'd want the updates to come to me as the students posted them. Also, for your own professional development you can subscribe to other educators' blogs... or even the ITM. Visit supportblogging.com to learn more about educational blogs and to find blogs to subscribe to.

Podcasts are another common source of RSS feeds. In fact, podcasting wouldn't be possible without RSS. Teachers often ask me what makes a podcast different from simply posting an mp3 file on their homepage... and the difference is RSS, which allows others to subscribe to a podcast and listen to it (or view it) at their own convenience - even on their iPod. You can subscribe to student podcasts (from your school or others) and to other educators' podcasts... or even the ITM shows. iTunes is a common aggregator used particularly for collecting podcasts. Visit the Educational Podcasting Network (or the Education category in the iTunes Podcast Directory) to learn more about educational podcasting and to find podcasts to subscribe to.

Other Web 2.0 (or read/write web) tools also commonly include RSS feeds. Most wikis allow you to subscribe to any changes. So, if students are posting to a group work wiki or making changes on the class wiki, you will be notified. Also, services such as social bookmarking (like FURL or del.icio.us), photo sharing (like Flickr), or even web searches (such as Google News, MSN Search, or Technorati) can provide additional sources of RSS feeds. This can be like having your computer research for you 24/7!

Where can you learn more about RSS in Education?

Will Richardson shares an excellent eleven page guide to RSS for educators. Also, feel free to leave your questions in the comments. The ITM bloggers and readers can help.

Image Credits: The RSS logo comes from the Wikimedia Commons. The annotated diagram of the ITM feeds I created with Snipping Tool 2.0 on my HP TC4200 Tablet PC. ;)

Bloglines - Marketing Account Manager 2.0

2007-04-05T15:36:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Online Marketing Blog
A marketing blog about the intersection of social media, search marketing and online public relations.

Marketing Account Manager 2.0

By Lee Odden on marketing account manager

Marketing/PR Agency Misukanis Odden is now seeking a new Marketing Account Manager to join our talented group of client-focused, online marketing professionals. The smart, internet savvy and highly personable candidates we'll be interviewing will have agency side account experience (3-5 years) in any of the following industries: search marketing, public relations, interactive or advertising. Candidates will also possess a combination of creative and analytical skills which are critical for our client's online marketing success.

The right person for the Marketing Account Manager position plays well on the strategy as well as the tactical side and has a neverending passion for learning. They are comfortable providing professional guidance to both clients and team players and are truly "people' people.

With an ideal 5 years of experience (fewer years, with a strong passion for online marketing and the smarts to go with it) our new Marketing Account Manager can't wait to learn about bleeding edge – high impact – strategies and tactics with a deep appreciation for marketing metrics and accountability.

Daily responsibilities of this key player will include:

Professional client interactions and strategic consulting
Directing and coaching internal service groups to successfully deploy tactics including:

- Email Marketing
- Website Enhancement and integrating client sites with marketing campaigns
- Public Relations - online and offline
- Event Marketing
- Search Engine and Social Media Marketing Initiatives
- Other potentially high-impact "test" tactics

Minneapolis

Misukanis & Odden is one of the top 20 public relations firms in Minnesota and TopRank is one of the most respected mid sized search marketing agencies in the industry.

More information about the Marketing Account Manager here or contact M&O HR department at: info at misukanisodden dot com with "Marketing Account Manager" in the Subject line.

Sponsored By: 2007 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide All new report from Marketing Sherpa

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Bloglines - Travel Oregon Launches a Social Network

2007-04-05T15:34:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Mashable!
Social software and social networking 2.0.

Travel Oregon Launches a Social Network

By Kristen Nicole on mashable

Travel Oregon has enlisted the services of GoSeeTell to provide a social networking platform for their travel site, GoSeeOregon.com.

This is another case of a static website garnering social networking components to improve their status. GoSeeOregon has some basic features of a social networking site. You can send messages to other users, but can't share photos or videos. GoSeeOregon also takes extra care to ensure that the users of their site are valid and trusted members. They've installed a system to calculate a trust-score for each member, validated by peer ratings. This should discourage spam to some degree. The site is geared towards travelers at large, so you don't have to be a resident to peruse the site, but its benefits would be more apparent if more pages within GoSeeOregon were public.

The site is of course hoping to gain reviews, comments, tips and networking to revolve around attractions in Oregon. The Google Maps are plentiful, but adding some travel information, even a sponsored flight search, could bring more value to visitors. Utilizing GoSeeTell's platform has allowed for this type of user interaction and encourages them to become an integral part of each other's traveling experience. Other travel social networks such as LonelyPlanet.tv don't offer the niche focus of GoSeeOregon, but the GoSeeTell offering is similar in functionality to Visitopia, which lets users sponsor a city site and build a social network around it.

Recommended: MySpace News - MySpace Launching News Site

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Bloglines - Inkiling markets, obtÃ©n la respuesta social ante un asunto de mercado

2007-04-05T15:32:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Genbeta
El software y los servicios vía Internet, con toda la actualidad y los mejores trucos.

Inkiling markets, obtén la respuesta social ante un asunto de mercado

By Cyberfrancis

Imaginemos que somos inversores y queremos saber sobre como responderá el mercado ante un producto en concreto. Para ello, podemos recurrir a lo que opinan los usuarios mediante Inkling markets, una red de usuarios a los cuales les plantearemos preguntas con una serie de opciones, y ellos podrán apostar por una opción positiva comprando acciones o no ser muy optimista con cualquier opción vendiendo acciones de dicha pregunta.

Se trata, en cierta manera, de jugar con un dinero virtual y negociar comprando acciones de las preguntas de mercado que vean con buena salida y vendiéndolas a las que crean que no.

Las preguntas de mercado irán en sus correspondientes categorías y serán organizadas mediante etiquetas, definiendo las posibles opciones a elegir como respuestas y marcando una fecha máxima de finalización. Podemos optar por hacerlas públicas o privadas, en cuyo casi definiremos los usuarios que puedan participar. El valor accionarial que vayan adquiriendo las preguntas de mercado podrán seguirse igualmente a través de un widget para lo que nos ofrecen el código para insertarlo en nuestros blogs o sitios web, y ya dentro de las propias preguntas de mercado, los usuarios podrán participar en discusiones dentro de las mismas.

Hay preguntas realmente interesantes, sobre todo del mundo de la tecnología, en la que podemos participar comprando y vendiendo acciones sobre las preguntas de mercado, obteniendo por ello un dinero virtual que nos servirá para seguir comprando e incluyendo nuevas preguntas de mercado.

Vía | BuzzShout
Enlace | Inkling markets

Bloglines - Rearden Commerce: Time For The Adults To Come In And Clean House

2007-04-05T15:29:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

TechCrunch
TechCrunch profiles the companies, products and events that are defining and transforming the new web. TechCrunch is written by Michael Arrington.

Rearden Commerce: Time For The Adults To Come In And Clean House

By Michael Arrington on ReardenCommerce

Silicon Valley based Rearden Commerce is a company that I've spoken to a few times over the last year to hear what they were up to. They are well known in enterprise/business solutions circles, and in a few months they are going to put one very large footprint down in the consumer space as well.

The best way to describe Rearden Commerce is "mashups for adults." Like some very early stage startups we profiled last week, they are targeting global services - hotel, airline, restaurants, rental cars, shipping, event tickets, and parking Eventually they'll dip down deep into the long tail and include things like doctor and dentist appointments, massages, etc.). In total, services are roughly 60% of the worldwide economy.

Their strategy to date has been to sign large corporate customers and create customized websites for their employees. The service acts very much like a personal assistant. Set your profile up with the types of restaurants you like, whether you like aisle or window seats, and your preferred car provider, and Rearden will book all aspects of your trip for you.

See restaurants within a certain distance from your hotel via a Google Maps mashup (and based on Zagat ratings and cuisine), pick one, and the software will make a reservation for you through OpenTable. Then they'll sync up with your calendar and your mobile device, and send you messages if anything goes wrong, like a flight delay. You can also access their mobile client to make changes to your itinerary. The interface is orders of magnitude beyond what Orbitz and other travel sites offer (click the screen shot for a larger view), and they'll also book your restaurant and find you tickets to the Lakers game that night if you like.

Rearden will also keep track of reward miles and points from airlines, hotels, rental cars, etc., and lets users use those points to book additional travel and other services. Cancel a flight? No problem. Rearden keeps track of the credit in its system and suggests you use it the next time you travel.

They charge corporate customers a yearly fee that ranges into the millions of dollars, and are able to take a fee per transaction as well. Companies like it because they have to hire fewer administrative staff, and have excellent visibility into discretionary travel and entertainment spending (because it all goes through the site). Companies can also control costs easily - if they are having a rough fiscal quarter, they can simply turn off business class travel and expensive hotels.

Services are pulled into the system using whatever interfaces are available. This is a big problem (since they have thousands of service providers), but it's also a huge competitive advantage now that they've done it. It will be very hard for anyone to scale to their size very quickly. No one else has even tried, so far.

Rearden allows employees using their service to create a personal profile as well, and plan their travel and entertainment that isn't business related with a different profile and credit card. That service has proved to be massively popular. And so their next step is to offer the service to anyone through resellers. In 2008, they'll release their own consumer branded service, too. They'll also begin allowing smaller service providers to hook into their system (that's when the doctors, dentists, flower shops, etc. will start to join in).

The company won't disclose their revenues to me (no matter how many times I ask), but it's clear that they already have substantial cash flow. They say they'll be cash flow positive by end of year, with 340 or so employees (they'll double from their current headcount of 160). The vast majority of their headcount are product focused and/or developers - the company still only has six sales people.

Rearden Commerce was founded in 2000 and has raised $100 million in funding from Foundation Capital, Oak Investment Partners and American Express. The American Express investment came late last year as part of a larger deal - Amex is now reselling Rearden Commerce to its corporate customers as well.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Bloglines - Mapwing Restructures Memberships and Price Levels

2007-04-05T15:27:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Profy.Com
Professional blog community

Mapwing Restructures Memberships and Price Levels

By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira on photos

A month ago, I reviewed Mapwing, a site that allows you to create your own personalized virtual tours using images linked to an interactive map you create. At the time, I thought the service was a great idea that was limited by its pricing structure and associated features, which seemed geared toward a business-only audience, leaving little room for the casual user.

Soon after my review went live, I received an email from Andrew Hagenbuch, the CEO and co-founder of Redbug Technologies, creators of Mapwing. Identifying himself only as "Andrew from Redbug" (I had to Google him to verify that he was, in fact, the CEO), he asked about my concerns about the pricing structure as well as a bug I was experiencing.

On Monday I received a general email letting all Mapwing users know that more features were available for free accounts, as well as an email from Andrew explaining that Mapwing was rolling the former Basic and Plus levels into one free level, with the separate premium Pro level available for businesses and power users. With the new structure, Basic virtual tours can have up to 20 location points, unlimited editing, the ability to embed your tour on other sites, and (my biggest complaint before) the ability to make tours private so that those pictures of you in a bathing suit on vacation don't have to be viewable by the masses. The Pro level allows up to 50 location points per tour as well as a new pricing structure: $15 for a single tour, or $195 for a year's worth of unlimited tours.

The new features and pricing structure make Mapwing a much more attractive site for the casual user, as well as providing a better pricing structure with more options for professionals and power users, and I'm happy to see the site make itself available to more people.

Tags: Mapwing, redbug, Google, andrew hagenbuch, virtual tours, photos

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Bloglines - Concurso Startup 2.0

2007-04-05T10:48:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Bitelia
Software, aplicaciones web, trucos y actualizaciones.

Concurso Startup 2.0

By Alberto Verdoy on Bitelia

Startup 2.0 está organizado por Spri, Alianzo y La Caixa y su objetivo es descubrir y premiar los mejores proyectos 2.0 europeos.

El plazo de presentación de proyectos se extiende hasta el 5 Mayo. Tras una primera votación por parte del Comité seleccionado y de los usuarios de Internet, se elegirán los 15 mejores proyectos que pasarán a una primera fase eliminatoria, que se celebrará en Madrid el día 15 de Mayo, donde se elegirán los 5 finalistas. El 24 de ese mismo mes se dará a conocer el ganador en un evento celebrado en Bilbao.

El premio para el ganador será:

Un viaje a Cambridge para asistir a un curso de una semana en el 'Center for Entrepreneurial Learning'.
Un anuncio de 2 semanas en TechCrunch (este es un grandísimo premio).
Posibilidad de presentar el proyecto en el e-Business Global Forum.
Material Técnico.

En cuanto al jurado, bueno, no tengo palabras, lo mejorcito de cada casa.

Startup 2.0 - El concurso de los mejores proyectos europeos 2.0 (Vía Wwwhat`s new)

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Bloglines - ComunicaciÃ³n cara a cara

2007-04-05T10:46:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

powerpymes.com
Herramientas Empresariales para las Pymes del Siglo XXI

Comunicación cara a cara

By bastidas on comunicación

Ahora que está por salir al mercado Joost las cosas ya no son igual que antes, ya que ya no se necesitan sitios que te den simplemente imagen sino que ahora la imagen tiene que ser la mejor, porque las conexiones de banda ancha lo permiten y es ahi donde muchísimas empresas saldrán al mercado ofreciendo esa imagen cristalina que demandan los nuevos tiempos. Bienvenido ooVoo que promete que puedes comunicarte por medio de videollamadas con quien quieras, sólo que ambos descarguen el software gratuito para poder realizar la conexión, de tal manera que sus comunicaciones con clientes, proveedores y compañeros de trabajo no serán iguales ya. Además puedes enviar videomensajes a cualquier correo electrónico y muchas cosas mas. La promesa parece interesante, será cuestión de probarlo en la empresa y veremos si las cosas son como las cuentan. ¿No cree?
via Dexly

Compartelo

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Bloglines - Creating Successful Niche Content Spaces on the Web

2007-04-04T15:46:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Portals and KM
This blog shares ideas and hopes to generate discussion on the use of portals, blogs, and knowledge management to provide value to organizations through practical applications. New trends and technologies are covered with a switch to art, music, travel, and food on the weekends.

Creating Successful Niche Content Spaces on the Web

By Bill Ives on trends: web 2.0

CNN offered an interesting article, Why commercial Wikis don't work: Crowdsourcing has been a giant hit for the Web 2.0 set -- so why won't it work for bigger, more mainstream enterprises? It covers some successes and failures in group content creation. The main point can be summed up in this excerpt.

"…Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and Flickr organize people into literally millions of accessible walled gardens. Each one allows you to take part in tending the growth of that tiny space -- that encyclopedia entry, that Flickr "tag. By tirelessly nurturing their specific communities, not by randomly "crowdsourcing," Wales, Butterfield, Fake and their ilk encourage responsible gardening. Wiki novels, Wiki op-eds, a Wiki Amazon: these are concepts too large, too uncontrolled, too wilderness-like - too unwalled - to be gardens. Either nothing grows at all there, or the good ideas get strangled by weeds."

So foster very focused content creation and stay away from trying to do too broad and ill defined a topic like writing a group novel. Success can come on a focused site or on a site that promotes and support multiple niche content areas like the Wikipedia. The article gives a nice niche example, the Lostpedia, "a Wikipedia-like site created by fans of the ABC series Lost who are all trying to figure out what the heck is going on, and sharing their notes." There is also the Intelipedia operating inside the Intel firewall to collect definitions of key work related concepts.

Link

Bloglines - More results on use of Web 2.0 in business emerge

2007-04-04T15:43:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Enterprise Web 2.0
Leveraging the convergence of IT and the next generation of the Web

More results on use of Web 2.0 in business emerge

By Dion Hinchcliffe on Blogs

The last few weeks have seen a series of interesting new reports, studies, and papers on the past, present, and future of Web 2.0 concepts and applications as applied to businesses. Most notable for many industry watchers have been fairly rigorous new works by McKinsey & Company as well as Forrester, whom have each released the results of broad surveys of executives in various industries. The focus of both surveys was to capture a picture in the interests, activities, motivators for Web 2.0 adoption of several thousand C-level executives in medium to large companies.

Bloglines - Innovation is a Human Ability

2007-04-04T04:25:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

The FASTForward Blog

Innovation is a Human Ability

By Paula Thornton on Enterprise 2.0

Recent posts have spoken of challenges to Enterprise 2.0. The dissenters seem to mistakenly assume that Enterprise 2.0 is a technology play. This reflects a common mind-set, um, among technologists — they forget about the people and process portions of the solution triad. Certainly there are technological components, but they are simply enablers. Optimizing the potential rests with the people and process dimensions.

Even one of my respected colleagues seems to miss this point when he suggests that "it is vital for intranets to innovate". Just as Jared Spool correctly argues that interfaces cannot intuit, intranets cannot innovate. Innovation is a human ability, not a technical one. Technologies can be deemed 'innovative', but do not innovate.

Enterprise 2.0 provides necessariy but insufficient means by which to facilitate the potential of individuals to innovate. The potential can easily surpass Knowledge Management initiatives, which were doomed by edict as a misnomer. There is no value in managing knowledge, an intert collection of bytes. The value is in facilitating human potential.

Leveraged correctly, this is an opportunity to identify and crush limitations/barriers to human potential. When considering the process dimension, focus on the original premises of BPR (to obliterate non-value adding work, rather than using technology for automating it) and challenge defined process and methods seeking for focused simplicity. The goal is to mechanize the work, not the worker. But to recognize that the greatest value humans contribute is in managing varability. Automate the fixed dimensions and facilitate for variability.

Critical to such efforts is a fundamental premise: innovation is fueled by design thinking. If Enterprise 2.0 is left to the practices of IT, it will fail. Where many IT floors are often more culturally diverse than the rest of the organization, they often lack true intellectual diversity. That's not to say that the staff do not have diverse intellectual potential, but that typically such potential is restrained by methods and operating cultures. I have found truly creative technology people who 'change their identify' when they go to work, as a survival tactic.

I suggest that it is not Enterprise 2.0 that is threatened by this renaissance, it is the survival of the current IT model that is in question.

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Bloglines - 5 Questions for Jim Fowler, CEO and co-founder of Jigsaw

2007-04-04T04:23:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Enterprise Web 2.0

5 Questions for Jim Fowler, CEO and co-founder of Jigsaw

By Jerry Bowles on Jigsaw

Jigsaw is a fast-growing, controversial online marketplace that lets people trade their business contacts for more contacts or cash. Co-founded by veteran sales executive Jim Fowler, Jigsaw aims to become the world's largest Rolodex. Before Jigsaw, Fowler spent more 12 years selling marketing and collaboration software.

1. What is Jigsaw? Give us the elevator speech.

Jigsaw is the world's largest online directory of business cards and company information. The directory has over five million business cards and is built and maintained by over two hundred thousand members. Jigsaw helps salespeople, recruiters, marketers, job seekers, and anyone else who wants to reach the right person(s) at a particular company do so without having to call and crawl all over that organization.

2. How does it differ from other business networking sites like Linked In or Open BC?

Jigsaw doesn't compete with LinkedIn or OpenBC. In fact, they are complimentary. LinkedIn and OpenBC are for networking. They allow business people to maintain and grow their business networks or find links between themselves and other business people. Jigsaw is a data company that uses a wiki (community) to build and maintain the database. Jigsaw competes directly with data dinosaurs such as Hoovers and InfoUSA, who build and maintain their own databases rather than empower a community to do so.

The Jigsaw directory focuses on business cards, all complete with email and phone number (in addition to name, title, address and company). In exchange for adding or updating contacts Jigsaw members earn points that are used to purchase other contact information from the database. This model of rewarding users for participation encourages members to continually grow and clean the database.

3. Sounds a little anti-social, more like plain old you show me yours and I'll show you mine. Does it work?

We have over two hundred thousand members and the database is growing by twelve thousand new business cards every day. Members don't trade with each other; they trade with the system. Members can add business cards that have no value to them in exchange for business cards that have extreme value. The great thing about self-organization is that one person's trash is another's treasure. The system is also self-correcting. If a member adds a bad contact they will get a point penalty when another member updates it with the correct status or information. The updater gets points and the person who added the bad contact gets a spanking.

This basic reward structure has worked remarkably well and created a database unlike any other in existence, and venture capitalists agree; we've raised $18M to date.

4. What's your revenue model and when do you expect to be profitable?

Our basic offering is a "Pay or Play" model. Members may either pay $25 per month for 25 contacts, or play by adding 25 new contacts every month. Think of it as paying with money OR data. The cost, compared to other data offerings, is extremely low.

In addition to individual businesspersons, Jigsaw also has over four hundred corporate accounts that purchase subscriptions and data in bulk. Finally, we make a great deal of revenue cleaning CRM databases. Because every contact in the Jigsaw database is complete, our ability to identify dead records allows us to offer one-ofakind cleaning and append services. We will be profitable by the end of this year (2007).

5. Most people agree that with so many social networking sites out there, there is bound to be a shakeout. Tell me why you expect Jigsaw to be a survivor.

As mentioned previously, Jigsaw is not a social network. Unlike the social networks, we own the database created by the membership, and can sell this data in a very traditional way, without the traditional overhead of having to build and maintain the database ourselves. In essence, Jigsaw is doing to the data dinosaurs what Wikipedia is doing to Encyclopedia Brittanica. We have many other sources of revenue we haven't even rolled out yet, such as advertising and affiliate programs. Our focus isn't on survival, it is on how badly we can disrupt the data dinosaurs.

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Bloglines - Outdoorzy Adds Business Branded Profiles

2007-04-03T16:18:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Mashable!
Social software and social networking 2.0.

Outdoorzy Adds Business Branded Profiles

By Kristen Nicole on mashable

Outdoorzy, the social network for people who love the outdoors (first mentioned here), has just rolled out its new Business Profile feature, allowing businesses to have a custom, branded profile within the community.

Just as with Facebook and YouTube, businesses are finding that integrating themselves into an existing network is a decent way of expanding your brand. For Outdoorzy, it can also provide a good amount of kickback. It is, after all, a form of advertising. Of course the companies that create entire profiles around their brand must be very careful to not receive backlash from the community at large. With many online social networks, those that are not sincere about their presence within the group are looked down upon. But those that are seeking a branded profile on Outdoorzy are truly part of the community, and offer beneficial information, products and services to the users.

The actual difference between a user profile and a business profile is the basic information shown at the top, and a few missing features such as the Trip Reports blogging tool. While I expected the branded profiles to be different in color, or show the company logo, in reality it blends in seamlessly with the rest of the profiles on the site. This could be by design - considering the Outdoorzy user base, they may prefer to keep it that way.

Recommended: Piczo Layouts at Mashcodes!

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Bloglines - Become an Online Influencer by Modeling Tiger Woods

2007-04-03T15:00:00.000-04:00

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Micro Persuasion
Steve Rubel explores how the digital citizen is transforming marketing, media and public relations.

Become an Online Influencer by Modeling Tiger Woods

By Steve Rubel

Photo by Craig Watson

If you're a golf fan then you know that this week is The Masters tournament, one of the four big majors in the sport. I will be watching Tiger Woods closely. He's one of my biggest heroes. Not only does he have tremendous talent but he's driven to continually improve.

Recently, I picked up a great new book called Tiger Traits by Dr. Nate Booth. The premise is that you can learn a lot about success by studying arguably the greatest golfer who ever lived. However, as I dug into the nine secrets outlined in the book, I saw a lot of applicability for people who aspire to ascend in the Web 2.0 world.

Here's a closer look at the nine traits through a Web 2.0 lens. They are valuable not only for individuals, but also marketers who what to stay relevant in this chaotic environment as well as startups that are competing in a flat world where anyone can eat your lunch.

Identify and Develop Natural Talents

Tiger's talents for golf emerged early and is the stuff of legends. He started swinging a club at a very young age. If you want to become an online influencer (yes, corporate types too), you need to zero in on your talent. If you think about it, there are very few individuals who rise to prominence in more than one Web 2.0 galaxy. The more popular bloggers, for example, do not achieve the same level of success in say podcasting. The top diggers? Most of them write blogs you never heard of. Pick your spots and play to your strengths.

Create a Clear and Compelling Dream

What's your dream? Tiger's dream is to win more majors than Jack Nicklaus, who currently holds the record with 18 (Tiger has 10). My dream is that the chaos caused by new media will propel PR to become the lead marketing discipline. That's what drives me to blog. If you're creating content actively, make sure your passions come through.

Select Teachers, Heroes, and Teammates Who Guide, Inspire, and Support

Woods has a cadre of people who guide him in his game, personal life as well as his business affairs. It's commonly known as Team Tiger. Create a personal "board of directors" who help guide you. Mine includes my co-workers, family and also online influencers like Ross Mayfield, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer and others.

Be Confident

Tiger Woods plays to win and he's confident that he always will, even if he's down by a lot. I'm not always the most confident guy in everything I do, but when I blog I am. Most people who are opinion leaders online are extremely confident (sometimes too much so!). When you blog, podcast, digg, create online video, be proud of what you do. Stake your reputation on it and others will follow you.

Manufacture Magnificent Mental Models

If you want to succeed in any activity - be it personal or business - you need to be able to "find your zone" to win. Tiger is known for having incredible powers of concentration. This can be tough at times. There are lots of distractions and detractors. Still, if you figure out what to tune in and what to tune out, you will succeed. Skip the gossip. Unsubscribe from the blogs that do nothing but spew smoke. Frown on distractions.

Let Actions Do the Talking

Tiger wins and that's all we need to know that he is a leader. The same applies online. Focus on your craft and your expertise. Don't obsess over your stats or Technorati ranking. Know what you cover and what you don't. Then, stick to it, create good content, do so consistently and often and you will succeed. The cream rises to the top. You will become known if you let your actions do the talking, rather than trash talking. The same applies for brands.

Constantly Improve in Good Times

The minute you stop improving, you're dead. This is why if you're in PR or marketing, you have to be dabbling with new technology constantly. After all, your customers are. Further, if you're blogging, constantly look for ways to improve. Don't take anything for granted. The same applies in business too. Tiger overhauled his swing twice in his career, even though he was at the top of his game.

Bad Be Likeable Be Grateful, Give Back

This one is huge. Sometimes people who become "web famous" forget where they came from. Companies get arrogant too. Everyone started at the same point. You have to give back if you want to succeed. Scoble, for example, constantly links to new voices and he's a downright approachable guy who puts his phone number on his blog. Tiger Woods will probably become the first sports billionaire soon, but he always gives of his time and money. That's a valuable lesson for every individual and company.

Bloglines - Use a CyberTwin to Trick Your Boss Into Thinking Youâre Online

2007-04-03T14:41:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Web Worker Daily
Rebooting the workforce

Use a CyberTwin to Trick Your Boss Into Thinking You're Online

By Anne Zelenka on Software Apps

Now you can create a chatbot cybertwin who will instant message in your place even when you're not available:

An Australian upstart on Monday introduced MyCyberTwin, an early version of software that lets people create and customize a virtual personality that can chat with others while they're offline. Liesl Capper, co-founder of RelevanceNow, which built MyCyberTwin, said the so-called chat bot technology can be used on blogs, dating sites or in social networks like MySpace by cutting and pasting code from the site onto the third-party page.

This could be really helpful for you virtual workers with old-fashioned bosses who want you to be ready to IM any time they are, bosses who still believe in a face time rather than workstreaming culture. It could also protect you from the virtual team chatty Cathy or chatty Carl who wants personal therapy or endless gossip sessions by instant message every day.

(more…)

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Bloglines - (How) Should higher ed institutions use MySpace? Get answers from the higher ed MySpace advocate: Heather Mansfield, Web editor at Drury University

2007-04-03T14:35:00.001-04:00

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collegewebeditor.com: web, marketing & PR in higher ed
News, tips and, hopefully, some good ideas for people taking care of websites and online marketing in colleges and universities

(How) Should higher ed institutions use MySpace? Get answers from the higher ed MySpace advocate: Heather Mansfield, Web editor at Drury University

By Karine Joly on MySpace

My next column about social networking websites will soon be published in the April issue of University Business.

I wrote it a couple of months ago before having a chance to discover a very interesting MySpace page (with 883 friends at the time of this posting): the Colleges and Universities MySpace.

Heather Mansfield, Web editor at Drury University and a MySpace consultant for non-profit organizations at DIOSA | Communications, is the person behind this original initiative.

1) Why did you start the universities and colleges MySpace profile?

I started the Colleges & Universities MySpace in December 2006 to monitor the trend and watch its progress. Drury University was a very early adopter with its MySpace launched in July 2006. We wanted to see what other colleges and universities were doing on MySpace. Higher education institutions embracing MySpace was so new that there was no information out there. So, the Colleges & Universities MySpace was created to provide some organization and a central place where MySpace early adopters could chat and share ideas. It helped us feel more secure about using MySpace, because we saw the numbers of higher education institutions using MySpace growing daily.

2) What have you learned since you started it?

I have learned that MySpace is highly misunderstood by people who don't use it. It is the most amazing online communication tool I have ever worked with. It continues to grow by 230,000 individuals of all ages everyday. MySpace is the third visited website in the U.S. and the fifth visited in the world. As far as colleges and universities using MySpace? I give kudos (a MySpace thing) to those early adopters and visionaries. Every target audience that colleges and universities are trying to cultivate are on MySpace in massive numbers - prospective students (traditional, nontraditional, international), current students, athletics fans, parents, alumni, nonprofit organizations, etc.

3) How should institutions use MySpace as part of their marketing strategy?

The first thing every college and university needs to do is set-up a MySpace account and grab its MySpace address, regardless of whether you plan on using or not. I think many colleges and universities will be very surprised when they discover a current student or alum has already grabbed the address and is already representing your institution on MySpace.

Second, get your MySpace profile professionally designed. First impressions are everything on MySpace. MySpace design is a new field and the really good designers are charging a small fortune ($5-20K) and designing mostly for bands and musicians.

Third, pick an individual to maintain the profile. Hire a student who can do most of the maintenance work required. An admissions or marketing staff person can direct the MySpace marketing strategy. There is a MySpace etiquette for colleges and universities which I have learned through trial and error.

Fourth, promote your MySpace on your website and in print materials. I can count on one hand the number of colleges and universities that have progressed to this level. When you get on MySpace and realize how the "Schools" function works, you are going to be shocked that it took your institution this long to get on MySpace.

4) How have you used it at your institution? With what kind of results?

Drury University has used our MySpace mostly to engage current students and alumni. Drury has numerous branch campuses throughout southern Missouri and our students at these campuses often feel disconnected from the main campus community and culture. They are some of our most active participants on our MySpace. Current students like the events information we bulletin, the polls, and the little ways we work to interact with them online. We also use our MySpace to engage alumni. Our alumni email list has grown significantly since we launched. On average each bulletin we send out asking for alumni to join our e-newsletter list generates a response of 10 subscriptions. We will ask alumni to subscribe via bulletins 1-3 per month. Our MySpace community grows by 150 each month. In the next few months we're going to ramp up our MySpace outreach to prospective traditional, nontraditional, and international students.

Live from HigherEdBlogCon: 3 great case studies of admission-related podcasting initiatives

Podcasting 101: Learn how to podcast from a higher ed podcaster, Dennis Miller

MySpace 101: how teenagers use the popular social networking website

Why and how college students use social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace

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Bloglines - Software as a Service Passes the âTipping Pointâ

2007-04-03T13:55:00.001-04:00

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The FASTForward Blog

Software as a Service Passes the 'Tipping Point'

By Joe McKendrick on Enterprise 2.0

If there's any phenomenon that will move enterprises out to the Web in a big, impactful way, it's Software as a Service, or SaaS. If it catches hold, SaaS will begin to change the mindset of many business leaders — that the Web has many resources to offer that can be done in a faster and better way than having companies continue to struggle with their own IT and applications management.

But we've heard all these promises before, haven't we? Most recently, the ASP (application service provider) and managed hosting trends that arose in the mid to late 1990s promised to free enterprises from the drudgery of IT management. But the economic foundations of the ASP industry were too shaky. Security was an overriding concern. Availability was not a sure thing. And, more than anything else, control was an issue — executives did not want to hand over control of critical IT assets to outsiders.

However, recent studies and quotes from industry leaders suggest that perhaps SaaS is a phenomenon that is now gaining steam. A new report out of Saugatuck Research, for example, declares that "SaaS is now beyond the 'tipping point .'" The firm's latest survey of 250 IT executives shows that not only have more than 26 percent of companies installed at least one SaaS application, representing nearly 150 percent year-over-year growth, but resistance has plunged dramatically, in terms of firms that are not planning to deploy SaaS."

Saugatuck adds that another 20 percent either prototyping, implementing or planning to install their first SaaS application in 2007.

I just published an article on the SaaS phenomenon in the April issue of Database Trends & Applications, for which I spoke with SaaS movers and shakers at both Oracle and IBM. Robert Reid, group vice president for Oracle's CRM On Demand service, said that "a majority of Oracle enterprise customers" are now deploying Oracle's CRM applications through its SaaS-based delivery service.

Dave Mitchell, director of software-as-a-service strategy for IBM who is in charge of Big Blue's partnerships with SaaS ISVs, said that "most of the start-up application vendors are selecting SaaS as their primary model, and increasingly as their sole model for delivering applications. It's gotten to the point now where most of the venture capital firms are only investing in ISVs that deliver their applications as a software service."

Saugatuck predicts that the next surge of growth will come from large enterprises that are now beginning to view SaaS as "just another part of the fabric of enterprise IT." Saugatuck calculates that on average, the typical large enterprise now taps into at least three SaaS applications, with one in seven having greater than 10 SaaS applications."

Users are growing increasingly sophisticated about SaaS as well, and are "newly fluent in such concepts as multi-tenancy, web services APIs, data and workflow integration and mashups — even though users may not require them all in the SaaS business services they contract."

However, some industry experts have words of caution about SaaS. Steven Mocarski, CTO of Singularity Design, for instance, told me that he would not recommend SaaS to his larger clients, based on concern with security, particularly of intellectual property or other key strategic information:

"I would not recommend it for any of our large clients," Steve said. "While we're happily using SaaS in a number of areas, due to our high growth and increasingly more sophisticated and demanding IT security requirements, we're planning to move away from SaaS applications for any core functions by 2010. We may reconsider if SaaS vendors provide uptime, responsiveness and integrity assurance in real terms (read: from our location, not theirs) in addition to the obvious need for security and privacy. Those kind of guarantees would require SaaS vendors to go way beyond simply offering a service on the Internet — it means working with connectivity providers/experts and I don't know if they're ready to do that."

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Bloglines - Magnify.net Goes Feature Crazy

2007-04-02T12:11:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Mashable!
Social software and social networking 2.0.

Magnify.net Goes Feature Crazy

By Kristen Nicole on mashable

Magnify.net, the company that lets you create your own niche video channel, will announce a plethora of new features this week - they're expected to go live on Tuesday.

First up, they've improved their drag-and-drop function to include your members on your Magnify frontpage, and block the members you don't want on your site. They've also added a discussions board and a chat widget, powered by Gabbly to encourage member interaction on your site. Other widgets include buttons for bookmarking, and Paypal integration to accept credit cards.

First mentioned on Mashable back in February, Magnify has always been very inclusive in the video hosts they allow you to search from, and now they've added DailyMotion and Metacafe to the list. They've added to their search capability as well, allowing you to find a YouTube video based on someone's username, their favorites, or the most popular videos. This is an interesting integration that I haven't seen from any other third party video aggregating service. Another important addition is RSS integration, allowing others to subscribe to your Magnify site and get optional alerts when a new video is added by you or your members. Also important is their provision of support channels via screen-cast videos offering step-by-step instructions on how to manage your Magnify site.

In all, these new features are user-focused and aim to improve interaction and viral growth. Perhaps Magnify could become the Ning of video - less heavily integrated than white label video solutions, but offering anyone the ability to instantly create a niche video site.

Show RSS Feeds on Your Magnify Homepage

Recommended: Hi5 Layouts at Mashcodes!

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Bloglines - Babilonic, red colectiva de profesores y alumnos de idiomas

2007-04-02T11:02:00.001-04:00

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Genbeta
El software y los servicios vía Internet, con toda la actualidad y los mejores trucos.

Babilonic, red colectiva de profesores y alumnos de idiomas

By Cyberfrancis

No cabe duda de que saber idiomas te abre muchas puertas, además de poder ofrecerte la oportunidad de conocer a otras personas. Ya hemos comentado algunas de las redes sociales existentes en el que los propios usuarios realizan prácticas con otros usuarios de diferentes idiomas para que ambos practiquen el idioma del otro usando las herramientas que a día de hoy nos ofrece de sobre la red de redes.

Dicho ésto, añadamos una más, Babilonic. Ojo que esta red social está más limitada que las anteriores que hemos comentado, ya que se trata de que tanto alumnos como profesores se registren, añadan su perfil curricular y tanto unos como otros se añadan como favoritos a quienes consideren interesantes.

La cuestión es que la herramienta a usar para las prácticas es el propio MSN Messenger, y las prácticas hay que contratarlas con los profesores que creamos mejores, y en el que como alumnos podemos valorarlos. Cada profesor dispondrá de su propia tarifa y tendrá un apartado donde nosotros como alumnos podemos buscar un horario adecuado y contratarlo.

Igualmente dispone de foros y tablones de anuncios, así como algunas herramientas que nos ayudarán mejor en nuestro aprendizaje. Vamos, enlaces a diccionarios, periódicos digitales y estaciones de radio.

Se trata de otra red más, con un entorno de usuario más plano y menos llamativo que otras redes sociales, donde nos limitaremos a contratar clases o enseñar nuestros idiomas en caso de registrarnos como profesores.

Y para quienes les interesen, recolectando redes sociales de aprendizaje de idiomas: italki, Soziety, talkConmigo y FriendsAbroad.

Vía | Loogic
Enlace | Babilonic

Bloglines - Maneja tus fotografÃas en un solo sitio

2007-04-02T11:01:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

powerpymes.com
Herramientas Empresariales para las Pymes del Siglo XXI

Maneja tus fotografías en un solo sitio

By bastidas on fotografía

Muchas son ya las diferentes alternativas en este apartado, pero continuan apareciendo sitios que hacen cada vez mas sencillo manejar todo el acervo fotográfico con el que contamos en la compañía. Es el caso ahora de Dumpt que nos muestra algunas características interesantes como: 1 Gb para almacenar todas las fotografías que necesitemos, la posibilidad de hacer álbums temáticos ya sean privados o públicos, el poder compartir nuestros archivos con quienes necesitemos que los vea, es decir si tenemos que enviar fotografías de un nuevo proceso de producción a todos nuestros clientes, lo podemos hacer via correo electrónico o subirlos aquí y que cada quien lo baje cuando quiera, suena como una mejor alternativa. De tal manera que podría funcionar para su empresa. Analícelo.
via Buzzshout

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Bloglines - Survey: 43% of Employees Web 2.0 at Work

2007-04-02T07:35:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Micro Persuasion
Steve Rubel explores how the digital citizen is transforming marketing, media and public relations.

Survey: 43% of Employees Web 2.0 at Work

By Steve Rubel

There's a common myth that the entire Web 2.0 movement doesn't have a big impact on B2B and their enterprise purchasing decisions. Nonsense. Workers are knee deep in these sites. According to a new survey by Clearswift, some 43% of employees access Web 2.0 sites multiple times during the work day. Think they're publishing too? Nod. Studies have shown that most blogging takes place during the day.

More stats from the survey....

* 51% spend an hour or more a week on Web 2.0 sites; 13% spend five hours or more
* 46% have discussed work-related issues
* 46% regularly access Wikipedia during work hours
* 50% believe they have a right to use work computers for personal internet access

Bloglines - Convergence case in point: SOA approach eases hotelâs development of in-room communications/Web portal

2007-04-02T07:32:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

The FASTForward Blog

Convergence case in point: SOA approach eases hotel's development of in-room communications/Web portal

By Dana Gardner on sponsored post

Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: BlueNote Networks, Inc.

When I first heard of the Seaport Hotel's in-room "Seaportal" application, built using SOA principles to attain a true IP convergence features, I was jazzed and blogged on it. The Boston hotel recently took part in a webinar deep dive on the process and explained the results of the unique project.

I thought the webinar came out really well, a lot of information on the means and methods to pull together VOIP, unified communications, SOA, Web services and external information sources — all with a slick touch-screen interface for the hotel's guests. BlueNote Networks, the hotel's vendor and partner in the project, pulled the webinar together, and I agreed to extend the reach of the information by presenting it as a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast.

Seaportal may well define the next generation of hotel-based communications and information access services. It also helps the hotel monetize its services better (now that making money from phone calls is history). It newly empowers guests and traveling business workers to get what they need quickly and easily in terms of information, access, unified communications and entertainment.

Seaportal offers significant ongoing benefits for the hotel, its suppliers and partners. Because when guests access their needed or desired services from the portal, that use pattern can be tracked and examined. Before such use was scattered amid different communications functions and networks, and hard to capture and measure.

So the integration benefits the portal affords also sets up the power of business intelligence so that a guest's individual preferences can be observed, measured, and therefore enhanced, either on this trip or the next. Users get convenience, efficiency, custom-tailored services, and lowered overall costs — while the providers of products and services get clarity of demand and use from which to improve their offerings while reducing their own costs.

Here are some excerpts from the discussion:

The Seaportal is the next step of innovation. In the hotel room there are actually three devices with which you can communicate with guests: the telephone, the computer, and the entertainment system and television. We envision all three of these technologies merging in the future. This is not going to happen overnight, and it depends in large part on the comfort level the guests will have with this technology. I can't envision my parents using this device to watch TV, make phone calls or order room service, but I know my kids will.

The Seaportal is the first generation of this technology convergence, where we merged the phone and the computer into a single device. These are some of the requirements we gathered through focus groups with our guests. We had to limit what we built in the first version, so that we could hit the target date. However, the beauty of Web technology allows us to add functionality very easily in the future.

Seaportal is an in-room Web portal that is accessed through a thin client PC running Windows Embedded XP. … These devices are not susceptible to viruses and can be easily returned to a known good state by rebooting them. … When a guest checks out, the cache is erased, and the device is rebooted, awaiting the next guest. There are no traces left behind of where the guest may have surfed to, or any information they have left on the device. It is a thin-client with a touch-screen display, and it provides information about the Seaport and the Seaport district. We are offering our guests complimentary Web access. We also offer complimentary long distance and local calling within the continental United States with the Seaportal.

There was one mandatory requirement for the Seaportal, and that was it had to have VOIP. The reason for this is that we were looking for a lower-cost alternative to our legacy PBX. What used to be a profit center, for us is now considered a cost center. This is due to the ubiquitous use of cell phones. A number of hotels claim that they have VOIP technology deployed, and in one sense that's true. However, in most cases they have installed IP phones and an IP phone switch, and the VOIP calls are going across their internal LAN, not over the Internet. The VOIP capability that we've built into the Seaportal routes calls over the Internet using a SIP parent provider.
There are solutions today to embed voice or telephony features into applications, and that typically involves traditional PBXs and computer telephony integration (CTI) interfaces like TAPI and JTAPI, but there are a lot of challenges that organizations face in leveraging that technology. It's very complex, involving a significant amount of programming by software developers, and an intimate knowledge of the different PBX vendors' implementations.

Because of that, the time to respond and the time to build applications are usually very long. Integration costs are high because of the customization effort involved, and the programming model of CTI interfaces is typically very different from a Web services or Web development programming model. Often, you need specialized telephony expertise to embed telephony or voice in any application, including portal technology. Also, the development effort is typically one-off. So, you're building an application tied into a PBX as a one-off application. For those of you on the call familiar with Web services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), it does not have the same concept of reusability in terms of Web service technology.

In the application leveraging the portal technology in the Web services, all of that was enabled using a product called SessionSuite SOA Edition from BlueNote Networks. SessionSuite SOA Edition provides a very rich set of communication services. We've talked about the telephony services, everything from traditional calling features to advanced services. It is based on SIP, includes a full SIP server, SIP registrar, proxy and redirect server. As I mentioned before, users are authenticated, authorized, and given access privileges, no matter where they're physically located, whether within a company, over the Internet, the public voice network, or an IP network.
SessionSuite also includes a user portal, so that, for example, the [hotel] could set up such specific user preferences such as call blocking, call forwarding, and other features. And there is a management system so that a system administrator can manage all of the different components of SessionSuite SOA Edition. Most importantly, SOA Edition also exposes, through application programming interfaces, a set of Web services that allow developers to embed some of the capabilities that we've talked about into business applications.

Leveraging Web service technology shortens project cycles and certainly lowers development risks. You can leverage existing IT developers, so you don't need an intimate and detailed knowledge of either a vendor specific CTI or even SIP. We allow organizations to actually leverage and modernize their existing PBX infrastructure.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: BlueNote Networks, Inc.

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Bloglines - The Real Scrapblog is Hereâ¦ Finally

2007-04-02T04:02:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

TechCrunch
TechCrunch profiles the companies, products and events that are defining and transforming the new web. TechCrunch is written by Michael Arrington.

The Real Scrapblog is Here… Finally

By Nick Gonzalez on Scrapblog

Scrapbook maker Scrapblog strutted its stuff at the We Media conference last month, went off the grid, and finally came back online today.

Scrapblogs are Flash-based slide shows made up of pages of photo or video layouts you can jazz up with a myriad of designs and effects. Transitions can be added between each page and you can set the mood with some background music as your show plays. You can publish a Scrapblog publicly or by invite only and embed it as well. If you choose, viewers can leave Flickr like embedded comments on key spots of the show.

Scrapblog's editor is a flash application, which may make a lot of you cringe, but not for good cause. Scrapblog, as we've mentioned before, has one of the most natural feels of any online application out there. It's full screen and closely mimics the design of a Windows desktop application.

Creating a Scrapblog starts with a creation wizard that lets you pick one of 19 different design themes to frame your pages of photos. You can then cover this canvas with by dragging and dropping in photos, clipart, shapes, text, and even videos. Each of these media objects can be hyperlinked, overlayed, resized, rotated, and edited along several parameters.

Photos are given special treatment and support frames, shadows, as well as that quintessential web 2.0 effect, reflections. Photos can be pulled from your computer, Photobucket, Yahoo Photos, Flickr, and WebShots. Video, on the other hand, is drawn solely from YouTube. After you've laid out the pages, you can choose from 12 different transitions between them and from 22 different songs to play along with the show.

Photo slide shows are a crowded space which includes the 38 million user giant, Photobucket, along with two newer players, RockYou and Slide, bringing in tens of millions in financing. Like FlipTrack, however, Scrapblog keeps a distinct niche by offering a more richly designed presentation less like a series photos and more like a hipper version of Powerpoint.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Bloglines - Twitter Interface for Eventful: Fact of Fool?

2007-04-01T07:56:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Mashable!
Social software and social networking 2.0.

Twitter Interface for Eventful: Fact of Fool?

By Pete Cashmore on mashable

Since there are so many potential "fool" announcements today, you might as well play along at home. Eventful, for instance, is announcing that it is switching to an "all Twitter" interface to bypass issues like uptime, instant responses, clean markup, and SEO:

Starting May 1st, Eventful.com will redirect all site traffic to the Eventful Chicken page on Twitter, and all stickers will be automatically replaced by Twitter badges for Eventful Chicken. Existing Eventful.com users will be given the month of April to make the switch. The site will feature a screencast tutorial on using the new interface, including how to befriend the Chicken, ask it for event information, and patiently await its attention.

This one doesn't require much thought to figure out, but we'll ask anyway: fact or fool?

Bloglines - wikinomics and the source of innovation « Marketing & Innovation

2007-04-01T06:04:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Latest Marketing News On Marktd
Martkd - Marketing News For Marketers By Marketers

wikinomics and the source of innovation � Marketing & Innovation

By visionarymarketing on Social Marketing

Howard Rheingold�s vision of 'the guy in the basement' who is the one reponsible for innovation is becoming reality. I have attached a great article when Rheingold depicts the importance of collaboration and how people can actually re-shape the corporate in which we live, and for some of us, barely survive. (download the source of innovation - Howard Rheingold). Now in a buisnessweek article are living examples of how people are actually changing the world from the bottom-up. Only 2 years ago, ...

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Bloglines - Maneja todos los archivos de tu computadora

2007-03-31T12:25:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

powerpymes.com
Herramientas Empresariales para las Pymes del Siglo XXI

Maneja todos los archivos de tu computadora

By bastidas on Regalo del día

Normalmente Windows viene ya con programas internos para el manejo de los archivos que se encuentran en el sistema como lo es el Windows Explorer, pero tiene sus limitaciones por lo que siempre se hace necesario buscar programas como Frigate 3 File Manager que lo potencian al máximo dándonos mayor amplitud de miras y una comodidad extraordinaria en el manejo y exploración de los archivos que tenemos desperdigados por todo el sistema. Sus características las podrá observar en su página de inicio, pero lo importante aquí es que su utilidad será muy alta en la empresa. El costo de este software en el mercado es de $39.90 USD, pero si lo descarga y activa el dia de HOY lo obtendrá de manera GRATUITA. Pero recuerde que debe de descargarlo el día de HOY.

Compartelo

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Bloglines - PlanHQ, herramienta para gestionar planes de empresa

2007-03-31T12:23:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Genbeta
El software y los servicios vía Internet, con toda la actualidad y los mejores trucos.

PlanHQ, herramienta para gestionar planes de empresa

By Cyberfrancis

Igual que para los usuarios individuales tenemos herramientas en la que podemos gestionar nuestras metas en la vida mediante herramientas web 2.0, para las empresas tenemos PlanHQ, un servicio online que nos permitirá marcar un plan de acción para nuestra empresa.

Se trata de una herramienta donde marcaremos metas, crearemos nuestro plan de negocios, lo enfocaremos a un mercado en concreto en función de análisis y discusiones, organizaremos a los miembros de nuestra empresa y haremos un seguimiento a nivel financiero.

Disponemos de una versión gratuita por 30 días para poder probarlo, aunque tenemos una demo con la que podemos manejarnos un rato para comprobar dicho sistema. Luego tenemos tres opciones de pago, diferenciándose en el número de usuarios, metas y soporte, personalización y conexiones seguras según los planes.

Vía | eHub
Enlace | PlanHQ

Bloglines - Trip Sync, organiza y gestiona de forma simple tus viajes empresariales

2007-03-31T05:19:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Genbeta
El software y los servicios vía Internet, con toda la actualidad y los mejores trucos.

Trip Sync, organiza y gestiona de forma simple tus viajes empresariales

By Cyberfrancis

En mi caso no creo que me vaya a hacer mucha falta pero para aquellos usuarios corporativos, que por un motivo u otro, tienen que realizar continuamente viajes alrededor del mundo, quizás el servicio del que les vamos a hablar a continuación les pueda interesar. Muchas veces hemos hablado de buscadores de vuelos como Trabber, y algún que otro que se nos haya escapado, de buscadores de hoteles, como Paguna, etc…

Pues bien, Trip Sync es una herramienta sencilla y hasta quizás muy valiosa para el planeamiento de nuestros viajes empresariales, que es al sector a donde está enfocado este servicio. Nos podemos registrar como usuario individual o como empresa. Dentro de nuestra cuenta disponemos de tres buscadores, uno de vuelos, otro de coches y otro de hoteles, tres buscadores a los cuales les indicaremos una serie de opciones a cada uno de ellos y dentro de los resultados escogeremos la que mejor nos convenga. En todo caso siempre podemos rectificar y realizar nuevas búsquedas antes de hacer la reserva definitiva y pagar por ella.

Una cosa interesante es la posibilidad de crearnos nuestros propios perfiles de usuarios, en el que podemos indicar las preferencias de vuelos, de hoteles y de compañias de alquileres de coches, nuestra información de contacto, nuestra forma de pago, nuestros permisos y otros aspectos.

Una vez planificado completamente nuestro viaje, tan sólo nos queda por efectuar las reservas, por el que realizaremos nuestros viajes.

En todo caso las búsquedas pueden ser genéricas o muy concretas, como podemos observar en el propio video de demostración. Y en el caso del registro de las compañías, se pueden añadir más de cinco viajeros en representación de la misma, por lo que ellos a nivel individual pueden indicar sus propias preferencias particulares.

Como ayuda, disponemos de plugins para Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer y Firefox 2.x, en este último caso para Windows y Mac, donde nos permite un acceso rápido para gestionar nuestros viajes corporativos.

Vía | TechCrunch
Enlace | Try Sync

Bloglines - Digital Marketplace Data and Enterprise Search

2007-03-30T20:49:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

The FASTForward Blog

Digital Marketplace Data and Enterprise Search

By Hadley Reynolds on sponsored post

sponsored post

(co-written with Rob Carney)

At the Future of Media workshop at FASTforward '07 Sue Feldman of IDC previewed some research findings that have enormous implications for the way we think about search. Her report has now been released by IDC as "Who Owns the Web?"

What she and the IDC research team find, counter to popular intuition, is that the vast majority – perhaps 70% – of all queries on the Web are NOT taking place on the major search engines. They are instead "Enterprise Search" queries on individual sites.

A few excerpts from IDC's report "Who Owns the Web?" by Susan Feldman and Rachel Happe follow to give the gist of the argument. Then we add some thoughts about how this connects to what goes on inside the firewall.

"Popular wisdom tells us that the battle for Web hegemony is won. The big search engines — and in particular Google — have the online ad market all sewn up. But new research at IDC may put an end to this belief. IDC has spent the last year mapping the structure of the digital economy and turning it into an interactive market simulation tool. We seeded it with publicly available data on the number of queries, clicks and ad revenue. But we also gathered data on the number of hours that users spend searching on the Web, and on their online purchasing behavior for both business and personal use.

When we turned our model on, we found a large hole: unaccounted for queries, perhaps seven to ten times the number that were commonly reported in the press. Those query numbers are not just an academic concern: every query represents an opportunity to generate ad revenue. While our results are only preliminary, we now believe that roughly 70% of queries on the Web are not going first to search engines to be referred through results clicks to Web sites. Instead, users are going directly to the Web sites, the destinations, on the Web, and are bypassing search engines entirely. This behavior makes sense: once you know that you can buy books from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, why would you return to Google or Yahoo to purchase a book. Purchasing managers at businesses know which office supply vendors they buy from and bookmark Staples, for instance….

Media companies–newspapers, online content providers, yellow pages publishers–have a golden opportunity to retrieve control of their markets. Publishers already know their audience. They understand their customers - the demographics, trends, and local interests. They already have a dedicated sales force that know their market. If they can seize this new ad revenue stream, improve the ad targeting by using their customer knowledge to increase the relevance of the ads, they can attract more advertisers to their online content sites."

Of course these dynamics in the digital marketplace that Feldman and Happe are reporting on have a direct parallel inside the firewall. Namely, every enterprise has no excuse not to know its users and know them well. And the more the search on the digital property (portal, collaboration environment, etc.) knows about the customer or consumer or employee, the more detailed and relevant the content on the site and the delivery of that content can be. Enterprises should think about whether they can take 70% of internal queries and channel them to sites where internal users really want to go, and provision those users with content that is really useful to solving the issue of the moment.

Has your enterprise started to think of its population of "associates" as shoppers for quality information yet? Do you think your associates know where to find the amazon of customer information or the staples of the supply chain for your business?

As Feldman says, "every query is an opportunity" - the value can be measured by ad revenue on the consumer web, but also by the quality of the answers to someone's problem inside the company.

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Bloglines - HiTask, sencillo y prÃ¡ctico gestor online de tareas

2007-03-30T20:45:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Genbeta
El software y los servicios vía Internet, con toda la actualidad y los mejores trucos.

HiTask, sencillo y práctico gestor online de tareas

By Cyberfrancis

HiTask es un nuevo y excelente administrador de tareas en el que podemos añadir tareas, encuentros, recordatorios, notas y cumpleaños, y cada uno de estos elementos podemos agruparlos por fechas, proyectos, colores y usuarios. Así, cuando vamos añadiendo los items correspondientes, aparecerán en nuestro propio calendario que tenemos a la izquierda. Contamos con una dirección ical privada para añadirla a nuestros gestores de calendarios.

Además, nos permite invitar a otros miembros para que se creen sus propias cuentas y entren a formar parte de nuestro equipo, y de esa manera por ejemplo, podemos asignar tareas a un usuario en concreto con tan sólo arrastrar la misma encima de su nombre. También podemos establecer conversaciones con los miembros de nuestro equipo individualmente mediante un chat interno.

La verdad, este servicio es simple, práctico y puede merecer la pena que le echéis un vistazo porque quizás os convenzan para usarlo a nivel de grupos de personas.

Vía | Mashable
Enlace | HiTask

What is a wiki?

2007-03-30T20:40:00.001-04:00

Clipmarks user felmiranda has sent you a clip...

clipped from its.unc.edu

"Wikis are Web pages that can be viewed and modified by anyone with a Web browser and Internet access. Described as a composition system, a discussion medium, and a repository, wikis support asynchronous communication and group collaboration online." ("7 Things You Should Know about Wikis," from EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative; http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ELI7004)

To see more clips or start creating your own, visit clipmarks.com

Bloglines - BlueGrind, conversor de textos a audio en mp3

2007-03-30T13:51:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Genbeta
El software y los servicios vía Internet, con toda la actualidad y los mejores trucos.

BlueGrind, conversor de textos a audio en mp3

By Cyberfrancis

Y siguiendo con el tema de conversores de textos a audio, ahora nos aparece BlueGrind, una herramienta todavía en desarrollo pero que, a nivel general, permite la conversión de los artículos de textos a audio en mp3, completamente descargable.

¿Cual es la diferencia respecto a Feed2podcast y Audiodizer? Pues que en este caso no indicaremos ningún feed, sino más bien haremos uso de su buscador para acceder al artículo deseado, aunque la verdad es que sólo se basa en Yahoo News ya que no encontré referencias a otros medios, ni a blogs, y eso que también estaban incluídas en las búsquedas. Otra opción es añadir el texto propio indicando autor, descripción, etiquetas y subir el texto o escribirlo en el mismo formulario, para que el sistema nos genere el audio para descargar.

Así que si a mi compi Sacha no le importa, tenía más a mano su artículo referente al nuevo sistema de etiquetas para imágenes de AdBrite y la mando a procesar, con lo que éste es el resultado, en auténtico acento inglés. Lo bueno es que no ha tardado mucho en procesar la información, aunque lo malo es que sólo funciona mejor con textos en inglés.

Próximamente nuevas funcionalidades que quizás sean interesantes.

Vía | Wwwhat´s New
Enlace | BlueGrind

Bloglines - HiTask To Handle Those...Tasks

2007-03-30T13:50:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Profy.Com
Professional blog community

HiTask To Handle Those...Tasks

By Paul Glazowski on web-20

Say you want to manage your daily routine. Your work life, your private life, whatever. And you just want an all-in-one solution that happens to be everywhere you are even if your computer isn't always right by your side. If that profile fits you well, HiTask may end up being something you simply can't live without. If you're already set with your favorite utility, or want nothing to do with task management, read on anyway. You might change your mind.

There are two things about HiTask that strike me as fitting for the "wonderful" tag. One is the clean and casual layout of the application. It's not drab. It's not boring. It's got an upbeat vibe about it. I like it a lot. The other is the truly engaging drag-and-drop feature it offers the user.

Now, dragging and dropping doesn't sound like fun. It sounds like…dragging and dropping. Those actions bespeak themselves, and they're not often found in the same sentence as the term "exciting". But in a task management application such as HiTask, drag and drop come together to form a team of simplistic AJAX-happy bliss. (Don't worry. No more drag and drop talk from here on out.)

"Free and easy" is how HiTask is advertised, and the product is nothing but. Call it anything you like. Simple as pie. Effortless. Quick and painless. They all sum it up really nicely. Whether you're dealing with HiTask in groups, dealing with team chats, setting up projects and the tasks that correspond with each, or just dealing with your day-to-day to-do list(s), you get to do it all without any headaches.

HiTask may not be the most secure web app on the planet. It's certainly not to be trusted with sensitive internal information passed between enterprise managers and their underlings. But that's not the type HiTask is going after. Instead, it's here to help manage the lives of us regular folk. A mere foe of disorganization. It doesn't take care of your work for you (We really wish it would, don't we?), but it helps you get things done without getting overloaded. Open an account. Make some lists. Talk to some people about those lists. Schedule stuff. All of the basics are there. Give it a shot.

If you're into easy organization with the help of a healthy supply of Web 2.0 technology, HiTask may just turn out to be your task manager of choice. And it's free. Who doesn't like free?

Tags: hitask, task management, drag and drop, ajax, web 2.0, web 20

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Bloglines - 5 Things to Learn from Island Marketing

2007-03-30T12:17:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Influential Interactive Marketing
Reflections on creating compelling marketing, advertising and public relations

5 Things to Learn from Island Marketing

By Rohit

I have a few days off and am in sunny Cancun until next Monday. Though Cancun may not officially be an island, there are several things that I noticed in common among every trip to an island or resort area that I have the chance to take - including this one. It seems the rules for island marketing are unique, but common across countries and cultures. Here are just a few things I found interesting about island marketing that I will be taking home and considering as I plan new campaigns and efforts for clients:

Own the category - no matter how small. On an island or in a remote place, the easiest way to stand out is to do something that no one else does. Having your own niche as the only underwater tour operator that teaches basket weaving may not be interesting for everyone, but at least you will stand out in a sea of sameness.
Pay later, take it now. The guys walking along the beach selling necklaces and other trinkets have only a moment to capture your attention. Yet most beachgoers stay here at the resort for a week or more tend to stay in the same location and visit the same beach everyday. Giving them the product today and letting them pay later ensures you complete the sale and do not miss your chance.
Be the first to ask and do not let go. Anyone who has visited a resort town will be familiar with the phenomenon on fhe persistent salesperson who first asks you to buy something and follows you along until they can finish the sale. It is like spam, but in real life. Yet the difference is that if you are seeking a service, or willing to buy, the first person to ask will usually close the deal. And if you aren't, hopefully they are smart enough to get the cue and move on.
Integrate with hotels and get exclusivity. In a city where most tourists are coming in on "all inclusive" packages, the hotels the the rulers of the itinerary. For most, they will book their tour packages and organize other services through the hotel. The businesses that have arrangements with the hotels are often the only ones that get called, creating a sort of monopoly that drives commerce on islands. Sound a little like Google to anyone?
Offer the full package. Following from the comment about the all-inclusive packages above, most services here are offered with everything you need. If you book a snorkeling tour, you get the snorkels, equipment, lunch and transfers by bus from your hotel. Contrast that experience with that of purchasing consumer electronics or toys where accessories, batteries and required cords are often sold separately.

Bloglines - ColaboraciÃ³n entre un equipo

2007-03-30T12:14:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

powerpymes.com
Herramientas Empresariales para las Pymes del Siglo XXI

Colaboración entre un equipo

By bastidas on colaboración

Una compañía que se acerca por primera vez al problema de los trabajos en equipo es Huddle que parece ser una empresa inglesa, ya que sus cobros los trae expresados en Libras Esterlinas, pero hay una opción gratuita que le sirve muy bien a las micro y pequeñas empresas que desean hacer trabajos en conjunto. Colaborar en documentos, anotar ideas, en fin todo lo que se hace cuando las partes no están en la misma habitación. Una opción interesante que le permitirá seguramente que su compañía tenga mayor productividad ya que no habrá barreras físicas ni distancia que se interponga entre dos empleados, colegas, estudiantes, etc. que deseen colaborar.
via MoMB

Compartelo

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Bloglines - RSS Buttons for Your Blog

2007-03-30T07:22:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Online Marketing Blog
A marketing blog about the intersection of social media, search marketing and online public relations.

RSS Buttons for Your Blog

By Lee Odden on rss chicklets

When reviewing search marketing blogs each week for inclusion in our big list, one of the most consistent problems we see is that blog owners don't make it easy to subscribe. Either there is no icon for the RSS feed or it's hidden way below the fold.

Something as easy as adding a prominient RSS button near the top of the blog template with the word "Subscribe" near it can increase the number of return visitors substantially. We've done this ourselves and we're now just under 6,000 subscribers.

A study by Yahoo and Ipsos Insight supports the need to display RSS subscription options as blog readers were found to be far more likely to subscribe to a blog if they say a familiar graphic for their favorite RSS reader, whether it was Bloglines, MyYahoo or Google Reader. One solution is to use our free RSS button tool which has been used by over 50,000 blogs so far.

The popularity of this button tool also caused some traffic issues for our current blog host. Several months back we made sure all the RSS subscription buttons for the various feed readers referenced the original sites rather than being hosted with us. However, the tiny RSS button icon was still hosted by us and that one graphic has been hotlinked by a huge number of sites.

As a result, we've had to update the RSS Button Maker tool so that blog owners will need to host that little RSS icon on their own site rather than linking to the graphic on our server. Anyone who has used the TopRank RSS Button tool should revisit the page and update their code along with downloading the RSS graphic for placement on their own site.

Additionally, if your blog does not place a RSS graphic high on the page, then you're missing out on a substantial amount of return traffic and visibility. Use the free RSS button tool and make it easy for your readers to subscribe to your content. You can output a list of RSS reader graphic buttons or just display one large RSS button as we do at the top right of this page.

Sponsored By: 2007 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide All new report from Marketing Sherpa

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Bloglines - ReviewBasics, plataforma de revisiÃ³n colaborativa de documentos

2007-03-30T04:28:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Genbeta
El software y los servicios vía Internet, con toda la actualidad y los mejores trucos.

ReviewBasics, plataforma de revisión colaborativa de documentos

By Cyberfrancis

A menudo men suelen pedir opinión sobre alguna web y yo pues la reviso y le saco sus puntos positivos y negativos, enviando mi feedback a quienes me lo han pedido por correo electrónico. Pero como la web 2.0 lo quiere abarcar todo, nos trae una plataforma en que los autores ponen a disposición de sus invitados de una serie de materiales para eso precisamente, recoger comentarios y opiniones acerca de dicho material.

Y esa plataforma se llama ReviewBasics, en el que bien podemos ser los autores o bien podemos ser invitados a comentar una serie de documentos, o ambos. Como autores, crearemos nuestros espacios, donde disponemos de 25 MB de almacenamiento por cada uno, en el que subiremos algunos archivos que queramos que sean revisados y cuyos formatos actualmente soportados son docx, .doc, .rtf, .ppt, jpg, .gif, .png y .zip. Luego, invitaremos a los usuarios de los que deseamos obtener sus opiniones, llegándoles una invitación en sus buzones de correo electrónico con su nombre de usuario y contraseña aleatoria, que podrán cambiar, para dirigirse al apartado de revisores.

ReviewBasics dispone de dos modalidades de cuentas, la gratuita y la de pago, donde esta última no tiene las limitaciones de la cuenta gratuita y puede ser integrada en servicios de terceras partes. Dispone igualmente de un servicio de atención al cliente online y pronto tendrá videotutoriales disponibles.

Una necesidad más que genera una utilidad más, ideal para muchos tipos de profesionales creativos que desean obtener opiniones acerca de sus trabajos.

Vía | MoMB
Enlace | Review Basics

Bloglines - Los usos de las herramientas de la Web 2.0, segÃºn un estudio inglÃ©s

2007-03-29T16:30:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

educ.ar - Educación y TIC

Los usos de las herramientas de la Web 2.0, según un estudio inglés

In Nuevos alfabetismos

La semana pasada el proyecto Spire del Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) del Reino Unido presentó los resultados de un estudio acerca del uso de servicios y aplicaciones de la Web 2.0, tales como la Wikipedia y los blogs, el Messenger y YouTube, entre otros. El estudio incluye una serie de gráficos que ponen en relación los tipos de usos con las edades de los usuarios y su nivel educativo,...

Bloglines - AudioDizer, convierte los contenidos de medios tradicionales en podcasts

2007-03-29T15:42:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Genbeta
El software y los servicios vía Internet, con toda la actualidad y los mejores trucos.

AudioDizer, convierte los contenidos de medios tradicionales en podcasts

By Cyberfrancis

AudioDizer es un sistema automatizado que pretende crear nuevos canales de distribución de contenidos sonoros para los reproductores portátiles a partir de los artículos y entradas de diferentes medios. Dicho de otra manera, es un sistema automático que genera mp3 de alta calidad, según ellos, partiendo de los contenidos a los que nos suscribamos mediante sus canales rss.

De esta manera, nos permitirá personalizar los podcasts generados por capítulos, en el que podemos indicar que tipos de acentos y voces, música a añadir y anuncios sonoros deberán de llevar nuestros podcasts generados.

Al final conseguiremos poder descargarnos o escuchar archivos de audio por cada entrada, aunque además podemos suscribirnos desde nuestro lector de feeds para que nos lo traiga directamente.

Anteriormente conocíamos una herramienta algo más simple, feed2podcast, una herramienta que hace algo similar pero sin posibilidades de personalización.

Via | MoMB
Enlace | AudioDizer

Bloglines - âReal-Timeâ RSS Reading With Anothr

2007-03-29T14:21:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Profy.Com
Professional blog community

"Real-Time" RSS Reading With Anothr

By Svetlana Gladkova on google-talk-bot

I don't know why we rather rarely speak of various RSS feed readers. Are we all totally satisfied with our reading experience? Well, I use Snarfer for my daily reading of news and other blogs and I can't think of a reason to move to another reader now. But there is one situation we should keep in mind: when you want to know that a blog is updated the second it gets the update. If I were involved in Digg deeply and actually tried to get into unofficial top diggers lists, I would really need to know of new posts on a number of very popular blogs immediately. Also if I participate in a discussion around some topic in the comments to a blog post and subscribe to RSS, it is better to be notified when someone replies to me immediately. Solution? Anothr.

You may remember from our previous posts in October and December about this Chinese startup that is here to enhance our reading experience (or at least make it more "real-time"). David Wilkinson reviewed the procedure of using Anothr to get Skype notification every time a certain RSS feed is updated. It seems to me that this Skype bot (another.com is the user name to be added to your Skype contacts) has become rather popular among Chinese users. Yesterday I got great news from the Chinese team behind Anothr: Anothr for Google Talk arrived. This means that you can now add anothr@gmail.com to your Gtalk list of contacts and start using it. After you add the bot to your contacts, you will receive a number of messages which will prompt you to choose your language, instruct you on how to subscribe to new feeds and unsubscribe and give you other tips on use of the bot. Knowing how many people have migrated to Gtalk from other messengers, I think you should give it a try. Of course, it is not the most feature-rich tool to actually read and manage all your subscriptions. This is why I would not advise you to import your OPML file to Anothr (while this is also possible with them) BUT if you need to know what happens on a blog as soon as it actually happens, Anothr is really a suitable option - with no installation or registration required.

The only disadvantage I can mention about Anothr is language: English and Russian (those languages I speak myself) on Anothr website and messages from the bot are rather awkward. But after all are you here to talk to a bot or to read news as soon as they arrive?

Tags: web 2.0, skype rss, Skype, rss reader, rss bot, rss, feed, anothr, gtalk, Google, Google Talk, gtalk bot, google talk bot

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Bloglines - Google Apps para la educaciÃ³n

2007-03-29T04:53:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

DigiZen: Un blogfesor aprendiendo
Nadie puede parar una idea cuyo tiempo ha llegado. (Víctor Hugo)

Google Apps para la educación

By Mario Núñez on Herramientas

Por recomendación del Dr. Moisés Orengo he estado experimentado con Google Apps, un servicio que es descrito de la siguiente manera:

Con Google Apps para educación, podrás ofrecer a tus estudiantes innovadores servicios de correo electrónico, mensajería instantánea y agenda. Y todo, completamente gratis. Puedes combinar los servicios disponibles como prefieras y personalizarlos con el logotipo, los colores y el contenido de tu facultad. Podrás administrar a tus usuarios a través de una sencilla consola basada en Internet o utilizar nuestras API para integrar los servicios en tus sistemas. Todo está alojado por Google, así que no tendrás que instalar ni mantener ningún tipo de hardware o software.

Lo único que se necesita es poseer un dominio. Bajo ese dominio puedes entonces ofrecer las herramientas de google a los estudiantes que pertenezcan a la escuela o centro educativo. Además, el sistema facilita la creación de una lista de correo mediante la cual puedes comunicarte con el grupo. Mediante Google Apps las escuelas y centros educativos con pocos recursos económicos pueden darle a sus estudiantes la experiencia de la Web 2.0 con una mínima inversión de tiempo y esfuerzo.

Para experimentar con este servicio utilicé el dominio blogfesor.net . Déjame saber si te interesa obtener una dirección tipo nombredeusuario@blogfesor.net pues tengo unas 498 disponibles.

google apps , Herramientas google apps, Herramientas

Compártelo

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Bloglines - Creating Successful Niche Content Spaces on the Web: Lessons for Enterprise 2.0

2007-03-29T04:49:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

The FASTForward Blog

Creating Successful Niche Content Spaces on the Web: Lessons for Enterprise 2.0

By Bill Ives on Enterprise 2.0

CNN offered an interesting article, Why commercial Wikis don't work: Crowdsourcing has been a giant hit for the Web 2.0 set — so why won't it work for bigger, more mainstream enterprises? It covers some successes and failures in group content creation. The main point can be summed up in this excerpt.

"…Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and Flickr organize people into literally millions of accessible walled gardens. Each one allows you to take part in tending the growth of that tiny space — that encyclopedia entry, that Flickr "tag. By tirelessly nurturing their specific communities, not by randomly "crowdsourcing," Wales, Butterfield, Fake and their ilk encourage responsible gardening. Wiki novels, Wiki op-eds, a Wiki Amazon: these are concepts too large, too uncontrolled, too wilderness-like - too unwalled - to be gardens. Either nothing grows at all there, or the good ideas get strangled by weeds."

So foster very focused content creation and stay away from trying to do too broad and ill defined a topic like writing a group novel on the web. Success can come on a focused site or on a site that promotes and support multiple niche content areas like the Wikipedia. The article gives a nice niche example, the Lostpedia, "a Wikipedia-like site created by fans of the ABC series Lost who are all trying to figure out what the heck is going on, and sharing their notes."

This also applies within the Enterprise. One example of success is the Intelpedia operating inside the Intel firewall to collect definitions of key work related concepts. Here you get many people focused on specific subsets of content. There have been over 9,000 entries. This is much better than a broad wiki for simply discussing company issues.

There is also the Intelipedia for the US intelligence community. The "top secret" Intelipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction on April 17 (2006)" Both of these applications follow the successful approach of the wikipedia, allowing for niche content creation that is maintained by dedicated users.

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Bloglines - Asegura tus contraseÃ±as a prueba de hackers

2007-03-28T09:54:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

powerpymes.com
Herramientas Empresariales para las Pymes del Siglo XXI

Asegura tus contraseñas a prueba de hackers

By bastidas on protección

Ya les habíamos dado un par de sitios que tienen que ver con contraseñas antes, de hecho uno de ellos es el que utilizamos nosotros. (¡fuera hackers!) y ahora nos llega la noticia de un nuevo sitio que se ofrece de manera gratuita a almacenarnos todas nuestras contraseñas (que amables). La verdad es que en este oficio de estar revisando diferentes sitios para que usted no lo haga hemos acumulado una cantidad enorme de password que necesitamos anotar en papelitos y tarjetas que bien podrían caer en manos de algún maloso por lo que bien podría ser de utilidad Clipperz que te permite almacenarlas todas ellas y encriptarlas para que sólo tu puedas acceder a ellas. Por lo que es mejor aprenderte una sola clave que te dará todas las demás. ¿Crees que sea conveniente darles tus llaves de acceso a bancos y sitios como eBay y Amazon que tienen tu número de Tarjeta de Crédito a ellos? Habrá que verlo. Lea muy bien la letra pequeñita que viene en el contrato y firme al fin de que es gratuito.
via Genbeta

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Bloglines - Trabajo en equipo usando Internet

2007-03-28T09:53:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

powerpymes.com
Herramientas Empresariales para las Pymes del Siglo XXI

Trabajo en equipo usando Internet

By bastidas on colaboración

Los equipo de trabajo de muchos de los empresarios que nos leen son amplios en algunas ocasiones y dejar instrucciones o compartir información es difícil si no se cuentan con las herramientas adecuadas. Y ahora le podemos comentar que ya está listo un software Código Abierto gratuito llamado Mindquarry el cual puedes descargar para cualquiera de los principales Sistemas Operativos y con el que puedes lograr grandes cosas como:
1.Manejo de Archivos Asi es, ya que no importa donde estén físicamente dos personas, ahora pueden editar archivos al mismo tiempo o revisar todo lo que otros en la compañía han almacenado. No hay necesidad de sufrir, ya que todo está organizado por carpetas.
2.Wiki Esto es como un cuaderno donde todos en un mismo equipo van anotando todo lo que sucede para que se tenga una sola mentalidad y se conozcan los avances de los proyectos.
3.Cosas por Hacer De tal manera que puedes anotar todos tus pendientes y el jefe de un equipo estar al pendiente de las cosas por hacer de cada uno de ellos. Ya nadie olvidará lo que se debe de hacer para llegar a una meta en común.
Algunas otras cosas que se irán sumando en el camino como chat interno, manejo de equipos, etc. De tal manera que podría ser una buena idea que le eche un vistazo a este programa para que vea todo lo que puede hacer por su empresa.
via Genbeta

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Bloglines - Defining Blogs and Wikis: Technology or Style?

2007-03-28T06:41:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Defining Blogs and Wikis: Technology or Style?

By Bill Ives on trends: blogs

This post combines a few things I wrote on the Fast Forward blog and expands them a bit. There was a lot of debate in 2003 and 2004 about what is blog. Jordan Frank summarized some of this discussion in his recent post, What is a Blog? A Wiki? As Cesar Brea said in 2004, blogs can be considered as both a style and technology. I mentioned this in one of my first post: Web Logs: The Relationship of Style and Technology (June 2, 2004). For each objective, there will likely some unique aspects of the technology, the functional design, and the style. Dave Winer focused on the style in his 2003 post and defined blogs as the unedited voice of the writer and they reflected a personal perspective. He viewed technical functions as not as important and the need for comments as optional.

Later (November 8, 2005) I wrote, When is a Blog, A Blog? and mentioned Ethan Zuckerman's comments on the blog Christopher Lydon and his team from Open Source radio had just created. Ethan said that they were not doing a blog, but rather an RSS enabled content management system. In other words, they were using blog software to present ideas and collect comments. Ethan explained that most blogs are connected to an ecosystem of other bloggers who engage in online dialog. To be a real blog, the site had to present more of Christopher's personal views.

Jordan, in 2007, focuses more on the technology as he defines blogs and wikis as "A system for posting, editing, and managing a collection of hypertext pages (generally pertaining to a certain topic or purpose)...
Blog: ...displayed as a set of pages in time order...
Wiki: ...displayed by page as a set of linked pages..."

While Jordan's definition would not pass the views of Winer and Zuckerman, for Enterprise 2.0 purposes the emphasis should be, in part, on the technical capabilities because it opens up more uses. From a purely technical perspective Jordan boils the tools down to the essence of blogs and wikis and their essential difference. This is useful as we think of new uses. As he wrote, why should a technology be defined (and limited to) by its initial major use case. However, the Enterprise 2.0 technology does enable a different "style" of interacting with others and this is something many of us prize. And blogs and wikis have distinct styles apart from each other. Blogs are more about communication and are author-centric. Wikis are more about collaboration and are content-centric. The open communication of both blogs and wikis is much more than a technology and Enterprise 2.0 is much more than a technology play. It needs to be more than technology to realize its potential and to succeed.

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Bloglines - How Much Can Enterprise 2.0 Transform? Experts Agree to Disagree

2007-03-28T05:12:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

The FASTForward Blog

How Much Can Enterprise 2.0 Transform? Experts Agree to Disagree

By Joe McKendrick on Enterprise 2.0

Two of information technology's greatest thinkers — Harvard's Andrew McAfee and Babson's Tom Davenport, have agreed to disagree over the scale of the impact of Enterprise 2.0.

Davenport, author of Competing on Analytics and a vocal proponent of the power of IT to transform business, doesn't think E2.0 will rise to the occasion. He just published an article in Harvard Business Review questioning the value of Enterprise 2.0 to business. He even considers E2.0 to be the "next small thing," rather than "the next big thing," as Andrew McAfee believes (and as we proclaim with such persistence at this blogsite.)

Davenport questions whether E2.0 technologies and services "will empower employees, decentralize decisions, free up knowledge, and generally make for better places to work," as McAfee and many of us here at this blogsite believe.
Davenport explains his skepticism:

"Such a utopian vision can hardly be achieved through new technology alone. The absence of participative technologies in the past is not the only reason that organizations and expertise are hierarchical. Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won't make organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won't make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO."

McAfee response is that he "couldn't agree more" with Davenport, arguing that he, too, argues against the "techno-determinism and -utopianism that I've sensed in some E2.0 enthusiasts." Rather, McAfee predicts "spotty deployment of E2.0 technologies, not broad or deep adoption. My pessimism comes from exactly the factors that Tom describes."

McAfee, however, admits he is far more optimistic about E2.0, putting it this way:

"My optimism, and my interest in the component technologies of E2.0, comes not (solely) from my inherent geekiness, but from the fact that these technologies really are something new under the sun. They're not extensions or enhancements to previous generations of corporate tools for collaboration and knowledge management; instead, they're radical departures from them."

He also agreed that E2.0 in and of itself won't "turn our existing hierarchical, political, and busy companies into egalitarian gestalts of knowledge creation and continuous bottom-up innovation." However, what E2.0 will do, McAfee believes, is open more doors, giving "managers who want more lateralism, egalitarianism, crowdsourcing, idea percolation, self-organization, collective intelligence, etc. a new and unprecedented opportunity to obtain them."

McAfee also observes that many managers truly want to break down the hierarchies that hold their organizations back, and that market forces will ultimately make E2.0 attractive to many businesses. "If Enterprise 2.0 technologies and mindsets do in fact help some companies get ahead by creating and disseminating more knowledge, innovating more, reacting faster, etc. then interest will grow, and so might new approaches."

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Bloglines - Forlater, programando el envÃo de futuros mensajes de correo electrÃ³nico

2007-03-28T04:01:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Genbeta
El software y los servicios vía Internet, con toda la actualidad y los mejores trucos.

Forlater, programando el envío de futuros mensajes de correo electrónico

By Cyberfrancis

Seguro que muchos recordaréis a Futureme, un servicio que nos permite escribir un mensaje para mandárnoslo en una fecha determinada a la dirección de correo electrónico que le indiquemos.

Pues tenemos un competidor mucho más digno, igual de simple y con el mismo fín. Forlater es una herramienta similar aunque con mejor diseño en el que escribimos el asunto, el mensaje, indicamos dirección de correo electrónico, elegimos fecha y hora y, llegado el momento, se nos envía los mensajes que hayamos programado previamente.

¿Utilidad? Vosotros mismos quizás encontréis alguna utilidad práctica, en comparación con las infinidades de herramientas, como los recordatorios por correo electrónico de Google Calendar, pero bueno, aquí tenemos una opción más para, como siempre, les interese.

Vía | Go2web20.net
Enlace | Forlater.net

Bloglines - Web Services Coming To Twitter

2007-03-27T17:41:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

TechCrunch
TechCrunch profiles the companies, products and events that are defining and transforming the new web. TechCrunch is written by Michael Arrington.

Web Services Coming To Twitter

By Steve Poland on Twitter

Earlier this year we talked about the usefulness of a simple command line to query multiple web services via a set syntax. Yubnub, one of the web services we discussed, does just that. Enter "Weather 90210″ into Yubnub and get the weather from Weather.com. Or query thousands of other services with that single command line.

A subtle upcoming change to Twitter's API will allow this kind of functionality, too. Twitter, which is a kind of social network around sms/text messages, has a rapidly growing community of users that spend hours each day sending text messages about what they are doing or thinking. To post a message, a user simply texts the message they want to post to "40404." Anyone who cares to follow the meanderings of another user can do so. All messages from people you follow can be seen on your Twitter page and, optionally, delivered to your mobile device via SMS.

A popular feature with Twitter is a "direct" message that you send to just a single friend. The syntax is simple - you type "d [username] [your message]."

Until now, Twitter's API hasn't allowed you to access those direct messages though. With today's API addition, you can now retrieve Twitter direct messages. What does that mean? A lot, quite frankly.

Users can now send a command ("direct message") to a username which is just a name for a web service like weather.com. For example, there could be a Twitter username "weather", which I could send a Twitter message of "d weather 14202″ by text, web, or IM. The Twitter username "weather" could get this command (er, Twitter "direct message") via the API, run a process on a web server to retrieve the current weather forecast for 14202, and send that as a direct message back to me ( i.e. "d TechCrunch Currently: Partly Cloudy, 50F. Tomorrow's Forecast: AM Clouds/PM Sun. High: 55 Low: 40″).

Or there could be a username "score", which you could send "d score Yankees", to immediately request the score of the Yankees game. Or another example could be "d 411 Starbucks 14202″ to retrieve the phone number of the closest Starbucks to zip code 14202.

Currently, it costs a lot of money to launch a start-up in the SMS/mobile space — you have to license a shortcode monthly ($500-$1000/mo), pay a SMS gateway provider, and then pay anywhere from $0.03 - $0.05 per inbound or outbound text message. It adds up. But now, if a start-up chooses to use Twitter as a command line to their web service, it's free (until Twitter starts charging for it).

As you can tell, the one thing that is kind of annoying is prefacing messages with "d", but Twitter is internally discussing use of "@" as possibly becoming the equivalent of "d" — I hope they do this. Currently, people are using "@(username)" to publicly reply to other Twitter messages — which can be annoying if you're a friend of a user that is replying to what another user said (and you don't even know what was originally said).

The updated Twitter API code should be posting live by morning and accompanying API documentation should be posted by the end of today as well.

Editor's Note: This post by Steve Poland of Ringside Startup, where he's blogging his own web start-up journey with advice along the way from VCs and seasoned entrepreneurs. You can follow Steve's life on twitter.com/techquilashots, and Michael Arrington's at twitter.com/techcrunch.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Bloglines - Pattern Tool for Web Designers

2007-03-27T17:40:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Go2web2

Pattern Tool for Web Designers

By Orli Yakuel

lately I don't have so much time for blogging so it's good to find services like Stripe Generator that you don't actually need to explain so much about them ;-)

Just go inside the site and try their Design Tool yourself. Very usefu and easy-to-use, you can't go wrong there, believe me.

Unleash your personal style, experiment and download the tile. You can use it directly in your CSS file or as pattern in Photoshop.

Another great way to make patterns, in this service: StripeDesigner

Bloglines - YouCams, salas de videoconferencias para tu web

2007-03-27T17:38:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Genbeta
El software y los servicios vía Internet, con toda la actualidad y los mejores trucos.

YouCams, salas de videoconferencias para tu web

By Cyberfrancis

Cada vez más existen más formas de que nuestros amigos se pongan en contacto con nosotros desde nuestros sitios web, pasando por sistemas de chats tipo Plugoo o MeeboMe, mensajería como blom, videoconferencias como Wengo Visio, y ahora con YouCams.

YouCams es un widget, bastante grande con lo que deberemos de buscar un lugar espacioso en nuestra web, que introduce una sala de videoconferencia, realizada en flash, donde poder establecer conversaciones de textos y vídeos con nuestros propios amigos, estén o no registrados, e incluso otras opciones mediante plugins, como la de compartir los vídeos de YouTube o coleccionar otros widgets. Desde la misma interface pueden navegar para poder acceder a otras salas de chats públicas existentes.

Podemos modificar nuestra propia sala e incluso crearnos nuevas salas, que podrán ser públicas o privadas, indicando una serie de parámetros de personalización.

Como usuarios registrados, podemos acceder a funciones extras gracias a los créditos que podemos ganar enviando invitaciones, añadiendo el widget en nuestra web e incluso que otros usuarios nos la hayan transferido a nosotros. Además podemos acceder a códigos específicos de nuestra sala para añadir en nuestra web o dentro de nuestros perfiles de nuestras redes sociales, en formato flash o java, así como el enlace para poder compartir con otros usuarios de cualquier forma, por ejemplo, como firma de correo electrónico, ya que dicho enlace es fácil de recordar.

En estos momentos parece caído el servicio cuando andaba en mitad de su revisión, aunque dispone de doce vídeos en total en su propio canal de YouTube para ver sus funcionalidades, en cuyo canal también nos permite suscribirnos.

Vía | Web2null
Enlace | YouCams

Bloglines - MX Skype Recorder, grabando conversaciones VoIP

2007-03-27T05:55:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Bitelia
Software, aplicaciones web, trucos y actualizaciones.

MX Skype Recorder, grabando conversaciones VoIP

By Jordi on VoIP

MX Skype Recorder pese a su nombre, permite grabar las conversaciones realizadas mediante diferentes programas de VoIP como Skype, GTalk y Yahoo! Messenger. Las conversaciones que puede grabar son todas aquellas que se produzcan a/desde el ordenador en que está instalado (PC-PC, PC-Teléfono).

Las características de la aplicación son:

Puede trabajar en modo automático, con lo que graba y para de forma solo, o en modo manual.
Guarda las conversaciones en formato MP3 (8-320 kbits) o WAV.
Puede guardar las conversaciones en una sola pista o en dos, uno para la entrada y otra para la salida.
Puede trabajar en modo espía. Graba sin que ni siquiera el usuario del ordenador en que está instalado lo sepa.

(more…)

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Bloglines - Revisiting Web 2.0 Startups

2007-03-27T05:00:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Profy.Com
Professional blog community

Revisiting Web 2.0 Startups

By Phil Butler on web-2.0

Where are they now? It is about time we looked at some of Web 2.0 startups to see what kind of progress they have made since we last reported, so here are a few favorites and not so favorite Web 2.0 Startups we have reviewed. I submit this first group of re-visitations for our readers as a way of marking the first 3 months of 2007. Some startups are excluded from this set, but will be covered at the end of the month.

We got an invitation to check out Veoh back in February and found the site to be one of the best video sharing sites. One thing I really love about Veoh is that every single time I visit I am greeted by Shakira! My favorite videos says hi each and every time I stop by. The most notable addition to Veoh is the browser plug-in that allows users to find and download video from their favorite sites. The Veoh downloadable player allows viewers to download or view DVD quality, full screen video, Web TV and movies and watch them on their PC's, portables or TV's. The player is essentially a DVR for Veoh users that adds a new dimension to video enjoyment. As I mentioned, video recommendations stores and displays your preferences to make your Veoh experience more personal and enjoyable. Veoh channels are a great new addition, and the site has about 10 times as much content as when we visited in February. Veoh apears to be thriving and easily tops this first list.

Jamglue is a neat and innovative community we reviewed last December. The site essentially allows community members to upload and collectively or individually mix music tracks. Besides a slight face lift and a whole lot more content and users, Jamglue is essentially unchanged from its original offering. It is still a fun place to collaborate with other music manipulators, if a little bypassed by some more complex communities. I expect Jamglue was intended as a niche site any way, so they seem to be progressing pretty well in that regard.

WeWin was touted as being the next YouTube the last time we posted about this incentive based video community. There was also some rather controversial news play about a supposed buyout of WeWin by gofish that is still a sort of mystery to me. The site is, or course, not YouTube yet, and they did not take my advice about offering a super computer as a prize either. WeWin appears to be chugging along and has added a great deal of content for (or from) their users. Oh yes, you can still win a PS3 too. Do the super computer Brian!

Graffitipad is a philanthropic entry into Web 2.0 that we reviewed back in January. The site was designed to sell pixels to donors in an effort to send people to college. All I can say now is that the site looks as dead as Julius Caesar.

Cranky is the first age relevant search engine we looked at in January. Designed basically for people over 50, Cranky at least appears to still be kicking. Interestingly, the most searched topic on the home page was sex. I expect this might be true for any search engine regardless of the age niche it occupies. I was originally taken back by the site because I did not feel I was ready for walking search engine just yet.

Poopasnuffas was a cute little idea to attach stories to some critters in an effort to sell some baby clothes. I liked the idea for a Web 2.0 kids clothing niche back in January. I asked "what's in a name?" as the post title, and it looks like the name says it all. Poopa is virtually unchanged from its original kid authors to the clothes offerings.

Adkafe got a pretty bad review from us back in January and won the "stinker" award for that month. The site looks to have been modified, but has added some Ad seekers (28) and Ad designers (44). Not much else needs to be said for Adkafe today.

Well, I looked for a real success story to thrill you guys with, but the fact is most of the really good contenders are either still in Beta or behind closed doors. I did notice while scanning some of these sites for this story that just maintaining a presence might be considered success for some entities in Web 2.0 right now. Joost and a few others will obviously be success stories, but the vast majority I have covered in the last 4 months are either growing steadily, stagnated, dieing or virtually dead. I don't have any numbers for you, but it looks like a lot of high hopes have turned to disappointment. I guess this was to be expected.

I doubt there is any reason for concern about the Internet as a whole, but it is a little sad to watch cool ideas die a horrible death. As for the really crummy ones, we cannot lose too much sleep over the inevitable.

Tags: startups, veoh, jamglue, wewin, gofish, grafittipad, cranky, Poopasnuffas, adkafe, Joost, Youtube, web sites, web 2.0

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Bloglines - Mas ventas, menos viajes

2007-03-27T04:49:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

powerpymes.com
Herramientas Empresariales para las Pymes del Siglo XXI

Mas ventas, menos viajes

By bastidas on presentación

Muchas son las compañías que están buscando la manera de hacer mas productivos los negocios establecidos, es decir que realicen mas actividades con el mismo esfuerzo. Una empresa alemana está ofreciendo ayudarle a que sus ventas crezcan y sin necesidad de tanto viaje. La idea es muy sencilla, le permiten transmitir una presentación de ventas, o de instrucción o capacitación tipo Power Point y enviársela a un cliente cualquiera, quien la podrá ver, al mismo tiempo que usted y ambos pueden estar comunicados via telefónica o VoIP para que estén discutiendo lo que van viendo. Una manera muy diferente de hacer que las juntas de ventas se conduzcan. Y sentimos que en verdad le será de utilidad para cerrar mejores tratos. La cuenta básica es gratuita en Telepark aunque hay opciones mas avanzadas que ya cuestan. Pruébelo.
via MoMB

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Bloglines - 10 Ways to Improve Your Blog Karma

2007-03-26T14:10:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Influential Interactive Marketing
Reflections on creating compelling marketing, advertising and public relations

10 Ways to Improve Your Blog Karma

By Rohit

Whether you believe in karma or not, making your blog a success often has a lot to do with a series of seemingly disconnected events. Every post you make, person you contact or comment you leave adds to the sum total of your efforts in the blogosphere. Building relationships is important in any industry, but blog karma is the idea that what you do and how you behave will ultimately have an effect on you directly or indirectly. Blog karma is not often written about, but very often spoken about by bloggers, especially successful ones. So if you did believe that blog karma does exist, how should you go about increasing yours? Here are 10 ways you can improve your blog karma:

Be real. This is the first and foremost principle of furthering your blog karma that I could think of. Being real involves not lying, being transparent about who you are and what you believe, and sharing an honest voice. People trust others that have an authentic voice, and are more likely to refer them to others or help when asked.
Respond to emails. This is tough when you have a high volume of unsolicited emails, but the idea that someone took time to write directly to you should make it enough of a priority to respond. Obviously, this applies to personally written messages, and not to email blasts of press releases. Those are rarely worth a response.
Offer exclusives. Maybe you aren't breaking "news" on your blog, but the idea of exclusives is not limited to that. If you are going to write about something interesting, offer a preview to other bloggers. Share ideas as they happen and offer the chance for others to say it first. Exclusives are gold in the blogosphere ... everyone wants them.
Make connections. In social settings, the gold standard for making connections is introducing two people to one another who later get married. Blogging is no different. If you can be the person making these connections between individuals that may not have met otherwise, you will be remembered by both for your efforts.
Join networks. This is not just about publishing networks, but about social networks of people who are interested in the same things you are. Joining groups like this, and actively participating adds value to the group. As a member, it probably won't be long before you take something useful from the group.
Avoid snark. Snarkiness is the enemy of good karma. Being rude, uselessly opinionated or arrogant are all rising behaviours from bloggers that add to the sea of needless commentary online. The price for this may not be apparent, as unfortunately, snarkiness does sometimes result in readership (who can't avoid watching a car crash?) -- but eventually the snark will catch up to you.
Forgive mistakes. Most bloggers are not journalists and don't have the time or necessity for checking every fact or argument before making it. This does result in mistakes, and people do screw up. Correcting them without holding a grudge is a big deal. Mistakes are made, people are sorry. If they fixed the error, then get over it.
Post to contact. Email is not the only way to get in touch with someone. Posting about something they have written and linking to their blog offers an indirect route to contact, as most bloggers pay attention to who is linking to them. Writing about one of my posts is still the best way to get onto my radar, and I suspect most bloggers are the same way. Communicating in this way avoids the email filter and starts the dialogue.
Comment and participate. This may be part of earlier suggestions, however the idea that you need to be a participant online rather than just an observer is key to this belief. If you expect others to communicate and add comments to your blog, you need to be online doing the same for others. Without participation, it is difficult to belong to a community online or build relationships with others.
Show gratitude. Often mentioned as an important factor in connecting with users, showing gratitude for someone participating on your blog, linking to you, or offering some other effort on your behalf is vital. Appreciation makes someone more likely to believe that you think their efforts are significant and as a result, connect more strongly with you and your blog.

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Bloglines - Build Your Own Justin.tv With Ustream

2007-03-26T08:17:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

TechCrunch
TechCrunch profiles the companies, products and events that are defining and transforming the new web. TechCrunch is written by Michael Arrington.

Build Your Own Justin.tv With Ustream

By Michael Arrington on Ustream

Justin.tv launched a week ago, and is rising steadily in popularity. It's a simple idea - the site shows live video of Justin, who lives in San Francisco with his buddies and spends his time meeting with local startups and personalities. At any given time hundreds of people are watching and chatting real time on the site. Just this moment, at 2:46 AM PST, 126 people are watching Justin sleep.

Ustream.tv, a service that let's anyone create their own 24/7 web cam show, is capitalizing on a ton of press around Justin.tv and launching way earlier than expected. That may or may not be a good thing - I discovered a lot of bugs while trying out the service, and it really detracted from the overall experience. Ustream also needs a basic "how to" guide for new broadcasters - suggested equipment, and a step-by-step process for launching their show.

The basic Ustream service is free, and anyone with a computer, an Internet connection and a web cam can set up their own channel and broadcast live. Viewers can watch on the site, or embed the live video onto any other website.

So far Ustream is a poor version of Stickam, which has great tools for people who want to broadcast their own live web shows (and build a social network around them). Ustream is targeting users who want to carry a camera around with them all the time, though, and like Justin.tv they are allowing users to put up a calendar with their upcoming activities.

Meanwhile, the Justin.tv guys have already built a robust platform that's handling quite a bit of traffic already. It would not be difficult for them to launch a platform for others to host their own shows, too. They haven't indicated that they intend to do that, but my guess is they'll keep an eye on Ustream to see if this takes off. Like most things, there's a novelty factor - future shows will have to have very talented hosts if they hope to build an audience.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Bloglines - Who Uses What Online Tool for Which Reason: Oxford Study

2007-03-26T05:53:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Who Uses What Online Tool for Which Reason: Oxford Study

By Bill Ives on tools: web 2.0

Here is a comprehensive study of online tool use with data taken from December 1, 2006 to February 16, 2007. During this period the survey was completed by 1369 respondents, mostly Continuing Education students and academics at the University of Oxford. So it is very specialized sample but still useful. Thre are very nice graphics. For example, you can see that many are using the Wikipedia for study or work and very few are using the social bookmarking tools, del.icio.us or Stumbleupon. There is also a strong use of discussion forums, along with some use of the World of Warcraft. About a fourth write a blog while about two thirds read blogs. Some read blogs for study but they mostly do it for fun and socially. About half use You Tube, mostly for fun. About a third are on MySpace and about half of that number are on Facebook.

I do not see any surprises here but it is useful data to back up your intuitions. It is a Creative Commons project and asked for attribution to be to 'David White, JISC funded 'SPIRE' project 2007.' Here is some more context to the study. Thanks to Hylton Jolliffe for sharing this report.

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Bloglines - Twitterrific 2.0, cada vez somos mÃ¡s

2007-03-25T15:52:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Genbeta
El software y los servicios vía Internet, con toda la actualidad y los mejores trucos.

Twitterrific 2.0, cada vez somos más

By Oscar J. Baeza

Como ya hemos repetido en infinidad de veces, Twitter es el nuevo boom en la red. Infinidad de aplicaciones de escritorio, clientes web, plugins para CMS, librerías para gestionar envíos o lectura desde Twitter, mashups basándose en Twitter y otros servicios, entre un largo etcétera de posibilidades que ofrece este servicio web.

Los usuarios de Mac, al menos yo nos hemos acostumbrado a utilizar Twitterrific, uno de los mejores clientes de Twitter para Mac, existiendo clientes equivalentes en Windows y Linux, Twitteroo y gTwitter, respectivamente.

Twitterrific, de Iconfactory, tiene su predecesor en beta privada, Twitterrific 2.0, que pronto podremos utilizar y que ha mejorado enormemente con respecto al actual Twitterrific 1.1.1, principalmente en las opciones de personalización y un interfaz mucho más cuidado.

Enlace | Twitterrific.
Vía | Glenn Wolsey « TUAW.

2007-03-25T15:50:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Martin Varsavsky | Español

Que el mundo fué y será una porquería....explicado por Gapminder

By Martin on General

Gracias a lectores de mi blog conocí Gapminder. Había pensado hacer algo tipo Gapminder en mi fundación pero descubrí que no solo ya existía sino que este proyecto era mucho mejor y más elaborado de lo que yo pensaba hacer. Sin embargo, hasta esta tarde lluviosa en Paris no había encontrado un rato para estudiar bien el proyecto que tan gráficamente explica por qué el mundo fué y será una porquería (tango favorito de mi padre, de Enrique Santos Discépolo). Sugiero estudiar esta presentación un buen rato. Lo explica todo muy bien..

Siglo XX Cambalache, Siglo XXI....peor.

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Libersy video. Excelent service.

2007-03-25T15:31:00.001-04:00

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Bloglines - JOHN HAGEL's KEYNOTE at Community 2.0 Conference

2007-03-25T15:13:00.001-04:00

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Outside Innovation
New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to compliment the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

JOHN HAGEL's KEYNOTE at Community 2.0 Conference

By Patty Seybold

This is the inaugural Community 2.0 conference being put on by Shared Insights. It's being held in Las Vegas March 12-14th.

Conference was kicked off by Barry Libert, CEO of Shared Insights, and then by Francois Goissieaux, the conference chair, who both stressed the mood of informality and strategic conversations.

JOHN HAGEL'S KEYNOTE

John Hagel led off with the keynote. See his blog. Edge Perspectives.

Here are his remarks:

I'm very encouraged about the commercial prospects of online communities.

My book NetGain was published in 1997, was one of the first to focus on online communities in business. Every business plan in 1998 claimed to be about virtual communities.. the result was a lot of wasted investment and backlash. Most of the virtual community initiatives have operated under the radar screen.

In the past 12 months, I've gotten a series of phone calls from blue chip execs asking for help with virtual communities. So my personal barometer says that there's a time for climate change.

Community 2.0 is heralding a rebirth of online communities.

One lesson learned from my book: people focused on the opportunities, not the challenges..
The first challenge has to do with language. What are virtual communities? (anything that involves conversations among people?

Hagel's definition of Virtual Communities:
Establishing connections among people with common needs on shared networks.

Shared Discussions among people over time.
Shared relationships.
Shared identity with one another and with the community.
Shared meaning that grows over time.

The resurgence in virtual communities? They respond to deep needs we all have.

Virtual communities take a couple of different forms. Some started in physical space and became electronic. Others started electronically and added the physical community aspect.

THE CORE CHALLENGES

Diverse Skills and cultural challenges:

Combining published content with interactions
Social Interaction -- How do you catalyze and sustain relationships
Economic business models --

Every community starts with a spike in one of these three areas.. but don't do a good job of combing all three.

Three key shifts in mindsets:

Move from a benefit to sponsor focus to a participant focus
Move from short-term, get rich quick focus into long term value creation focus
Move from a top-down, imposed organization view to a bottom up emergent organization view.

You can't control them. You want to enhance the initiatives of the participants. Most large companies bring mindsets that are

Organizational Challenges and Organizational Frameworks required

Organization-Who's accountable? Do they have the status and influence within the organization to mobilize the resources and talent required to foster community? Are they too narrowly focused in their interests? Marketing/Customer Support/Product Development or any other functional area? If the person has a narrow view, the community's focus will be narrowed.
Systems-What is being measured and what is being rewarded? How will they define success? What are the relevant operational metrics? Are there systematic reviews? Do we reflect on how we're doing?
Skills-Who has the relevant experience? Are they being mobilized into the virtual communities?

WHAT ARE THE OPPORTUNITIES?

From a broader business context--these will make virtual communities essential to success of the overall business over time. All companies are facing two pressures on profitability:

From Customers
From Talent -- people with talent

Corporations are beginning to realize their success hinges on their ability to build and retain talent. More mobility and more opportunities to strike out on your own. Talent is becoming more valuable and requires more bargaining power.

How can I create an environment that will develop talent better than anyone else. They'll be able to develop their talents more rapidly in my company.

Customers getting more power; Talent gaining more power; Companies stuck in the middle.

How do you define performance in this new era?

ROA--Return on Attention. It's critical to look at this both from the participants and the organizers. The scarcest resource is the attention of people. How we choose to allocate our 24 hour days determines who creates value and who destroys value. Of the total attention that I allocate to a source, what's the return on that attention? How much attention do I receive as a participant from other participants, and how much value to I derive from that? How much effort and resource was required to gain the attention of the participants, and how much value was gained from that attention. Reducing the costs to attract attention, gain value and retain retention. For customers, I would focus on key questions. Who are the 20% of the customers who generate 80% of your profitability? What can be done to engage those high-profitability customers? How can customer communities be designed to strengthen the lifetime value of all customers--a broader swath than the top 20%. We need to do more than help participants search for things that are valuable. More important is focusing on serendipity. How do I create environments that introduce participants to resources they didnt' even know existed. Recommendation: Read Peter Morville's Ambient Findability. This ultimately leads to "fundability." If you're findable, you're more fundable. One-to-one marketing focus diminishes the "return on attention" equation. The customer wants a broader range of options and a broader set of resources. The ability to connect each person with multiple people.. more published content, more contributor-generated content, more customers... This is hard for companies who want to limit choice (they don't want to include their competitors).. Maybe the natural owners of these virtual communities are third-parties.

ROI- Return on Information- Information meaning profiles of participants. Who these people are , what their needs are, what their interests are. How much Info have I provided? How much effort was that? How much value have I received? From an organizer perspective, how much information can we gain that is volunteered? What can we do with that info in order to deliver more value to them? What more can we do to learn about participants by watching them interact vs. asking them things? How can we be more helpful to participants based on information and activity.. Leverage serendipity.. offer resources. How can we shorten the time between the time someone offers info and the time they get value back..

ROS- Return on Skills - Talent is more and more valuable as an asset. Focus on this from a participant perspective and from a provider perspective. Given the amount of effort I have put into the community or in developing my skills, or by amplifying my skills thru social interactions. For organizers--am I able to motivate our skilled people to participate and to gain value and learning from the people who matter most to them--our customers--?

In general, we've made a distinction historically, we've made a distinction between communities of interest and communities of practice. With communities of practice being groups of people who are working on a shared project, e.g. open sources software. I believe that these boundaries will blur. Why? Because we have pressures intensifying for people to deepen their skills. People want to adopt their passion as their profession. Seek out communities who support their passion and who can aid in their development.

As customers get more involved, they'll want to be more active in the design and delivery of the products and services they need to meet their needs.

We're seeing these boundaries between communities of interest and communities of practice coming together. Becoming the catalyst in the shift between push programs and pull platforms.

There's a broad spectrum of opportunity in virtual communities. Not just connection. But broadening and deepening those interactions over time. Joint construction and creation activities.

Bloglines - Cashlinkr, aloja enlaces publicitarios y recibe dinero por ello

2007-03-25T15:08:00.001-04:00

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Genbeta
El software y los servicios vía Internet, con toda la actualidad y los mejores trucos.

Cashlinkr, aloja enlaces publicitarios y recibe dinero por ello

By Cyberfrancis

Cashlinkr es un servicio que intermedia entre anunciantes y propietarios de sitios webs para que los primeros escojan entre una serie de paquetes, en función del PR y cantidad de sitios web, y los segundos recibir ingresos vía Paypal de forma mensual por cada enlace publicitario que alojen en sus propios sitios.

Cashlinkr negocia con los propietarios de sitios web registrados en su sistema los enlaces publicitarios a añadir, cuyo valor va en función del PageRank, del valor de Alexa y de otros factores.

Una forma más de poder rentabilizar para sitios web que tengan una buena posición dentro de los buscadores.

Vía | Wwwhat´s new
Enlace | Cashlinkr

Bloglines - 8 Social Startups at Under the Radar

2007-03-25T11:52:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user felmiranda (felmiranda@gmail.com) has sent this item to you.

Mashable!
Social software and social networking 2.0.

8 Social Startups at Under the Radar

By Kristen Nicole on mashable

The Under the Radar: Why Office 2.0 Matters conference starts later today in Mountain View, CA. It's a chance for lesser-known companies that provide web-based business solutions to strut their stuff. The 32 companies that will be presenting at the conference are promoting their ideas on how to make business more collaborative and productive. Here's a roundup of those presenters that offer true social benefits with their services.

SlideAware - SlideAware provides online storage and collaboration solution for slideshows that's fully integrated with PowerPoint. This provides transparency for the team. Presentations can be sent to clients, and metrics give details about who looked at the presentation, and how long they viewed a particular slide.

Big Contacts - Big Contacts serves up an online Rolodex, wiki-style. Keep track of meetings, anniversaries and clients' spouses. One-click access to Word templates pre-populate letterheads and greeting cards for any contact. Added notes and assignments from multiple users are wiki-style to see the history on any client.

Koral - Koral is a private workspace for your docs that can be shared with a group. An improved search makes it easier to find the right document, and their sync function alerts other team members when a new version of your document has been added. Koral keeps everybody on the same page, at all times.

Spresent - Spresent provides a web-based alternative to PowerPoint. Their Adobe flash-based service is optimized to create feature-rich presentations that can incorporate YouTube videos and Flickr photos. Presentations are shared online, and prove to be far more engaging than a PowerPoint presentation.

Stikkit - Post-it meets wiki. Stikkit, a recent SXSW finalist, lets you type notes on your Stikkits, and they'll be kept up to date. Shared Stikkits can be edited, making it a mobile wiki. Email yourself a Stikkit for it to be automatically converted into an email format for furthered sharing purposes.

Teqlo - Teqlo is an application that lets you mashup your widgets. It aims to provide a way for non-tech savvy people to create customized solutions, such as a drag-and-drop feature to place sales leads on a map and automatically provide a list of phone numbers every morning. Removing the need for coding and developer knowledge broadens access to the furthered democratization of business and social tools alike.

Worklight - Worklight uses ajax and RSS to offer better access for employees within the corporate structure. Other ways they update businesses are desktop and web-based widgets, bookmarks, and mashups. Businesses are usually slow to adopt new trends like these. So Worklight may not change the masses, but could usher in the next era of business communication.

Xcellery - Xcellery enables online collaboration of Excel sheets. Their service may seem to be very similar to other online document management systems such as Google Docs and Zoho Sheets. Xcellery's main point of differentiation is the fact that revised documents aren't replaced, but are extended. This is a useful feature that many of the established players have yet to take into account.

–

Editor's note: Great roundup, but geez, is there nothing good at UTR this time around? We had trouble finding anything even vaguely impressive.

Recommended: Piczo Layouts at Mashcodes!

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