Enterprise - Editor's note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforcecom In it, he responds to critics of his last guest post arguing thatenterprisesoftware should be more like Facebook
Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforcecom, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazoncom” If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud, you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement Its been an exciting decade But the real excitement is just starting
Frankly, I’ve been amazed by the huge amount of responses, tweets, and comments (aka “the ruckus across the blogoshere,” as Joe McKendrick calls it) It only strengthens my conviction that we are about to see the greatest revolution in enterprise software, ever Well, really, the most exciting revolution in computing, ever It will create more value for users, customers, and vendors by an order of magnitude over what we saw in the last wave And, it’s really starting to happen right now It is realtime It is social It ismobile And, it is about time Literally, it is about productivity
Enterprise - Once again, the tech team at BusinessWeek is preparing our annual list of the best under-30 entrepreneurs. Who would you put on our list of the brightest young stars in the tech industry? Check out our online poll and nominate who you think are the most deserving start-up founders.
We've written about well-known entrepreneurs like Aaron Patzer, Bret Taylor, Christophe Bisciglia, and Max Ventilla in past reports, so we're looking for fresh faces. Tell us your nominees by March 19. We'll publish a report based on the results in late April.
Enterprise - An interesting firefight broke out over the weekend as Google engineer DeWitt Clinton defended Google data policies in Buzz and related “open” standards Those who remember the politics of RSS and the games companies played around its buildout would recognize a number of the names and tactics of the current positioning Closed comment threads, insinuations, []
Enterprise - Google made plenty of noise with its January announcement that the company was “no longer willing to continue censoring” its Web search results in China at the behest of that country’s policies. But nearly two months later, the company has not followed through on the threat and is less likely to shut its Chinese site, according to a recent study by analysts at Piper Jaffray.
Searches done on ten “sensitive” keywords in the Mandarin language on Google.cn, the company’s Chinese search site, yielded 52% fewer results than searches for the same keywords on the uncensored, English-language site, the analysts said in a research report on March 5. That confirms the censors are still in effect. And there may actually be a higher level of filtering on Google.cn now than there was in January, when Piper Jaffray found 40% fewer search results on the censored search engine for the same ten keywords.
The likelihood that Google will shutter Google.cn has diminished to 50% from 70%, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster writes in a research note.
The results of this study are line with reports that the company’s executives are in talks with Chinese officials, and are waiting to lift censorship in the country until the parties reach some resolution. Google employs
Enterprise - By Guest Blogger Suzanne Robitaille
Ah, video and search. Frank Sinatra said it best: Try, try, try to separate them – it’s an illusion. Here’s proof of that: Speech Technology. This week, Google sealed the deal on video search capabilities for its YouTube portal, saying it would provide auto-captions for all of its uploaded videos using proprietary Google's Speech Technology.
Google’s initiative, piloted in November, began with a handful of partner channels including PBS, Stanford University and National Geographic. It has now expanded to all uploaded English-speaking videos, with more languages to be added later this year.
With this news, Google establishes itself as a frontrunner in the Internet programming space. As a company built on search, search, and more search, Google is now able to capitalize on its investment in speech-to-texttechnologyto index videos, target advertising and create an actual profit margin for YouTube. In fact, video search is likely why Google acquired YouTube in the first place.
The bigger news is that auto-captions will have clear benefits for the deaf and hearing-impaired population, who now will be able to better understand dialogue on uploaded videos. Up to now, this group had to rely on the goodwill of YouTube
Enterprise - Ever since the Oakland-based East Bay Express published an explosive story called Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 a year ago, Yelp Inc. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has been dealing with charges that the company has a bad habit of shaking down small businesses. The scheme, say critics, is that Yelp salespeople call small businesses that have been reviewed on the hugely popular business review site, and offer to let them manipulate the reviews if they pay to advertise with Yelp. Some business owners say that when they refused to advertise, they soon began to notice good reviews disappearing or negative ones becoming easier to find.
Now, the grumbling has led to a class action lawsuit. Who knows if the suit has merit, but one thing is for sure: it has refocused attention on the controversy. If the suit goes to trial, Yelp will likely have to disclose more details of its inner workings. While the company has always insisted that advertisers have no control over the reviews that appear on the site (other than the ability to highlight one "sponsored" review they like at the very top of the queue), it has refused to say much about the secret algorithms that determine which reviews appear and in what order.
If Stoppelman is worried, he sure doesn’t show it.
Enterprise - Motorola General Manager Bruce Brda has big plans for the company’s networks mobility business, which specializes in next-generation wireless equipment and was recently spit off from a larger division.
The networks unit, which on Feb. 11 was combined with a unit that makes radios and computers for corporate and government customers, wants to boost revenue generated from services, such as helping carriers design and make more efficient use of their new wireless networks. Services already account for more than one-third of the division’s $4 billion in annual sales. “There’s room to grow it by a few percentage points,” Brda says. The division, which employs thousands of people, is “highly profitable,” he says. The unit’s financial performance and exact employee numbers have not yet been reported separately. Brda’s business specializes in gear for next-generationmobilenetworks, based on technologies such as Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and WiMax.
The idea is to offer a broader array of services for carriers that may use Motorola’s – or other vendors’ – equipment in more markets, particularly in the Americas. While he wouldn’t provide any hiring projections, Brda expects to grow his services staff in the coming months.
Striking additional partnerships is
Enterprise - Guest blogging today is George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, who for 30 years has been advising CEOs on the impact oftechnologyon business. He also blogs at The Counterintuitive CEO:
If you're a typical CEO, you're probably wondering what the hell all of these social technologies like Twitter are useful for. A question I get from a lot of leaders is: "How can we use social to make money?" Actually, the more frequent question is: "Why do these social things have such stupid names?"
Many CEOs only encounter the downside of social -- the disparaging YouTube video or the irrational Twitter attack on the company's brand or products. I've got personal experience here -- Forrester was recently the subject of a small Twitter tantrum based on inaccurate information. So it's easy to understand the skepticism and the questioning.
Trust me though -- social networks contain utility that your company will use to get ahead. I'll be posting some examples in the near future.
But for the moment, let's stay focused on one specific way that you will use social to make money -- something I call Social Sigma. While Six Sigma is a discipline for improving products through better process, Social Sigma is about improving products through social feedback. It's about using
Enterprise - Seeking startup funding may soon get easier. A group of venture capital firms led by Andreessen Horowitz on March 1 unveiled a Web site www.seriesseed.com designed to streamline the way startups apply for seed funds, cutting the number of documents young companies need to fill out.
The Web site, formed with the help of startup lawyer Ted Wang, contains 30 pages of free documents entrepreneurs can fill out to apply for $300,000 to $1.5 million of initial funding. Typically, such documents run about 100 pages and have to be customized by lawyers. The 30-page term sheet would have to be customized as well, but it would dispense with some sections typically unnecessary for early-stage investments, such as those dealing with prior investors. The idea behind the effort is to “save start-ups time and money,” Wang tells Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “The negotiations process will also be shorter.”
Ten well-known venture firms have committed to accepting these so-called Series Seed Documents. They include Charles River Ventures, SV Angel, Polaris Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, which is an investor into Web-calling company Skype and social games maker Zynga. “We are committed to making deals on these terms,” says general partner Ben Horowitz.
The venture firms
Enterprise - Lady Gaga blared from the speakers as my 16 year old daughter drove away from the house I didn’t want to like Lady Gaga, but her duet with Elton John at the Grammys changed everything She seemed to draw strength with every traded verse, turning his phrasing to her advantage, his blues to her power []
Enterprise - Virtualization giant VMware is set to acquire select technologies from parent company EMC VMware will be buying up certain technologies from EMC's Ionix IT management business, including solutions aimed at delivering improved management and deployment of servers and applications in a virtualized data center
The transaction is valued at $200 million and is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2010 VMware will acquire alltechnologyand intellectual property of FastScale, Application Discovery Manager, Server Configuration Manager and Service Manager As part of the agreement, EMC will retain the Ionix brand and have full reseller rights to continue to offer customers the products acquired by VMware
