Mixed by Sylvain Munaut (Chief Technology Officer @ Whatever) in Trends, Web apps
January
An article originally posted on Information Week
“The ax fell on Wednesday at Google (NSDQ: GOOG), not just for some of the company’s employees but for six of its services, too.
In addition to Google’s announcements about the elimination of 100 recruiting positions and the shutdown of offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden, the company said it would close Dodgeball, Google Catalog Search, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebook, and Jaiku. It also said it’s discontinuing the ability to upload videos to Google Video.”
Read the full article at www.informationweek.com
In my opinion…
It’s always sad when good services come to an end. At least Google tries to mitigate the negative effects. Sometimes we forget the risk associated with externally hosted services, especially free ones that provide no guarantees. That doesn’t mean commercial services are always reliable either, some of us might remember the “TheLinkup” huge data loss no so long ago …
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Mixed by Thomas Moreau (Head of Training @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Trends
January
An article originally posted on WTN News
“Based on Gartner’s findings, the top technology priorities of global CIOs involves harvesting value from existing core technologies in a way that solidifies business intelligence, enterprise applications, and virtualization. In this environment, there are some technologies that will get left out in the cold - “Basically, anything new,” McDonald said - but Web 2.0 tools are not among them.
McDonald said anecdotal evidence, including conversations with CIOs, indicates that social computing tools are on a different plane because such tools are not prohibitively expensive to adopt. “What’s the average cost of implementation of a new business intelligence capability? McDonald asked. “It’s not $5, but companies are implementing web 2.0 technology for very little money.
“Investments in BI and CRM and ERP were viewed as investments, and fairly significant capital expenditures. Companies are doing web 2.0 things almost as a straight operating expense.”
That’s true, he added, whether companies apply Web 2.0 tools internally to foster collaboration, or externally to attract new customers and retain existing ones. McDonald advised against favoring one approach over the other. The deteriorating economy does not mean that any aspect of social computing, which Gartner cited as a top emerging trend in 2008, should be placed on the back burner.”
Read the full article at wistechnology.com
In my opinion…
Indeed, enterprise 2.0 solutions that facilitate social productivity, that do not require complex implementation, and for which costs are not prohibitive (often offering flexible pricing solutions based on active users) will probably be exempt from the economic slowdown.
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Mixed by Fabienne Vandekerkove (CKO @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Trends
January
An article originally posted on anecdote
“The beginning of the year is a good time to take stock of where things are going and try and get a handle on the macro trends affecting our work. For me that means enterprise collaboration in all its forms. Here are six major trends that will encourage leaders to take action and help their organisations to be even more collaborative.”
Read the full article at www.anecdote.com.au
In my opinion…
Among the six trends likely to encourage enterprise collaboration pointed out by Shawn Callahan points, the global financial crisis is certainly the more vivid.
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Mixed by Olivier Verbeke (CEO @ Whatever) in Trends
December
An article originally posted on confused of calcutta
“People will not come to “my” blog. They will go to “their” feed aggregator, where they can read all the people they’re interested in reading. If they see something of interest, they will dig deeper and come to my blog.
People will not come to read “my” tweets. They will go to “their” tweet aggregator, where they can read all the tweets of all the people they’re interested in following. If they see something of interest, they will follow the links provided.
People will not come to see “my” pictures in Flickr. People will not come to hear “my” music wherever.
“My” time is over.
It’s a different perspective.”
Read the full article at confusedofcalcutta.com
Mixed by Fabienne Vandekerkove (CKO @ Whatever) in Trends
November
An article originally posted on The Content Economy
” (…) If we take this reasoning to the extreme, then the ability of an organization to communicate successfully internally as well as externally can simply be seen as the sum of the ability of all its members to communicate, plus a culture and infrastructure that empower and leverage.”
Read the full article at www.thecontenteconomy.com
In my opinion…
“one person’s talent has rather limited value if it cannot be “cross-fertilized” with the talent of other persons.” In the same order of idea, I tend to think that most valuable knowledge is not what’s IN people but what’s exchanged BETWEEN people.
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Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Business Development Officer @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge mgmt, Trends
November
An article originally posted on pistachioconsulting.com
Laura Fitton from Pistachio relayed this short business use case story for Twitter written by Gary Koelling of Best Buy and Blue Shirt Nation fame.
Image via CrunchBase
“We had a meeting today, about 30 of us in a room, where we heard from some very high ranking executives as they took us through their thinking on how to implement a relevant digital strategy. Sounds dreadful right? What was different was that there was a huge tv screen next to an overhead projection of the ppt. On the screen was a web app created by @benhedrington call spy. It was rolling every tweet tagged with #BBYCDS from Twitter. Almost everyone in the room and lots outside the room were tweeting thoughts and questions throughout. There were enough tweets, in fact, that the tag #BBYCDS trended on summize to number two right ahead of “sarah palin” and right behind “halloween.”
And what struck me was the dynamic of this meeting. It was participatory. No one was talking out loud except the guy presenting the ppt. But the conversation was roaring through the room via twitter. It was exploding. People we asking questions. Pointing out problems. Replying to each other all while the ppt was progressing along it’s unwaveringly linear path.”
Read the full article at pistachioconsulting.com
In my opinion…
Microblogging in a single room is the behaviour you’ll see at conferences nowadays, but I was thrilled to discover a company actually practicing this to manage all their meetings and presentations.
Whether you are 5 or 500 people, the ability to instantaneously share ideas and conversations without disrupting presentations almost sounds too wild to one day become common practice. My first impression is however that this could be slightly overkill for smaller groups/companies. Also the fewer the people, the closer the speaker and therefore the more potentially disturbing could microblogging become.
Should critical mass therefore be a requisit? Could we apply the same to web conference meetings and training sessions to dynamically gather feedback? Next step is now to convince the boss to try this out 
What are your thoughts about this?
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Mixed by Antoine Perdaens (COO @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Trends
November
An article originally posted on www.readwriteweb.com
Oliver Young, an analyst at Forrester Research, stated that despite there being a lot of buzz about the consumer market for web 2.0 applications, “the greatest opportunity today for vendors is in the business-to-business collaboration space”.
Read the full article at www.readwriteweb.com
In my opinion…
The trend is definitely about social networks and mashups, but what about B2B collaboration spaces? Tools like Basecamp started early by providing a simple SaaS solution where one can manage projects with his clients. In the enterprise, trends are clearly growing towards solutions answering such needs: not only can project management be done with your clients, but so can knowledge management.
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Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Business Development Officer @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Social software
October
An article originally posted on mashable.com
“As the corporate adoption of microblogging tools like Twitter continues to increase, it’s only a matter of time before companies decide that there is something there worth exploring. Well-known startups like Mahalo have a 50% adoption rate of Yammer. Companies like IBM are using similar functionality on their Facebook-like internal communities. With so many potential benefits, why wouldn’t a company want to give this a try?”
Read the full article at mashable.com
In my opinion…
Microblogging in the enterprise has been getting a lot of attention lately and speculations are made about its usefulness (or the opposite). To my mind it won’t help manage your information, but it will definitely help it flow and get people out of their e-mail boxes. Informality is another aspect of microblogging which helps quickly materialize knowledge that they would otherwise keep to themselves, yet without locking them into the silos of point-to-point instant messenging as microblogs are logged and shared.
Finally, one of the most important factors for adoption is the “what’s in it for me?” question which also gets a straightforward answer: if you know what people are up to, you’ll be more effective at finding the right person at the right time in order to get your own job done right. It also creates more opportunities for interaction and helps gathering feedback on your own work.
To those who blame these tools for additional information overload and attention diversion, what are you afraid of as long as the tool provides sufficient network/topic/project filtering features and its users stay professional? Receiving 20 status updates is far more useful and less disturbing than being disturbed by 3 people who are looking for information you can’t provide.
At the end of the day, you’ll only know if you try it out for yourself. So if you have the opportunity, I strongly recommend you give these Instant Messenging derivatives a shot. How? Well first choose a tool candidate requiring a minimal setup procedure (this article compares several amongst which my current favorite – Yammer). Find a few motivated folks in your workplace to test drive it but guide them with usage examples to avoid creating just a playground or another “information pit”. Finally, gather their feedback before considering a possible wider deployment.
Remember, even a small communication benefit over zero implementation effort leads to infinite return. So why wouldn’t anyone want to give this a try ? And if you have, what were the hurdles and solutions you encountered ?
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Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Business Development Officer @ Whatever) in After party, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge mgmt, Trends
September
An article originally posted on Library Clips
“I feel that people will indeed post to a micro-blog as the content is the length of an SMS, ie. a max of 140 characters. This is not hard at all, and the format encourages a type of informalness. Another low barrier is posting via email or some sort of app that’s real easy to get to and post, perhaps via the browser or a desktop widget. Actually micro-blog posting via IM feels right, it feels more casual and something people may be inclined to do, unlike a blog they are not fearing that lot’s of people will see their published post, in fact micro-blog streams fall off the radar quite quickly.
This is not a mirror replacement for typical blog content, using micro-blogs we also tend to share stuff we wouldn’t blog, more akin to IM…so this makes blogs and micro-blogs (or presence networks) very complementary.”
Read the full article at libraryclips.blogsome.com
In my opinion…
If you are wondering whether microblogging can be a useful tool inside your company and can complement existing blog/wiki platforms, read through this post as it gives concrete examples of messages/conversations which can be captured and further fill in communication gaps between employees.
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Mixed by Sophie Berque (Communication Manager @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Social software, Trends
September
An article originally posted on www.chrisbrogan.com
“PAB 2008 One of the things people will get wrong when trying to determine how to make a more human-shaped web for their company is sharing. Sharing is something that was left out of the business books for the last forty or fifty years. Your company isn’t set up to share. It’s not in the genetics, and as such, the people responsible for figuring out how to collaborate and do something in this whole new web are going to run into a problem quickly.”
Read the full article at www.chrisbrogan.com
In my opinion…
Interesting article of Chris Brogan about “sharing” which seems to have become a new business tool that you just can’t get away from. But is it appropriate to share everything?
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