Enterprise 2.0 News

Rapportive - is a plug-in for GMail (or more exactly - for browser) which in the GMail's right pane instead of ads shows the social profile of the person who sent you the email. The information for the profile is collected automatically (searched by email-address) from the most popular social networks and public services (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, etc.). Thus, you can see the latest actual information about the person - his photo, contacts, interests, recent messages, current location. You can add personal notes to the profile. It supports Firefox, Chrome and Safari. This plugin can turn GMail in something like a Social CRM - the useful tool for communications with customers. Of course, Rapportive - it's not super innovative service. We already wrote about Xobni, Gist and Outlook Social Connector, which also display social profiles in email clients. However, yesterday Rapportive raised over $1 Million from Gmail creator Paul Buchheit and some other ventures. ***

Here's another example of how business applications can be sexy. The developers of RULE.fm - the new startup for project management and collaboration - were so dissatisfied with existing solutions in this area (Basecamp, Zoho), that decided not to come out of their garage until create a collaboration tool that would even make Apple cry. They thought, how the service would look like, if Steve Jobs got serious about productivity software - and the result looks very similar to this idea. RULE.fm is designed to transform the everyday work into pleasure, to make workspace simple and beautiful. In addition, the service is intended to combine all needed business tools in a single place. It includes email, contacts, calendar, tasks, file storage, wiki, projects, CRM, discussions, activity streams, accounting. Below you can view the "trailer" of the project: ***

Though recently online image editors have taken a great step forward, we do not recommend designers to pay attention on them - none of them can match the capabilities of Photoshop. However, for marketing specialists that use to draw simple banners, images for presentations or web site, these online tools may be be very useful. We selected the best 5 tools in this series. And the online Photoshop Express was not included in this rating (as well as Picnick owned by Google) - because these services are suitable only for cropping images and removing red-eyes. We included only those tools that can be really used for business purposes. ***

As we recently mentioned, the private clouds have become the necessary intermediate step in moving companies to public cloud platforms. In result we see more and more private cloud solutions on the market. Basically it's a game for IT giants: IBM, Oracle, HP. These vendors use to supply the ready-made cloud solutions: servers + virtualization + operating systems + DBMS ... So companies are forced to buy all this staff combined and can't use the equipment in the existing data centers. It's like buying a computer from Apple with all included. But recently the pure software solutions for creating enterprise clouds appear. Moreover, one of the major cloud providers Rackspace has initiated the project of creating the free open-source platform for building clouds - OpenStack - something similar to Linux in the world of computers. ***

Almost simultaneously two major analyst firms Gartner and IDC presented their forecasts on SaaS market. According to Gartner's report, SaaS revenues within the enterprise software market in 2010 will grow by 14.1% compared to last year (from $7.5 billion to $8.5 billion). Last year, total SaaS revenue was 10% of all software sales, and in 2014 this figure will increase to 16%. The IDC forecasts are even more optimistic. According to IDC last year the volume of SaaS market was already $13.1 billion, and by 2014 it will reach $40.5 billion, i.e. it will grow by 25.3% per year. The volume of the traditional software market will drop (in 2010 - by $ 7 billion). The analysts say that the main reasons for this rapid growth of SaaS popularity are: the need for companies of all sizes to get their finances tight, the widely distributed teams needing a robust collaborative environment, the need to access business applications from mobile devices and the younger workforce wanting to use the latest technologies they are familiar with. ***

Nothing can be hidden from inquisitive blogger eyes. In the Google Docs tutorial video, that Google employee published on YouTube, the new item in the "Create document" menu has been noticed. The new format is called Punch. One meaning of this word is a drink produced by mixing strong liquor or wine, fruit juice and spices. Thus, we can assume that the new format allows to create mixed documents which combine text, spreadsheets, forms and media content. Obviously, these documents are designed primarily for real-time collaboration, rather than for publishing or sending by email. ***

A few years ago (like many startupers now) Aaron Levie, Box.net founder, was making a choice - what service to create. Now he tells why he had chosen the business application. Of course, every entrepreneur wants to create something cool and sexy, something that people will like - he says. And it's usually associated with such projects as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. But Aaron is sure that it's time for business apps to become "sexy." For many years, enterprise IT systems looked just as sexy, as Steve Ballmer in bikini. Due to the lack of competition (when a partner network was the major success factor), they were complicated, awkward and expensive. The emergence of SaaS and Cloud Computing technologies enables young companies relatively easily deliver new business apps. As a result, the market becomes more competitive, and forces IT systems to change. ***

Skype, probably in order to recover its reputation after the incident with Fring, decided to do some good thing. This thing is a new version of Skype for iPhone. First, the new client (which works on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS) supports multitasking mode, and thus is able to work in the background. Now, if you wait for an incoming Skype call, you do not need to keep the application open all the time. Now with an incoming call you’ll see a prompt, like the one above. You can also open other applications while calling over Skype. And most importantly, Skype decided to drop the idea to take an additional charge for calls over 3G (due to “some operators starting to move to tiered pricing models”). But, unfortunately, nobody in Skype mentioned when the video calls support are coming to Skype for iPhone. ***

At least since the previous year experts are talking about Social CRM, as of the most promising technology on the large CRM market. Now, these talks have the official confirmation - Gartner has published the Social CRM Magic Quadrant (as a rule, such reports are only created for the largest markets). According to the report, 80% of the CRM market growth in 2010 is due to the Social CRM development and the total investments in the social CRM in the next year will reach $1 billion. So what is social CRM? Gartner refers the following technologies to this concept: social Web monitoring, fetching contact information from social media, customer/partner community management, collecting feedback and ideas from customers. According to the report, Social CRM market leaders are Jive SBS and Lithium. Both solutions do not contain traditional CRM functionality, but rather, are designed for integration with traditional CRM. Salesforce, thanks to the release of Chatter, Ideas and acquiring Jigsaw, managed to get only into Visionaries section. Note the absence of startups in the Challengers section - it promises good opportunities for those who will decide to enter this market now. ***

Microsoft has updated its social Outlook plug-in - Outlook Social Connector, which can now can fetch the contact's data from Facebook and Windows Live Messenger (formerly the plug-in by default only supported LinkedIn, MySpace and Sharepoint). The Outlook Social Connector is intended to provide users with the actual information about a contact to better understand his mood and interests, which is very important when communicating with customers. The plug-in can display only publicly-available information from the profiles in social networks. Meanwhile it can only receive data but doesn't allow to post messages or statuses to the social networks. Microsoft says that soon the plug-in will be integrated with some local social networks. ***