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I’m concerned that although there is a certain demand for the masses to have an all-in-one/ everything client, the functionality does not reflect the the potential when pulling in these various networks. What happened to do one thing well? At an Enterprise-level there just cannot be the same offerings. The necessity for analytics, for nothing more than ROI purposes and tying to objectives makes these all-in-one suites less favorable. How will Co-tweet (backed by the likes of Guy Kawasaki) incorporate the necessary components? It’s standard issue to have an API these days, but APIs must do more to connect with automation and analytics.

Popular cross-platform social app TweetDeck is announcing an update to its desktop client this morning which will add Foursquare and Google Buzz to its arsenal of supported streams which already includes Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook. In addition, the version 0.34 update will allow for the addition of any Twitter-compatible APIs, including WordPress, StatusNet and Tumblr, as well as a slew of other features such as global filters and scheduled posts. The company will also announce financial news this morning, confirming that it has raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding.

Read the whole post at ReadWriteWeb >

Join the conversation about this story »

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There’s just not enough of these valuable tidbits out there. As the web continues to evolve, so will content delivery and what users are looking for. Naturally, you are looking at a screen, and as the capacity and capability of technology grows limitless, why would we be bound to just reading information. Experience is the new knowledge.

In lieu of our usual lunch time chart, let’s have a go at this cool infographic, via Good, showing the biggest news stories of the year:

click for interactive graphic:

Hat tip Neatorama

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Incredible focus on Organizational Sustainablilty from Fred Nickols. Understanding operational organization at a visual level characterizes the essential ingredients at a interactive base. Great piece content!

Nowadays there is a great deal of talk about “sustainability” as it relates to organizations. Yet, for all the talk, it sometimes seems like wishful (or wistful) thinking. I think it’s an eminently practical concern. In this post I’ll set out what I see as the two key elements of sustainability – the Yin and the Yang as it were. They are Fit and Fitness (see Figure 1).

Sustainability, simply put, is the capacity to endure, to keep on going. The Fit and Fitness of an organization are the key elements of its ability to endure; and, more important, to not just survive but to also thrive. Consider the diagram below in Figure 2. It depicts a rather high level view of an organization as an open, adaptive system. In the course of reviewing it we’ll get at the notions of Fit and Fitness in more detail. Take a moment to look it over.

Figure 2 – The Organization as an Open, Adaptive System

As the diagram in Figure 2 indicates, organizations receive inputs which they transform into outputs by way of transformation processes (e.g., manufacturing). Organizations obtain the inputs they require by way of transaction processes (e.g., payments to suppliers, salary and wages to employees, and return to investors to name some of the more obvious ones). Organizations also exchange their outputs via transaction processes (e.g., goods and services to customers in return for revenues). It is this ability to carry out transactions – to import inputs and to export outputs – that makes the organization an “open” system.

An organization’s transformation or production processes and its transaction or exchange processes cross over the boundaries of typical organizational functions such as sales, manufacturing, research, HR, finance, etc. The organization’s executive cadre is ostensibly “above the fray” so to speak and in a position to ensure that cross-functional squabbles and boundary disputes do not impair these vital cross-functional processes.

Fit comes into play in the context of the organization’s alignment with its environment. Is it producing goods or services that are a “fit” with customer expectations and requirements? Are its prices competitive or does it have a particular feature or benefit that supports premium pricing? Are its sources of inputs secure and reliable? Is it attractive to investors? Can it attract and retain the talent necessary to its ongoing operation, expansion, improvement and innovation? Can it accommodate and adapt to economic ups and downs? Does it perform better than its competitors? These questions and many more like them can be used to assess the Fit of an organization with its environment.

Fitness comes into play in the context of what goes on “inside” the organization. Are its processes productive and efficient? Are its people engaged? Can it flex and adapt to meet changing internal circumstances? Does it continuously improve upon how it does what it does? Most important, does it keep track of and manage both its Fit and its Fitness?

As Figure 2 also indicates, in addition to its transformation or production processes and its transaction processes, there is a third set of processes – those that focus on the organization’s ability to align itself with its larger environment, to adapt to changes or maintain that alignment, and to innovate – to drive changes internally and externally. These processes ensure Fit and Fitness on an ongoing basis. Thus they ensure sustainability.

Again, the executive cadre comes into play. It has the primary, direct responsibility for the alignment, adaptation and innovation processes. It relies on internal and external intelligence as the basis for driving the changes needed to ensure alignment, adaptation and innovation. In this way, the executive cadre is also responsible for the sustainability of the organization. And that is as it should be.

So there you have it – sustainability in a nutshell. Fit and Fitness are the keys and, ultimately, it falls to the organization’s executive cadre to see to it the organization’s alignment, adaptation and innovation processes ensure its sustainability. Sounds simple enough, eh? Well, actually, getting started is simple enough; all you have to do is ask yourself a couple of questions and work hard to get good answers to them:

1. What provisions (e.g., policies, standards, procedures, processes) do we have in place for assessing the quality of our organization’s Fit with its environment and the Fitness of its internal arrangements?

2. What do we have and what do we need in the way of intelligence, processes and change management capabilities that focus on alignment, adaptation and innovation?

If you have really good answers to those two questions then you’re probably in pretty good shape. If you don’t, you might want to dig a little deeper to see just how sustainable your organization really is.

About the Author: My name is Fred Nickols.  I am a writer, an independent consultant and a former executive.  Visual aids of one kind or another have played a central role in my work for many years.  My goals in writing for SmartDraw’s Working Smarter blog are to: (1) provide you with some first-rate content you can’t get anywhere else, (2) illustrate how important good visuals can be in communicating such content and (3) illustrate also the critical role visuals can play in solving the kinds of problems we encounter in the workplace.  I encourage you to comment on my posts and to contact me directly if you want to pursue a more in-depth discussion.

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It will not be long before phone numbers are extinct, and the more comprehensive offerings of google voice continue as the face of voice based communication in the future.

Google Voice is a great way to manage phone hell by giving you a single phone number that automatically rings your mobile, home, work and other phones based on your choice of rules and settings (who’s calling, when, etc.). But people are still stuck with their legacy phone numbers, and moving completely away from them is difficult.

I solved the problem by simply porting my mobile number away from AT&T over to Google Voice, a feature that Google says will be launched more broadly eventually.

Others solve the problem via the Google Voice application on various phones. But even then, if someone calls your old mobile number and leaves a message, you have to deal with it separately.

Not any more. Tonight Google is launching a third option, a new feature that allows mobile users to move their voicemail away from their carrier and over to Google Voice. The benefits: your mobile voicemails go into your Google Voice inbox along with other voicemails and text messages, plus you can create custom greetings for callers and your voicemails are all automatically transcribed (sometimes hilariously).

There are a few steps that have to be completed that vary based on the carrier and phone that you use. But if you are really trying to move over to Google Voice, it’s worth it. When it’s all set up, voicemail messages from people who call your mobile number (not your Google Voice number) will be taken over by Google Voice. That makes them much easier to listen to, or read.

And yes, it even works on the iPhone.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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This is the icing on the cake for those especially focusing on emerging cloud technologies. With the storage services and now database cloud, Amazon offers killer solutions to keep businesses that have mission-critical data happy.

Amazon has launched a hosted relational database service, Amazon RDS, as part of the suite of services available at AWS. The new service is a hosted MySQL database instance with the full capabilities and access rights as a normal self-hosted DB. As a hosted solution, instances are easily created and available almost immediately. Pricing stars at $0.11c per hour for the smallest scale specification, and is available now on the AWS site.

Unlike completely elastic hosted DB services, which abstract a large-scale cluster into a shared environment for customers, the Amazon model is to step up or down through tiers of service based on requirements. The tiers of service (with names that seem to be inspired by a fast food restaurant menu) and pricing are:

You also have to provision a set amount of storage, which is charged at $0.10 per GB-month (pre-provisioning means that you can run out of disk space, it wont grow out). Requests are charged at an additional $0.10 per million requests.

Backups are available (full, snapshots etc.) and backup space equivelant to the provisioned storage space is available for free. Additional space is $0.15 per month. Data transfer is charged at the standard AWS rates, with no charge for data transfers between AWS services (ie. if you have your web server at one host, and the DB with AWS, you will be charged for all the traffic between the web server and the DB).

AWS offer a large range of services, and full RDBMS hosting seemed like an obvious service to offer. AWS has the existing SimpleDB service, which is a key-value based data store.

My initial take on the new RDS service is that it seems that it involves pre-defined and pre-configured EC2 instances with MySQL running. This makes the task of creating and starting new DB instances easier, but does not mean that your resource allocation will automatically grow and scale with resource requirements. There are existing third-party services, such as Fathom, that are built on AWS and use EC2 to create and manage DB instances.

Your application will have to recognize that more resources are required, and make the appropriate API calls to either step up or down along the tiers of instances available. RDS, like most AWS services, provides building blocks for developers to use.

Update: Amazon has now officially announced the service on the AWS blog.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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With the popularity of iPhone apps, development is spreading like wildfire. A few things to keep an eye on. How will the competition in the iPhone app environment change… especially in terms of monetization. Will we see some new innovative ways to monetize, maximize audiences and more? How does this kind of clout app wise help and hurt other mobile handsets with apps, specifically android based devices.

It hasn’t been publicly announced by Apple, who like pointing out milestones that make them look great, but if you look at the stats over at unofficial iPhone App directory App Shopper, there are currently 101,751 approved apps available for the iPhone.

In August, we reported that there were 65,000 iPhone apps available. It took about 2 and a half months for that number to reach 100,000 – truly a remarkable feat. Have in mind that this is the number of approved apps; the actual number of available applications is a bit lower; according to App Shopper, it’s currently at 93,035.

As far as the competition goes, it’s hard not to rub it in. One needs only a quick look at (for example) Palm’s App Catalog or even the powerful Nokia’s Ovi Store to see where they stand compared to Apple’s numbers. Windows Mobile has been around for over six years, and its Windows Marketplace for Mobile opened up a couple of weeks ago with 246 apps.

Apple will probably officially announce the news soon. As far as what it all means in real, hard cash, just think about the August estimates that the iPhone app economy is worth 2.4 billion dollars.

Tags: app store, apple, iphone

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A few key points here:
-Maintain the capacity for innovation.
-Do not let the leverage of outsourcing reverse itself.
-Keep an adequate balance between R&D, labs testing and implementation.

According to Gary Pisano and Willy Shih, the U.S. has lost or is in the process of losing the ability to manufacture many cutting-edge products because of the outsourcing of development and manufacturing work abroad, which has caused a damaging deterioration in the collective capabilities that serve high-tech industries. This is a disturbing hypothesis backed up by anecdotal data about a variety of high-tech products that can no longer be manufactured in the U.S. As someone who has worried about the global competitiveness of U.S. high-tech industries for years, I find their analysis chilling — but not entirely convincing.

A look at some of the recent data on global market shares supports a more nuanced and optimistic assessment: The U.S. retains significant shares of global markets for high-tech products and services. And the reduction in costs and prices made possible by outsourcing upstream component production to low-cost foreign locations has helped U.S. companies maintain their competitiveness in high-value-added downstream products.

According to the O.E.C.D.’s latest Science and Technology Indicators, on a value-added revenue basis the U.S. continues to have the largest share of global markets in both knowledge-intensive services (business, communications, financial, education, and health services) and high-tech manufacturing industries (aerospace; computers and office machinery; communications equipment; pharmaceuticals; and scientific instruments).

Between 1995 and 2005, the U.S. maintained about a 40% global share in knowledge-intensive services and about a 35% global share in high-tech industries, keeping the lead in four of them. Indeed, despite the high value of the dollar and the rapid growth of emerging markets between 1995 and 2005, the U.S. increased its global share in all but the aerospace industry. The U.S. share in communications equipment increased by more than 20 percentage points as Japan’s share plummeted, and the U.S. doubled its share in computers and office equipment, although it was overtaken by China in 2003. These are the two sectors that encompass most of the products and companies that are the focus of the Pisano and Shih analysis.

The increase in China’s share in computers and office machinery — from 2% in 1995 to 46% in 2005 — was remarkable, but it is not a sign that China has gained on the U.S. in innovative capacity in this sector or others. China’s exports of high-tech products turn out to be not very high tech and not very Chinese: 80%-90% of China’s high-tech exports come from firms that are partially or wholly foreign-owned — in many cases by American or Japanese companies — and 95% are processing exports, the high-tech components of which are produced elsewhere and imported into China. China accounts for about 35% of the value added in its exports — and considerably less in many of its high-tech exports sold under the brand names of U.S. high-tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, and HP.

Pisano and Shih also argue that the national identity of high-tech companies is meaningless — that U.S. multinational companies are no more important to the innovative capacity of the U.S. than foreign MNCs. Again the data suggest otherwise.

According to a study by Matthew J. Slaughter of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, in 2007 U.S.-based MNCs accounted for 19% of private-sector employment, 25% of private-sector output, 31% of private sector investment, 48% of exports, 37% of imports, and an amazing 74% of U.S. corporate R&D spending in the U.S.

U.S. MNCs are especially important in manufacturing, accounting for 61% of manufacturing value-added and 49% of manufacturing employment in the U.S. And within manufacturing they are particularly important in high tech, accounting for 85% of value-added in computers and electronics, 76% in transportation equipment, 73% in chemicals/pharmaceuticals, and 49% in electrical equipment, appliances and components And despite outsourcing, most of the activity of U.S. MNCs remains at home: they purchase 89% of their intermediate inputs from other companies in the U.S. and their U.S. operations account for 70% of their worldwide employment, 72% of their worldwide output, 75% of their worldwide investment, and 87% of their worldwide R&D.

Nor have these shares declined meaningfully in the last decade. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the offshoring of activity by U.S. MNCs — either to reduce the costs of their supply chain or to serve foreign customers — increases rather than decreases their U.S. activities. According to a recent study by Mihir A. Desai and C. Fritz Foley of Harvard Business School and James R. Hines Jr. of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor Law School , both the domestic and foreign investment and the domestic and foreign employment of U.S. MNCs move together.

Overall, the data do not indicate that the U.S. has lost its innovative capacity or that the outsourcing of production to low-cost locations has undermined the global competitiveness of U.S. high-tech companies — at least not yet.

Laura D’Andrea Tyson
SK and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management
Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley

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Great innovation and evolution to close the gap/ barrier to paid versions while also eliminating redundancy in so many aspects-

By Yukari Iwatani Kane, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Apple Inc. (AAPL) said Thursday it will let iPhone application developers offer their users the option to buy additional content or features within a free app on its App Store.

App developers said they received an e-mail notice from Apple informing them that the in-app purchase feature was now available for free apps and that it would “simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses in App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app.” A spokeswoman for Apple confirmed the news.

The in-app purchase feature, which was first introduced in March, allows developers to offer fresh content for purchase within an app such as new levels in a game, additional books in an e-book app, or expanded capability in productivity apps.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

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Ahah! Although the trends will likely continue upwards, I’m curious if the increases will come in waves, and if so, the correlation of the waves with influential factors. Let’s keep an eye on this one!

Throughout the entire 2008 and the better part of 2009, we’ve reported on Facebook and Twitter’s explosive growth. Month after month, we’ve seen tremendous numbers from both these services, while some giants of old, such as MySpace, dropped lower and lower.

Somewhere in June, however, Twitter stopped growing, at least according to Compete. The same thing happened to Facebook at the exact same time; at first we’ve attributed the traffic numbers to the summer slumber, but now that Compete’s numbers for September are out, there’s no doubt that both Facebook and Twitter are no longer growing, at least in the eyes of the (admittedly US-centric) Compete.

Summer is one thing, but September is the month when everyone comes back to work, when the IT industry wakes up and when things, generally, start happening. A bump in the stats of almost everything that’s online is natural, so Facebook’s meager 1.96% growth when it comes to unique visitors isn’t something you’d write home about.

There’s a difference between these two, however: Facebook is already huge; there’s always a question of whether it has room for further growth at all. Twitter is several orders of magnitude smaller; accustomed to its explosive growth, we’ve already started calling it the “new SMS”, but if it stays where it is, numbers-wise, it’s not going to cut it. In September, its unique visitors fell by 0.17%, to 23,538,791. Over the last three months, it has grown approximately three times less than in May alone.

Furthermore, if we look at visits, Facebook experienced a solid 3.99% increase to 2,290,512,524, but Twitter actually dropped by a further 2.68% to 144,661,590. This doesn’t look too bad until you remember that Twitter’s growth in the last three months has been a staggering 463.62%.

When it comes to other social networking powerhouses of old, the situation is far, far worse. MySpace and Bebo are bleeding users at an oustanding pace: 11.15% and 15.41%, respectively. If the trend continues, we might see these sites join services like GeoCities in the geek history books in a couple of years.

We’ve noticed, however, that LinkedIn has been steadily growing lately, and the trend continued into September, with the service recording a solid +5.68% growth. Finally, we’ve noticed last month that Digg’s numbers look excellent, but in September, they remained almost the same with a tiny 0.25% growth to 43,888,259 uniques.

Judging by these (very diverse) numbers, I have a feeling that the period ahead of us will be different than before. Users are getting picky about what they want; they’re very fast to jump on and off bandwagons, and the movements in the social networking space are getting harder and harder to predict.

A good example is another social media darling that recently got sold to Facebook: FriendFeed. Once touted as the next big thing, it seems to have sold at just the right time, as Compete’s numbers show a huge drop in both unique visitors (-28.41%) and visits (-27.96%). A couple more months, and it might completely drop off the charts.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Norebbo.

Tags: bebo, compete, facebook, linkedin, myspace, stats, twitter

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Fun Friday article- Great fun facts about Google!

Fact No.1

In 1997, Google’s prototype was named “BackRub” and had this “logo” adopted.

Here is the full text of the research paper by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page

Fact No.2

Google.com – The domain was registered on 15 September 1997 (WebArchive info)

Fact No.3

The first ever review of the Google Search Engine was done by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch on August 4, 1998.

It was titled “Counting Clicks and Looking at Links”.

Fact No. 4

Google started off its first operations in this rented Garage.

(News)

Fact No. 5

Google’s first chef Charlie Ayers, ( hired in 1999 ) quit Google and opened his own restaurant in 2005.

(News)

Fact 6

Google won the prestigious award for Technical Achievement in 2000. In the nominees list there were no search engines at all.

(News)

Fact 7

Google’s ever first April Fool’s joke went online on April 1st, 2000 and was called “MentalPlex” – Google’s ability to read your mind.

Fact 8

The Google logo was never centered (as it appears today). It only appeared centered in March 2001. It was aligned to the left earlier. (And there were a lot more distractions then)

Fact 9

Google’s first employee is Craig Silverstein. Craig is the man behind “exact search” (where you get pages containing the exact search term within quotes.)

Fact 10

In 1999, when Google moved to their Paolo Alto office, there were only 19 employees in the company. Today there are 2,668 Googlers.

Hope you liked them.

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