The Enterprise Web 2.0 revolution has been a godsend to small and midsized companies.  Inexpensive, web-based tools and services mean the little guys now have access to professional office tools that rival those used by the Fortune 500–at a fraction of the cost.  Think Thinkfree, Zoho, Google Apps, and literally hundreds of other web office […]

Among the toughest tasks that marketers face daily is tracking what is being said about their company or its brands in the media, identifying which of the external voices are most influential and are having the most impact–positively or negatively–and then devising a strategy and specific tactics to influence the influencers. 
None of the existing tools for performing these tasks has proven adequate to the challenge of social media […]

Google has just added its re-designed (or shall we say, “un-designed”) Writely word processor to its online spreadsheet offering and renamed  the package Google Docs & Speadsheets.  Is this the end of Microsoft Office?  Not a chance.  Will it be a threat to Microsoft someday?  You bet your ass. 
As is its style, Google has stripped away […]

You know a company is having dark thoughts about its own mortality when it starts sticking the word “Live” in front of all its new products.  Such has to be the case with Microsoft which released its Live Search from beta today and launched Live.com in 47 markets worldwide.  The company also launched Live Local Search in the U.K. and […]

The reason high tech marketers love jargon like “Enterprise Web 2.0″ so much is not simply because it creates bandwagons to hitch a ride on–although there are plenty of companies trying to climb aboard the 2.0 express because it’s the latest hot thing. 
In many cases, the jargon serves a useful purpose.  Simply having a commonly understood label that implies certain specific inherent characteristics helps […]

In the not-so-long-ago days when old media was king, one of the ways you could tell that a trend was really dead is if it made the cover of Time magazine accompanied by a breathless article touting it as the next big thing.  It took Bruce Springsteen a decade to recover from getting the Time cover treatment in 1975 […]

Okay, I give up.  What exactly is Amazon up to with its Mechanical Turk platform? 
You don’t know about the Mechanical Turk?  Where have you been?  It’s been getting all kinds of press lately, including a big splash in Salon.  The Mechanical Turk (let’s call it the Turk, for short) is a web-services platform that uses an […]

Is SOA (Service-oriented architecture) really the magic bullet for large organizations looking to simplify the way they build and integrate information systems or it is just another over-hyped, under-performing acronym designed to keep consultants busy for the next ten years or until the next sure thing comes along?  Accenture, which stands to make billions from […]

One of the solid business stories that seems to have gotten a bit lost in the flurry of tech media attention to the latest GooGoo and GaGa and Rumedumdum 2.0 has been good old boring Amazon’s sudden transformation into a major BtoB web services and storage player. 
Launched in March, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) has turned […]