Red Herring, the tech industry’s essential source for Silicon Valley venture capital news and buzz during the go-go ‘90s but since fallen on hard times, has just rolled out a new beta online platform that it hopes will reduce computing costs and attract new readers and advertisers through the addition of a number of social […]

The rapid ascension of social media as a force in marketing and public relations has produced a nasty culture shock among communications professionals.  For those of us who came of age in a time when controlling the message through strategic positioning (sometimes called lying, by commission or omission), the reality that customers now have talk-back tools […]

One of our favorite social software startups (See profile), London-based Trampoline Systems has become the first European “Enterprise 2.0” software developer to receive major investor backing, snagging a £3 million ($5.8m) financing round from affiliates of the Tudor Group. Trampoline intends to use the investment to increase sales operations, intensify R&D and establish a strategic […]

It’s a familiar story.  An occupying army is bogged down in hostile territory threatened on one side by a well-armed, well-financed insurgency and on the other by a group of innovative and resourceful fanatics.  Is the wisest course to begin a phased withdrawal or should you pour more troops and resources into the trouble zone in […]

If you want an idea of what’s ailing America these days, shuffle over to Digg and check out the top posts for the past 24 hours.  Top of the pile as I write this is a little self-reverential ditty called “Digg.com “Site Down” Feature Suggestion (for Digged-Out Sites” which has garnered 3394 gestures of affection from […]

The next time the other people who live at your house start suggesting you might make better use of your time by fixing the garage door or watching a Law & Order re-run instead of writing stuff for a blog that even your mother doesn’t read, send them immediately to Rod Boothby’s latest posting, My Blog […]

Keith Patterson is the CEO and visionary behind Itensil, Inc., a web 2.0 software firm that develops web 2.0 user interface technology and provides a hosted service called Itensil Team Activity Manager.  The product features a unique wiki + workflow integration that enables teams to turn collaborative ideas into reusable workflows.  Patterson bootstrapped Itensil from […]

Charles Armstrong, co-founder and chief executive of Trampoline Systems, which bills itself as “Enterprise Software That Harnesses Social Behaviour,” is an ethnographer by trade and the study of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork, lies at the heart of Trampoline’s applications.  
In 1999, Armstrong became frustrated with the ”dysfunctional” nature of corporate systems and decided to see if […]

One of those debates that seems to resurface every few weeks among the Enterprise Irregulars is whether LinkedIn is the most valuable social networking tool since e-mail or just an online cheat sheet for pushy recruiters and annoying sales reps trying to angle their way into a big score. 
The trigger for today’s EI exchange was Michael Copeland’s puff piece from Business 2.0 which portrayed LinkedIn as A MySpace […]

Traditional read-only intranets are the Siberia of corporations.  Nobody goes there unless they have to.  Companies tend to view them as a place to park their personnel manuals, an internal phonebook, maybe some press releases, company calendar, and HR notices.  In organizations where they are the default home page, employees often see them as an annoying and unnecessary […]