October 26th, 2009

Google Adds Social Search

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 5:43 pm

Categories: Google, Search

Tags: Google Inc., Social Search, New York, Search Result, Dave Greenfield

A new experiment in Google Labs informs your search results with input from your social circle. Read the rest of this entry »

February 7th, 2008

Cisco to Combine Google's Android, UC and Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 10:13 am

Categories: Android Project, Enterprise 2.0, IP PBX, IP Telephony, Instant Messaging, Messaging, Mobility, Search, Telephones, Uncategorized, Unified Communications, VoIP, iPhone

Tags: Google Inc., Phone, Cisco Systems Inc., Dave Greenfield

I met with Cisco’s distinguished engineer Cullen Jennings for unified communications last week, where he showed me a new concept demo that lays out where Cisco is going with mobility and Unified Communications (UC). Think Google’s Android

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February 3rd, 2008

What Microsoft's Yahoo Bid Means for IT

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 12:37 pm

Categories: Enterprise 2.0, Google, Search, Uncategorized, Unified Communications

Tags: Google Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Mergers & Acquisitions, Investment, Finance, Dave Greenfield

In case you missed it, Steve Ballmer mailed Yahoo’s board of directors on Friday a love letter proposing an acquisition to the tune of $44.6 billion or $31 per share. You can read it here.

Larry Dignan thinks that Yahoo should take the deal noting that

Sure, there would be some overlap between the companies, but Microsoft would get Yahoo’s managers like Sue Decker and research teams. Microsoft touted R&D critical mass and innovation as two big selling points. In addition, the two combined Web giants could cut a lot of costs. Microsoft is estimating about $1 billion in savings from the combined entity.

And what are the implications for collaboration? Long-time UC analyst Jim Burton sees this as as a Microsoft play for a mobile UC strategy:

Microsoft has not presented a broad UC strategy for the mobile market. I am sure they are working on one and a Yahoo acquisition would be a great help in jump-starting the move from strategy to implementation. Yahoo does a great job of organizing information and services into portals. They are typically broad horizontal offerings – the type of market position Microsoft likes.

Eric Krapf wonders about the implications that this will have for Google and suggests that Google-Cisco merger may be in the wings:

More significant could be the effect such a deal could have on Google. With Microsoft striking so close to the heart of Google’s core business, presumably Google will have to respond by being even more aggressive in trying to shift the model to ‘cloud computing’

So if we enter a new era of blockbuster consolidation, how about a Google-Cisco merger of equals? It fits neither’s modus operandi when it comes to M&As, but would a Microsoft-Yahoo combination change the playing field?

The Google-Cisco deal might seem some what bizarre given Cisco’s traditional hardware focus, but having visited last week with Cisco’s Cullen Jennings it’s pretty clear that the company is serious about Web 2.0 technologies with search being one of them. More on that score later….

Nobody has mentioned the tie-in Sharepoint and enterprise search. As you’ll recall, Microsoft announced its intention to acquire enterprise search leader FAST in January. Aside from integrating search results into a common appliance, Microsoft-Yahoo deal has some interesting implications for the whole enterprise social network space Yahoo’s got great community features. Tie that in with FAST and Sharepoint and you could end up with an IT community, something along the lines of a SpiceWorks.

October 8th, 2007

Search: Tomorrow's Enteprise 2.0 Platform?

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 9:53 am

Categories: Bookmarking, Enterprise 2.0, Search, Tagging

Tags: Vivisimo Inc., Search Engine, Social Search, Velocity, Tagging, Velocity 6.0, Search, Dave Greenfield

A few months ago when I was reviewing bookmarking and tagging platforms I got to wondering whether search engines will become the platforms for enterprise 2.0 integration in your enterprise. I don’t mean search on the general Internet, of course, I’m talking about enterprise search engines from vendors such as Fast, Vivisimo and, of course, Google with its OneBox appliance.

Consider that ConnectBeam, for example, ties its bookmarking and tagging solution in with Fast and Google’s appliance. And its not the only one. (Got other favorite apps that tie into your search engine? Drop them in the comment section below and I’ll post a complete list in a later post). And this doesn’t even take into consideration IBM and BEA and others who build social networking capabilities around their own search engines.

Now today, Vivisimo announced that it was adding social networking capabilities to its search engine, Velocity 6.0. The new feature will leap frog Vivisimo to the front of the pack of social-aware searching in a number of interesting ways. With Vivisimo’s search engine, employees can now

• bookmark, tag, and rank pages
• update search results with those bookmarks, tags, and ranking in real time.
• save search results in virtual folders and then share them with other individuals or groups. (Much like we’ve seen with Gazool. )
• Experts can create mashups against Velocity to create a single view of an employee and then marry that information with what they’ve tagged.
• CIOs will be able to use the dashboard feature to see what are the hot topics across the organization.

Vivisimo continues to target the large enterprise and that means that its security needs to be both varied and nuanced. In the 6.0 release, Velocity will respect whatever security settings exist for a given document, said Rebecca Thompson, Vivisimo’s vice president of marketing, in a phone interview. This will allow groups to adhere to regulatory concerns by preventing others from seeing the tags members have created or the content they’ve tagged - something that many of the other enterprise bookmarking and tagging vendors have had problems with.

Velocity 6.0 is part of the normal upgrade. Average pricing for a departmental level Velocity server of 500,000 documents runs around $50,000.

BOTTOM LINE

The power of integrating all of those functions together looks extremely compelling to me, if one can afford the price point. But even for smaller enterprises with more limited budgets, turning search into your enterprise 2.0 integration point makes sense. Users already know the interface and the rich repository of information contained in the search engine will be critical to so many other enterprise 2.0 applications. What do you think?

September 11th, 2007

Google to Integrate its Social Applications

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 2:49 pm

Categories: Enterprise 2.0, Search, Social Networking

Tags: Google Inc., Dave Greenfield

Taking a page book from Facebook, Google intends to connect all of its social applications together. The project, code named Makamaka, will be based on the Google Reader infrastructure.

The information comes from a confidential conversation with Google’s Ben Darnell that was accidentally posted on Google Video. You can read more about it and hear the audio version of that talk here.

September 5th, 2007

Semantec Search Right for the Enterprise?

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 5:26 am

Categories: Enterprise 2.0, Search, Uncategorized

Tags: Google Inc., Symantec Corp., Page, Worker, Dave Greenfield

Google might be great for somethings, but when it comes to finding the “long tail” of Internet Web sites, Google comes up short, at least that’s the hope Wall Street-startup, Hakia, Inc. The company has released a beta of its semantec search engine that Stephen Baker reports can deliver impressive results.

I agree. In my own research, Google has this rather annoying habit of returning pages that are years out of date. I guess that’s not so surprising given that PageRank ranks pages based on the number and rank of referring links. Higher ranked pages have more importance than lower ranked paged. The more high ranking pages pointing to a page, the higher the page’s rank. All of which tends to favor older pages.

To see how effective Hakia could be for enterprise researchers, I ran a search based on the nebulous request “what is the number of mobile workers in the enterprise?” The results were impressive. Google’s first reference pointed me to an article about mobile ajax workers. Haiku referenced a report on mobile workers. You can see both search results below.

August 15th, 2007

Gazool: A New Kind of Enterprise Search

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 4:03 pm

Categories: Bookmarking, Enterprise 2.0, Search, Social Networking, Tagging

Tags: Enterprise Search, Search, Search Engine, Startup Attomic Labs, David Greenfield

Startup Attomic Labs has a fresh take on social networking in the enterprise. It’s Gazool search engine, still in alpha, is the first enterprise-oriented, community-based metasearch tool that I’ve come across. Instead of finding relevant links by navigating a tag-cloud, users find sites by viewing one another’s searches. (Check out the image gallery to see Gazool in action).

The biggest problem with social bookmarking and tagging systems in the enterprise, and for that matter nearly any type of social software in the enterprise, is getting folk to use the darn thing. Achieving what’s called the “network effect”, where the product’s popularity all but requires others to join, is particularly difficult in the enterprise for all sort of reasons. (See my analysis of the enterprise bookmarking space for more details as to why that’s the case.)

Attomic thinks the trick is to allow users to share things they already create on their own – their searches. With Gazool, users can allow their peers to view their searches, annotate other searches, and interact with them much in the same way that they might, say, use a tag-cloud.

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