September 25th, 2007

Zimbra plays matchmaker for Comcast and Yahoo!

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 7:18 am

Categories: Digital media, E-communications, Messaging, Web 2.0

Tags: Comcast Corp., Yahoo! Inc., Zimbra, TiVo Inc., Tv & Home Theater, TVs, Internet, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Maurene Caplan Grey

Earlier this year, Comcast announced their planned launch of SmartZone Communications Center — targeted for late 2007. Jay Fortner in Read/Write Web offers an excellent description of Smart Zone, components of which will result from Comcast’s technology partnerships with Zimbra (messaging) and Plaxo (contact management).

SmartZone Home Page

Last week, Yahoo! announced that they are acquiring Zimbra. Zimbra is a start-up that “has made a name for itself” through aggressive product development. From Between the Lines:

Zimbra has a browser-based client and supports Windows, Apple, and Linux desktops, as well as Microsoft Outlook a variety of mobile devices. On the server side, Zimbra supports Red Hat, Mac, Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora. Version 5.0 is due later this year, and adds numerous features, such as multiple mail identities, personal distribution lists, advanced search in the administration console, instant messaging, external directory support and delegated mailbox and mail folders.

Yahoo!’s acquisition of Zimbra offsets Google’s evolving application arsenal. However, I believe that the Zimbra acquisition will be a significant part of a framework leading to a powerful alliance between Yahoo! and Comcast. Read the rest of this entry »

August 10th, 2007

BlogHer07: A 2.0 human community

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 8:27 am

Categories: BlogHer07, Blogs, Social communities, Social media, Web 2.0

Tags: Web, Women, Blog, Maurene Caplan Grey

About a year ago, I was a neophyte blogger. My first few posts were force-fed into my blog. They were a “should” chore — I should be blogging. I approached “the blog” as unfamiliar technology. I didn’t yet realize that blog posts are born from passion, and that ”should blog” is an oxymoron.

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In late July, I attended BlogHer07. I was sipping my morning coffee, waiting for the keynote, when I experienced an epiphany: My “should blog” baggage was long gone. A collective passion and energy permeated the room. It wasn’t just me; others said that they felt it as well. BlogHer was an educational and networking event focused on the human effect of blogging — a viral revival meeting.

The conference included sessions on self-branding, storytelling, advocacy, politics, fundraising and the momosphere. At the same time, BlogHer was being held in Second Life. (A panelist shares her BlogHer Second Life experience.)

Many of the trade floor vendors left their tchotchkes at home. I got a laptop bag from AOL and an Essentials Renew kit from General Motors. Why such nice take-aways? Women generate revenue.

Women are the primary decision makers for the majority of household spend. According to BlogHer research:

• Women spend $5 trillion a year (U.S.) and control 83% of household spending.

• Women who blog are 30% more likely than average female Internet users to shop online–and spend more when they buy.  

Bloggers are influencers. Read the rest of this entry »

July 5th, 2007

Confessions of a social community subscribe-aholic

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 1:50 pm

Categories: PIM, Social communities, Social media, Web 2.0

Tags: Plaxo Inc., Community, Maurene Caplan Grey

I have subscribed to more social communities than I can keep up with … and yet I keep clicking subscribe links. Some I bookmark, and some I don’t. Most are clutter in my cyber-closet. My name is Maurene, and I’m a social community subscribe-aholic.  

In my reality, each one is important — with bits and bytes of information to be discovered. I’ve lost count of how many I’ve subscribed to. I play with each for a while, then get bored and subscribe to a new community. However, there are a few that I use regularly: LinkedIn and del.icio.us (for business) and Flickr (for fun). I have a folder of mainly unread RSS feeds. The blogs that I really want to read are subscribed to through Feedblitz, which delivers an RSS-generated aggregation of new posts contained within an email message. I use Feed Crier to alert me via IM for posts “hot off the cyber-press.”

My old buddy Plaxo 2.0 has been ousted by Plaxo 3.0 (PIM extraordinaire). The Plaxo 3.0 sync-platform is built on SyncML, a platform-independent, sync open standard. As my ZDNet Between the Lines colleagues point out: 

It’s an opportunity for Plaxo to become a kind [of] data synching hub of contact and calendar data between all the services a person uses.

I consider Plaxo to be socially aware, because Read the rest of this entry »

June 27th, 2007

Web 2.0: Where "low-fi is the next high-fi"

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 7:57 am

Categories: Blogs, Digital media, E-communications, Social media, Web 2.0, Wiki

Tags: Web, Web 2.0, IP, Maurene Caplan Grey

My audience [will] live a happier, easier life here on the web!

Well, you’re gonna be a rock star with this!

Simple, entertaining, funny, and informative!

… and my personal favorite

You made it so simple, even my parents could understand it.

These are a sampling of comments received by the folk at CommonCraft.

CommonCraft has mastered the art of simplifying the complicated. They call it paperworks, and “believe lo-fi is the new hi-fi.”

Let’s say that tomorrow you need to give a presentation to your non-technical boss on the value of wikis. You could start with the Wikipedia definition of “wiki” — or you could start your presentation with this video.

Human communication fails when people speak different languages and do not have a translator or a common goal — for example, when the IT system engineer talks about IP (Internet Protocol) with the marketing design team responsible for IP (intellectual property).

I rarely gush over vendor products or services… but gosh darn it, this type of “2.0″ tutorial was just so easy to understand.

June 5th, 2007

Word of mouth marketing: It's all about love

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 9:07 am

Categories: Blogs, Customer Service, E-communications, Web 2.0, Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM)

Tags: Marketing, Microsoft Word, Social Bookmarking, Blog, Maurene Caplan Grey

I do my food shopping at Stop & Shop (a East Coast chain) — mainly because I can flip through the online weekly sales flyer. I click on the items that I want and they are added to my shopping list, which I then print. Now that you know, you may do your marketing at Stop & Shop also.

The really smart companies give people a reason to talk about their stuff, and they make it easy for that conversation to take place, said Andy Sernovitz in his June 1 INBOX keynote.  Andy is the author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking and the founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. 

As Andy pointed out, word of mouth marketing (WOMM) is all about love. Love makes the world (and business) go ’round, because it’s viral. Did I mention that I get coupons for free Bath and Body Works products, merely because I shop there?

I’ve plugged two retailers and Andy’s book in this blog post, the record of which will live forever in the Blogosphere. Piggyback onto this post by adding a Comment with the names of your favorite retailers. Add this blog post to your favorite social bookmarking service, e.g., del.cio.us, and share your bookmarks with others.

To really spread the love, start or contribute to a blog meme. One of my favorite bloggers, Chris Garrett, promotes the Charity Link Meme.

Did you love (or at least like) this blog post? If so, tell others.

April 27th, 2007

Enterprise communication: Flexibility trumps security

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 6:50 am

Categories: Collaboration, Email, Messaging, Security, Social communities, Web 2.0

Tags: Security, Electronic Communication, Knowledge Worker, IM, Messaging, E-mail, Maurene Caplan Grey

Before wireless email became commonplace, executive management would often forward their most important email messages from their corporate account to their free, consumer email account (e.g., hotmail) – so that they could access them at a public kiosk while traveling.

Consumer instant messaging (IM), and the plethora of free "2.0" e-communication systems, are today's traffickers of business information. No longer the primary domain of executive management, everyone can participate in the risk of exposing private information on public networks. Tools that are free, easy and fun, while serving some business purpose, will be used by the average knowledge worker. Witness consumer instant messaging. 

As the knowledge worker decides how best to communicate, flexibility trumps security.

• Let me (the knowledge worker) choose the method by which I communicate, and I'll be more productive. 
• Business units and IT, sanction my choice of e-communication tools and the organization will be flatter and more productive.

The need for flexibility drove the executive to forward business messages to her consumer email account. However, today the traveling executive normally accesses her business messages through a secured Web or mobile session to the corporate email server. As consumer IM became a near staple of enterprise communications, enterprise-level, third-party "connectors" arrived to secure those IM sessions.

With the current explosion of new consumer e-communication media, an unending parade of enterprise-level (i.e., secure) unified communication suites are surfacing — with the supply-side vendors are one-upping each other, near daily. View Microsoft's announcement of the Microsoft-Nortel alliance, followed by Marguerite Reardon's (CNET News.com) report.

[Cisco] has been pursuing several new markets, such as telephony and video, over the past few years to find new growth markets. So far, Unified Communications is proving to be a winner. During the company's second-quarter earnings call in February, executives said that sales of its Unified Communications products had increased 38 percent compared with a year ago. … Even though sales seem to be strong for this product line, Cisco will likely continue to compete against some tough competitors, including Microsoft, which is working with voice veteran Nortel Networks.

Freedom of choice and data security need not be mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, the average Enterprise is wary to spend money on emerging e-communication technologies, or securing those already on-site – even as the average Enterprise User downloads any tool that provides him with the greatest communicative flexibility. 

April 9th, 2007

How Open Source Email is Gaining Respectability

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 3:15 pm

Categories: Email, Messaging, Open Source, Web 2.0

Tags:

Not so long ago, only the residents of Geekdom (usually in academia) would attempt to architect an entirely open source email system. Architects normally assembled the system from an à la carte menu of email system parts. Hooking the pieces together required an in-depth knowledge of email protocols and mail flow. (If you are a wannabe email geek, here's Carnegie Mellon's email system architecture.)

All too often, however, the architect may not have adequately documented the structure. The architect relies on the respective open source community of each part (e.g., IMAP or OpenLDAP) for support. Community members do assist each other, but the support may not be timely enough for a production problem. Consequently, an open source "build it" model for email is a scary venture – particularly as businesses are so reliant on email communication.

Tarnished creditability is difficult to clean up.   

Nearly 100 percent of organizations have an email system, of which approximately 80 percent use IBM Domino or Microsoft Exchange. The remaining 20 percent are using systems from established vendors, e.g., Gordano, Ipswitch, Mirapoint, Novell (GroupWise), Oracle, Sun and many others. So… why would a vendor want to introduce a new email system into a market that is 100 percent saturated?

The commercial arm of an open source community (e.g., Sendmail.com versus Sendmail.org) is an active participant in the community, while providing for-fee enterprise-level support, packaging and upgrades. 

Start-ups with commercial open source email and messaging systems are gambling their futures on changing organizational beliefs about open source.

Nat Torkington's blog post Open Source Trends discusses four emerging trends about open source overall (underscores mine):

• Adoption - we've written the main apps, now the real challenges lay in convincing users to adopt it. Usability, marketing, and support.
• Freedom Wins - there are crappy business models built around half-hearted adoption of open source. Embrace open source's strengths, don't treat it as a weakness.
• Web 2.0 is Open Source - the web is built on open source, and the scaling and platform challenges for Web 2.0 are the challenges for open source.
• Open Beyond Source - the best practices of open source extending to proprietary software development, hardware, and data. 

Open source start-ups are riding on the wings of "computing freedom." Computing freedom is a reshaping of how technology is designed and implemented. It leverages the individual's relationship within a group (or community). Computing freedom is as much about social change as it is about technology change.

In the big picture, new open source email and messaging entrants, e.g., Jabber, Jive Software, Open-Xchange, Scalix and Zimbra, must "stay the course." The established email and messaging vendors see that open source is gaining respectability and, therefore, are building open source into their existing systems.

April 2nd, 2007

Can Zimbra Encroach Upon the Enterprise Messaging Market?

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 10:22 am

Categories: Collaboration, Email, Messaging, Open Source, Web 2.0

Tags:

Zimbra is a powerhouse at marketing and public relations. Each Zimbra "event" (like last week's announcement of its desktop client)  results in a flood of media coverage. Marketing- and public relations-driven perception is a top-down approach to drive "radar" mindshare. Evidence of earnest creditability is the bottom-up approach that drives a sustainable customer base. The bottom-up approach is the more impregnable strategy to develop and implement. The consequence of a weak bottom-up strategy is ultimate failure.

The consensus of the Blogosphere and Internet journalists is that the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) server, Web client and the  Zimbra desktop client are all goodness.

Bottom-up…

• Zimbra is sexy. Its Web services architecture aligns with the current excitement over anything "2.0." Its "zimlets" ("hooks" for integrating ZCS with third-party applications) can also be used to create Web-based mash-up user interfaces.
• Zimbra is open source. Open source has shed its legacy, disparaging image in the enterprise. ZCS comes in two flavors: open source community (Open Source Edition), which is free. Community development feeds the for-fee commercialized version (Network Edition) — more suited to the enterprise.
• Zimbra has "cool" features. For example, you can mouse over URLs and certain words, which are linked to other sources of information.  

Innovation for productivity's sake supports a positive bottom-up strategy — and if the innovation just happens to be fun, so much the better. Though a start-up, Zimbra is not swimming in the same sea as the 2.0 "wannabes."

Back in the "real world," though, the vast majority of businesses spend money on Read the rest of this entry »