Unified communications was a notable absent In Gartner's top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. For years, the idea of a common platform for seemingly all communications seemed bewildering. Cisco CEO John Chambers said that even CIO's were unsure what unified communications really meant.
But now here it is raising its flag once again with predictions from ABI Research that the unified communications market will jump from $302 million in 2008 to $4.3 billion by 2014. Seems like a big jump? Not really if you compare it to what at least one other analyst group is predicting.
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Our startup-minded readers may remember Mike Trotzke, our good friend who, with a little help from his good friends Marc Guyer and Brad Wisler, founded a startup incubator called SproutBox earlier this year.
One of the latest sprouts to emerge from the box is Squad, Trotzke's gift to developers everywhere - and we mean everywhere! This web-based environment allows distributed teams to collaborate in real time, opening, editing and sharing code from anywhere with an Internet connection.
It's official: Google is ditching its homegrown Gears offline web app API in favor of backing HTML5 for the win.
Now that the Chrome browser is becoming available for Mac, and the Snow Leopard OS doesn't play nicely with Gears, a Google rep confirmed the company has decided to trash the whole works and wait for HTML5, even though the spec isn't yet ready and isn't supported by commercially available browsers. Oh, the humanity... or rather, the machinery.
Recently I was the keynote speaker at the Unlimited Potential W2W (Wellington to the World) event in Wellington, New Zealand. The topic of my presentation was running a virtual company.
In the presentation, written by our Marketing Manager Elyssa Pallai, I spoke about the unique nature of ReadWriteWeb's virtual business model and culture. Watch the video of my entire presentation below, for details of how our company is run and the Internet tools we use.
Twitter's default URL shortening service Bit.ly announced steps today to stop phishing and malware attacks from being passed around online through its service. If effective, the effort should help a whole lot of people save face and prevent those moments of panic when you're afraid you may have lost access to your Twitter account forever.
Really, though, people who take tech seriously don't fall for those kinds of things, right? Wrong! Below we offer the job titles of some of the most surprising people we've received phishing direct messages from over the last several months. It's a pretty surprising list.
Wrapping up a six month-long challenge to mobile developers, Google has announced a string of winners of their second Android Developers Challenge (ADC).
From games and social networking apps to productivity and privacy tools, the cream of the ADC 2 crop includes an app for just about every kind of mobile user - and just in time, as the Droid has recently become "the fastest-selling Android phone to date." Take a peek at the innovative apps waiting in the wings for the lucky owners of Android-powered devices.
The do-it-yourself website space is so crowded right now that it's amazing to see anyone launch a product and cut through the noise. Still, we were captivated by the simplicity and design of Flavors.me. Similar to Card.ly, instead of forcing you to use Facebook, LinkedIn or your neglected blog to represent you, Flavors lets you to build a basic vanity site in less than 10 minutes. As of this evening non-designers will have a chance to revel in their newly found web sex appeal.
Last week we surveyed you, the ReadWriteWeb community, about your favorite mobile applications. We asked for your top 5 mobile apps and ended up with nearly 200 different mobile apps in the post and comments! Today we reveal the full results, including the most popular mobile apps of our tech savvy readers.
Earlier today our resident Mobile Web expert Sarah Perez listed ReadWriteWeb's top 10 Mobile Web products of 2009. As for your choices, we discovered that you like social networking on the go (Facebook, Foursquare), Twitter clients (Tweetie, Twitterrific), Google (Google Maps, Google Mobile), and innovative mobile-focused apps (Evernote, Shazam). The top 16 is listed below, with commentary. Also at the bottom of the post you'll find a spreadsheet of the entire list.
IBM has acquired Guardium, a real-time provider of enterprise monitoring technology to secure and provide better business intelligence across the hundreds of databases that often exist in larger enterprises.
Guardium has established itself as one of the premiere data security companies. Its clients are a who's who of the Global 100. Its technology is designed to protect from internal and external threats to the enterprise. It is known for its ability to provide data integrity for better governance and compliance.
If you ever wanted to quickly share or collaborate on a simple sketch online, here is a fun new tool to try. With FlockDraw, you can draw simple sketches collaboratively in your browser in real-time. Up to 50 people can draw simultaneously on a single whiteboard. FlockDraw doesn't limit the number of people who can watch. FlockDraw feels a bit like a pre-Windows7 version of MS Paint and isn't anywhere close to being a replacement for a full-blown design app like Balsamiq or a browser-based image editing suite like Aviary. The service, however, makes it very easy and fun to create simple drawings and sketches in real-time.
Bit.ly, the reigning king of Twitter's short URL service is taking a good hard look at malware. In a blog post published earlier today, the company announced a partnership with three security giants to beef up protection for the millions of Bit.ly short links whizzing through Facebook and Twitter every month. The company will incorporate Verisign's iDefense IP reputation service, WebSense's ThreatSeeker Cloud Service and Sophos' Web Alert Services.