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Today, we drop another another segment in the Rulers of the Cloud series, focusing on SalesForce.com, the cloud innovator that re-invented the rules of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). SalesForce is growing into a big company, recently announcing over a $1 billion in revenue annual run rate . Yet, the company is still an agile organization focusing on upheaval of the enterprise through cloud services. The newest release brought a major new services focus, SalesForce Chatter . We took a look and found that this product may be the service that brings the company further into the enterprise as a dominant enterprise cloud and collaboration vendor. Sponsor Chatter is an industrial-grade collaboration framework that is designed for mixing following and deal flow, and finding the place where communication drives sales. Chatter feels like Twitter for the enterprise, with the advantage that its multi-tenant approach can be hosted and segmented for your organization. The toolkit was recently opened for select developers as part of the company release, dubbed LadyBug. We'll take a look at the core business and how this product may inspire IT leaders to create real-time tools for the enterprise. A Critical Asset: The Business Forecast To plot out the company's future, we want to highlight the past and present briefly. The company competes with big enterprise vendors such as SAP and Oracle for CRM. From day one, SalesForce has had a "No Software" mantra focus on the power of cloud platform approach. The lightweight, easy-to-install platform has lots of tools for the management of hardcore customer information including the scenario shown here. A Critical Asset: Developer Tools SalesForce's offerings for the enterprise are evolving. Key updates to the platform continue to roll out, as these shown for the Spring 2010 Ladybird release. In our recent briefing of SalesForce Chatter the thing that impressed us most is how the development community can use all of the SalesForce platform APIs in concert with the new Chatter services. In this case, a developer of "Chatter Bubbles" has taken chatter experience back to the future with a closer parity with Twitter. This demonstration peaked our interest, seeing how the Chatter experience could easily tug the "I could build a better Twitter" emotion. Now, each enterprise team that deploys Chatter can customize microblogging for the company or salesteam on top of the SalesForce collaboration cloud. A Critical Asset: Platform as a Service We noticed that SalesForce.com has a deep set of partners and relationships to technology companies. For this reivew, we took a look at the SalesForce and Adobe partnership as an example of where the company has, like its relationship with Google, created a partnership that brings the organizations' developers together. In the announcement here, the we see that Adobe AIR and the Flash platform are being enabled to consume SalesForce objects and to create persistent rich client applications. AIR has seen a lot of exposure in the Twitter application space, with very popular applications living on its client technology. Killer Enterprise Apps are Right Here, Right Now If we put all those things together, we see a new class of application emerging in the enterprise, literally a Tweetdeck -like, keyword-filter powered command center for each facet of the organization. We think enterprise software is headed there, and with the pieces SalesForce has put together, it could be built. This Tweetdeck screenshot sparked our imagination of how we could build a rich client for the enterprise. In the example shown, we can see the streams flowing further together to cross the enterprise to social bridge. In this perfect world, we see @GigaOM as our CIO, and @TechCrunch as head of marketing. Demi Moore is our CEO and wants to know your deal is flowing. In this not-so-distant future, we see the threads of decisions, meetings, and key concepts fly by in real time, and simple, user-controlled filtering could give personalized views to any stream. The Cloud Opportunity is Still Evolving In a way, SalesForce's biggest challenge is opportunity. The platform works; it has an obvious opportunity to chip away at the CRM market and adjacent markets through the dynamics it has been founded on. We wonder how platforms bind themselves to SalesForce and how the enterprise cloud might evolve. Here's a few we'll be interested in learning more about. Should the company go much further in building a developer community, or should it integrate the communities within other platforms (Google, Adobe, Microsoft). As a platform company, will SalesForce.com also be able to build the killer app for Chatter? Is it addictive? From our view, the question isn't will Chatter beat other tools, but instead, will it be a dominant form of communication? We wonder, could chatter beat email? From what we've heard so far, it has promise, but we'd like to see it. How does the Force.com cloud map to cloud efforts at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and VMware? Will there emerge a deeper integration between online and offline cloud resources, or a peering of services between SalesForce and Amazon, SalesForce and VMware? What is SalesForce.com's trajectory with core services like compute, storage, and other things that are getting clouded in the enterprise? Do multi-vendor collaboration platforms work? Should we expect that both Buzz and Chatter will be at our fingertips, or will in the end, one application win? We see the advantage of being "the message bus", like Twitter, and enabling smart clients to define experience, similar to TweetDeck's relationship with Twitter. In this case, it is the application (Tweetdeck) that decided to support other social apps (social clouds) such as Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. Perhaps we'll see the same in enterprise collaboration. Will SalesForce.com update its brand to show off the breadth of the opportunity? As an example, Apple Computer became Apple, Inc. to represent itself. Could SalesForce.com become Force? Does it need to? Personalities Matter: Are you Social with Your Boss? A lot of organizations are awaking to enterprise social opportunity, including the small and growing Yammer and Jive . These companies are bringing next-generation communications to the enterprise. There seems to be a communication landscape change, where the boundaries of "water cooler" and "board meeting" will meet. It will be interesting to see how these tools promote themselves and how social etiquette will evolve. Will our CEO send us an inspirational quote of the day, like so many others do on Twitter? Or, instead, next time you log on, will there be a direct message: "Come to my office"? This brings us back to SalesForce.com. For many in the enterprise, the question isn't only "What's happening", like it is on Twitter , but instead "Did you close?". This is where we think SalesForce's core premise of building a strong core business from CRM, along with its well-formed APIs give it a path to meet its ambition for delivering on leaderships thirst for knowledge. We wonder, will SalesForce.com power your CEO's real time view of your organization? Discuss
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Rulers of the Cloud: Your CEO has a SalesForce.com-Powered TweetDeck, and She's Following You
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MindTouch has developed a top 20 list of the most powerful voices in open-source, compiled using Twitter and other sources. It's a good example of how a research project can be transparent and in the process, help garner thought leadership for both the individual and the company. MindTouch Vice President of Sales Mark Fidelman wrote a blog post yesterday, discussing the project and how they came to their findings. Sponsor Our interest is in much the process as the results. This is the kind of approach that has a number of uses. It answers questions for the organization. It creates a center of intelligence for the open source community. And it serves as a useful resource for sales and marketing. It also helps show that real research can be done using a few simple tools. Most of the people on the list will be of no surprise to veterans of the open-source world. Notables include Tim O'Reilly, Chris Messina and Jonathan Schwartz. The results show the degree of amplification than the average active user. This is where you have to consider the "nuance" factor by defining what it means to be classified in such a manner. Fidelman explained the process in this way: "We first set out to determine reach by examining the number of followers and buzz an individual has on sites like Twitter and Google. We then needed to determine how much impact an individual had with their followers and subscribers. We asked questions like: How often were they retweeted? How much buzz is created around their blog posts, tweets, and other messages? How often is the individual referenced in the blogosphere? Were they cited by influential people?" To create the list, Fidelman used Twitalyzer , Klout Twittercounter , ReTweetRank and Twitter . They also used Google, Google Blog Search, and Google Trends. That's a take on the process but what about the larger meaning for MindTouch. Fidelman had this to say in response to our questions: Question: How does this project fit into your approach for building a company? Answer: "We actually view it as building an industry. The Open source industry has a lot of innovative, influential leaders but until now decision makers haven't had a guide to know where to tune in. Question: How is the process of doing the research useful? Answer: It helps mindtouch and the industry learn where to find the open source broadcasters. If the industry needs to get the word out, these individuals should be targeted first. Question: Can you provide 3 tips for people in the enterprise looking to develop information that positions the company as a thought leader? Answer: It's about building a community around your personal brand. Matt Asay excels at this. He provides useful, relevant content that's actionable. If I were to characterize it Into three dimensions: 1. Actively participate in the open source dialogue on Twitter, Google Buzz and niche open source networks. 2. Build a community around your personal brand by reaching out and networking with other bloggers, industry analysts and consumers of open source software and hardware. 3 Develop and create useful content on a personal blog or third party blog. The more actionable and useful the better. This is a big area to cover and I'm probably not doing it justice in two sentences. He adds...Perhaps a guest post on this topic will help? 
Out of the information, Fidelman looked at the larger group and created a Twitter list . MindTouch, also did a little inclusive marketing by adding a badge that people can put on their site if they are on the list. Thought leadership provides a host of important dimensions. Enterprise companies that approach the market with intelligence are usually the smartest of the group. Luckily, the tools have never been easier to use in helping filter out the information that matters most. Discuss
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Why MindTouch Posted a Top 20 List of Open-Source Leaders
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This morning, the Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign to bring video to Wikipedia . The project encourages Wikipedia users to add videos using the "100% free and open source video stack powered by HTML5 and Theora" that is the standard for the site. Our contention, however, is that while technical issues in adding media have certainly had a limiting role, is this all that has kept multimedia from dotting the pages of our favorite collaborative encyclopedia? Can video be collaborative? Sponsor While we wonder about the collaborative nature of the site versus the more fixed nature of video, others have already been hard at work making collaborative video a (potential) reality. We spoke today with Michael Dale, a self-professed "open-video evangelist" for Kaltura , who said that "we haven't really seen yet the collaborative sequencing aspects of the software," but that these tools are currently in development. Kaltura is the online video editing company that is working with Wikimedia to enable video on Wikipedia. Through meta data and other tools, the company is trying to make video a more collaborative media. The " Let's Get Video on Wikipedia " page offers a simple five-step how-to on how to add video to the site, but the only thing we're thinking it's missing is the "wash, rinse, repeat" aspect of adding any content to Wikipedia. While it is rather simple to go in and edit a sentence here and a paragraph there in a text format, editing a video is not nearly as simple. Now videos can be easily uploaded, how will Wikipedia's users contend with the medium? If a three-minute long video is added to an article, but 30 seconds of it contain somewhat disputed ideas, interspersed through out, will these parts simply be cut? Will the whole video be scrapped or will another user take the video, slice those parts out and insert their own? And in the end, if this is the case, what sort of mish-mash multimedia will we end up with in the end? This is the next step, it would seem. "Once there are more tools available," said Dale, "I think we'll see more experimentation." It's not as if these questions are new to the Wikipedia community, as you can read in its proposed guidelines , which suggest that videos will should likely be limited to "snapshot-type", "performance-type" and "tour-type" videos. Even with these limitations, if you've ever looked through the history of changes on Wikipedia articles, then you know how even the finest points of an idea can be discussed and dissected. According to a video interview with Kaltura co-founder Michal Tsur on Beet.TV , "users should be able to use video just the same way they're using text", but a word is a word is a word. A video, even a tiny bit of video, can differ in lighting, sound, angle and any number of other variables. "The actual fact is that we're just getting started," Dale pointed out. "There's not a clear idea of how video will work and be used." In the end, we think video sounds like a great idea, but wonder how widespread it can really become on a platform that holds collaboration in such high esteem. Whether or not video collaboration takes off on Wikipedia, we would love to see what could be created within other contexts (i.e. not encyclopedic) with the collaborative video tools that Dale says are currently in development. Discuss
Link:
Multimedia Wikipedia: Can Video Be Collaborative?
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Editor's note : We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. We were walking the streets of San Francisco and happened to witness a street band in the process of setting up shop. On the cue, almost all the observers around the band fished out their cellphones and started snapping pictures and video. Which lead us to ask this question: Which is the greatest camera? Sponsor A renowned photographer pointed out to us during Macworld Expo that the greatest camera is not the one that gives you the best quality picture or the best resolution. The greatest camera is the camera in your hand. Going by that, I guess it makes the mobile camera the greatest camera of our time. Mobile photography has really blossomed in the past few years with almost every cellphone worth its merit having a camera built into it. We now have cellphone camera capturing with up to 12.0 megapixels. We have citizen journalists providing breaking news of the Indian Ocean earthquake through phone footage. Let's step back a little. There are 110 or more million cellphones with camera on them. Add the dimension of them connecting to social networking sites , and that really makes things interesting. But there is a raging debate as to whether the cell phone camera can really be called a "camera". Maybe it depends on individual choices. However, from personal experience we have observed that people are passionate about photography from whichever source it comes from. The sheer volume of photos taken using cellphone cameras makes mobile photography a serious affair. (For instance, our iPhone app Camera Plus has been downloaded 5 million times.) Consequently,the ecosystem around mobile photography is also blossoming. The range of photography applications in the iPhone App Store is the testimony to how serious mobile photography is. The apps have covered all aspects of photography from the actual capture of the picture to editing, managing and sharing them all within the phone itself. No Limits for Mobile Surprisingly, the limitation of the phone hardware here is not stopping the application developers to dream any less than the digital camera manufacturers. If anything, they're dreaming bigger. You can use multi-shot to snap photos, adjust anything from brightness, sharpness of a photo, and add funny effects to them. With most of the cameras having GPS, users can also geotag their photos with just a click. It does not stop here. You can also instantly share your photos on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other social media platforms all from the phone itself! And things have also started moving on the video side. Did you know you can not only capture video using a mobile but also add effects like black and white, sepia from within the phone itself? And of course, you can share your videos on YouTube. Now just step back and wonder whether you can do all the above from within a digital camera, and you realize that mobile photography might not be that primitive at all. To put things in another perspective, you can liken the use of a cellphone camera to the use of a Swiss army knife. This was the theme around which we built our photography application Camera Plus Pro . Both Mobile Geeks and Kodak have some tips on learning how to use all the tools in the knife. With all the mobiles around, we can now reduce the disappointment of the sentence - "I wish I had a camera right now." Discuss
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Sponsor Post: The Greatest Camera of Our Time? It's in Your Phone
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Buzz , Google's controversial attempt to unseat Facebook as the most mainstream of social activity stream readers, just made some much-needed changes that Facebook could learn from as well. Buzz users now have more granular control over what social interactions with content trigger an email sent to their email inboxes and explicit explanations for why each piece of content was sent by email to them. These changes are a good start but ought to extended into the body of Buzz as well. Sponsor Just like most Facebook users can't explain the difference between the new algorithmically filtered News Feed and the raw bulk flow of the Live Feed, Buzz too could benefit from explaining the mystery behind the magic. As social networking analyst danah boyd said at the opening talk of SXSW today, privacy online is grounded in user control . Buzz violated the basic understanding of email as private when it surprised users by layering the new social network on top of their private Gmail. By granting users more control over information, today's changes are a small move in a better direction. Why Not Give Users The Tools to Drive Their Own Experience? Might social activity stream participation become more mainstream if users had clear and more complete control over what they see, what they expose and to whom? Many people believe that users are incapable of dealing with too many settings and need these decisions made for them. Perhaps it's just a user experience challenge, though. Nobody said creating the ultimate interface for mainstream users to drive their online activity was going to be easy. Google's move with Buzz today looks like a nice first start. Hopefully it will be extended beyond the Buzz and Gmail relationship. See also: How Google Buzz is Disruptive: Open Data Standards Discuss
The rest is here:
Google Takes Small Steps for Buzz, Points to Big Solutions for Social Networking
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