Applications

Taxes and Telecommuting

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 13:37:49 +0100

Surprise! Some states may claim that simply having an employee telecommuting from that state qualifies your business as 'doing business in that state.' in the past, a business had to have offices in the state to qualify, but in the Internet age that's all getting blurred, and in the slow economy, economically weak states are getting more aggressive and creative in discovering new revenues. According to this WSJ post, the only appropriate answer is to have the telecommuter resign and form a consul...

WiFi in cars, trains, buses and planes

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 16:51:50 +0100

Over the past several weeks I've had the chance to travel by limo bus (via the Boston-New York Limoliner) and today by plane where WiFi is complementary. This flight, Delta 1001 from Boston Logan to Atlanta is packed but comes with complementary WiFi from GoGoInternet. In fact this post comes via aircraft WiFi and satellite (I believe). Slow, but great for lumpy transmissions like this posting process. In fact the most painful part of this process is the fact that I have to turn off the WYSIWY...

Fashion Industry Shows How Tweets Make an Impact

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 14:44:33 +0100

The fashion industry has hit a vein and it's full of gold. Leaders such as the fashion giant, Oscar de la Renta has managed to cook up excitement, and intrigue into their new products and have used Twitter to help with the enduser 'noise' momentum. But let us be clear, not by just giving out raw information, but by cleverly mixing 'business with pleasure'. The Wall Street Journal writes about how Erika Bearman (Oscar de la Renta Director of Communications), did not just give raw information ...

Research Shows Dogs Help Collaboration

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:55:40 +0100

Does the presence of a canine make people collaborate more effectively? This is the question researchers at Central Michigan University studied in an advertising development experiment. A dozen groups of four persons were asked to build a 15-second advertisement. Although everyone was asked to contribute ideas, the groups had to choose one. Half of the groups had a dog present during the brainstorming meetings, while half had no access to an animal. Effectiveness of collaboration was measured i...

Employee-Employer Trust and Privacy

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:05:22 +0100

The relationship between employee and employer is a unique one. It is unlike any other relationship in ones life. Since the time of Henry Ford's great paternalistic employer experiments we've come to know that the employer is not like your mother and that there shouldn't be sentimental attachments or expectations that might prevent the business from progressing in its competitive market. Customers pay the company, which in turn provides the paycheck that allows your family to eat. However, it i...

Avaya ACE

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:35:28 +0100

ACE is middleware that coordinates the interactions between SIP processes such as voice communications servers (CS1000 or Avaya CM) and packaged or custom business applications requiring SOAP-style messages and workflows. Nortel Agile Communications Environment, now called Avaya Communications Environment is one of the best new communications products introduced since 2008. The ACE comes from the formerly known as Nortel enterprise communications unit and is capable of truly unifying communicatio...

Enterprise 2.0: Platitudes and more

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:58:35 +0100

Involve everybody. Start small, grow fast. It's about the content not the technology. Gimme a break. I stumbled across this presentation this morning. Big black screen, giant font. Yuck. It was some Microsoft dude talking about their experience rolling out the enterprise podcasting platform. Not that he was a bad presenter. It was the jist of the talk that got me going. Content - weak. I probably shouldn't flame the fellow too much. I did arrive late. I'm attending the Enterprise 2.0 conferenc...

There's a wiki for that!

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 22:52:45 +0100

Social networking and collaborative content formats are websites that are open for others to update, add, edit, and share information. The largest and most popular usage of such a site is Wikipedia. However, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal on June 3rd, Online Help For Parents Who Volunteer (sub. required), it seems that these types of services are making headway in the education sector as a tool to improve teacher productivity and link them efficiently not with students, bu...

Hops in a Conference Call

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:17:15 +0100

The challenge for any user of audio communications in recent years is how 'toll quality' expectation has been severely eroded with wireless compression and more recently through the success of IP PBX products and IP services for voice communications. With wireless services, the basic radio protocols slice the bandwidth used by the transmitted signal so that many, many users can share a limited licensed resource. Fortunately, the nasty analog surges and static overwhelming the spoken word has bec...

InterCall on SMB Unified Communications Services

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:55:13 +0100

The global conferencing company, InterCall, announced an important element of the company's unified communications strategy on April 26, 2010. InterCall announced a hosted unified communications service offering for small and medium business. As the world's largest conferencing service provider, with over 1 billion minutes of audio and web conferencing minutes/month, InterCall sees an opportunity to expand its offerings to gain customer wallet-share for customers they serve by leveraging the comp...

Purple Forge Mobilizes Community Passions

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:29:01 +0100

Mobile social networking is a growing opportunity to harness the passions of supporters What do politics, contests and certain kinds of branding or public service campaigns all have in common? They are ideally suited to mobile social networking. Citizens want to stay connected with campaign HQ and all are subject to perishable information. The candidate issues a new position paper and needs supporters to comment on it on their blogs. The contest just issued the first $100,000 prize and so the o...

Twitter Goes Down

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 23:43:15 +0100

You did know that Twitter was out of service yesterday?

Among the roar from Twitterers was this hilarious post from esarcasm.com. What did you do during the great Twitter outage of 2009?

Further to Large Organizations and Social Network Software

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:47:32 +0100

My previous post on this topic generated an inquiry which I answered by email as follows: Does Brockmann think small compagnies don't really need to implement social networks ? Is it important to mix the simpler technologies to the new ones? It depends on the goal of the social network technology and who the participants are. Forums for example, are great for any organization since they are aimed at helping customers solve problems with the company's products. Customers can get tips on how to s...

Newsgator Drives Microsoft Office SharePoint

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:53:24 +0100

Of all the meetings at Enterprise 2.0, the most impressive success story was the Newsgator presentation. The Denver CO company, founded in 2004 as an RSS system has really redefined their offer to address Microsoft Office SharePoint customer needs for more sophisticated collaboration services. Today, the company boasts 175 customers and over 1 million seats. Supporting probably a dozen specific modules for addressing enterprise collaboration needs, the Newsgator portfolio extends SharePoint stan...

Bluenog start with Business Intelligence...

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:31:07 +0100

Also, while at Enterprise 2.0 I had a chance to meet up with the CEO of Bluenog, Suresh Kuppusamy. The Piscataway NJ company, formed by several formerly BEA executives in 2006, is a systems integration / open source collaboration software company that concentrates on the glue that binds typical enterprise content management system implementations with business intelligence and enterprise wiki and calendaring services more commonly associated with portals. Customers, including Columbia University...

Qtask For The Process-Driven Organization

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:09:03 +0100

While at Enterprise 2.0 here in Boston, I met up with Russell Mix, CEO of Qtask, the Burbank CA, Syndey Australia and St Petersburg Russia software company who briefed me on the product and its market. After only nine months in the market, Qtask has achieved some 3,000 subscribers from organizations of all sizes. What brings these customers to the SaaS project management company is the need to assure transparency and accountability. Some organizations pride themselves on their business process. ...

Twitter Business Model Questioned

Tue, 26 May 2009 14:09:50 +0100

In the Wall Street Journal this morning (subscription required), the explosive growth of Twitter (noun) and the rise of twittering (verb) has stressed the founders and operations staff of the VC-backed California company. With recent rounds of financing valuing the company at $255 million, there doesn't seem to be any downside for the 45-person operation. I've been twittering too, but rather rarely - like when I remember to do so. Even still, I've managed to gather 47 followers in about as many d...

Unimax Does a Practical Convergence

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:10:17 +0100

In a briefing with Phil Moen, CEO of Unimax and Director of Marketing, Tod Remely here at VoiceCon Orlando, I got a solid overview of the Unimax offer and business. Founded in 1991 by Andrew Hunkins who wrote an application to automate his college's large, multi-vendor voicemail environment and evolved the functionality into 2nd Nature, used by 80% of the Fortune 500. 2nd Nature is a client-server application where the server captures configuration data for each of the enterprise custom...

Social Networks More Popular Than Email

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:25:22 +0100

The latest consumer research from The Nielsen Company shows that social networks have overtaken email as the 4th most popular online sector after search, portals and PC software applications. This is not just the case in America, where [[FaceBook]] promises ever-faster growing participation, but is a world-wide phenomenon. Member communities is the name of the category in this report, but it's just not about consumer popularity, but about the time consumers spend on these sites. Th...

Telephone Answering Service

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 11:01:02 +0100

When I went to New York on vacation in the spring of 2001, I took my kids to the Broadway show called 'Bells are Ringing', starting Faith Prince. Faith Prince starred as an answering service operator that didn't just gather the messages and disposition the calls. She got involved with her clients' lives, to great comedic effect. Of course the FBI thought there were more sinister aspects to the operation, but it all came down to true love in the end. Before I took my kids into the ...