Jive Software’s Clearspace upgrades enterprise social software

As is the case with many astute creators of enterprise social software makers,  Jive Software‘s user interface designers have clearly been paying attention to the allure of the clean style, tabbed layouts and easy collaboration capabilities of Facebook.

The newest version of Clearspace, Jive’s enterprise social software platform, allows organizations to collaborate across intranets and extranets, along with extensions into the public Internet. Companies like Intel (Community), Nike (Community), VMware (Community) and Electronic Arts (Community) have all used Clearspace to provide collaborative forums for customers, end users, clients, product groups, online gamers and event-goers.

Clearspace also includes integration with Salesforce.com:

Watch a demonstration of the capabilities of Clearspace 2.5 over on Vimeo.

Google helps you keep up with the Olympics

These days, Google isn’t just a search engine, though of course google.com is the starting point for most online searches. As Dylan Casey points out on the Official Google Blog, Google has now made it easier than ever for users to keep up with the Olympics online. In my most recent post, I linked to the various places where you can watch the Olympics online. Casey extends your options — and then some.

The 2008 Summer Games on Google, available in 66 countries and 31 languages, features event schedules and updates on results. You can even track medal counts with an iGoogle gadget. The Summer Games Google Maps is a nifty mashup that allows you to “view medal and event information based on your favorite regions and sports.”

There’s even  a 3D video of the different venues you can tour, embedded below:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/0p2cEQCsBuY" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

The Google Mobile Team also has a post up that explains how to follow the Olympics on your phone.

Just head over to http://www.google.com/m/summergames and enjoy.

Thanks, Google!

How you can watch the Olympics live online (and what sysadmins can do about it)

After years of buildup, the Olympics are about to kick off tomorrow in Beijing. As Shamus McGillicuddy reports, streaming Olympics video will drain corporate bandwidth. This year’s games are going to put substantial, perhaps even unprecedented, strain upon the Internet backbone. NBC plans to to stream more than 2,200 hours of live video coverage online.

CBS took a similar approach to “March Madness” this spring, streaming all 64 games of the NCAA mens’ basketball tournament.  Network administrators have similar challenges now in deciding where and whether to block users from accessing NBC.com, capping bandwidth use or engaging in a little proactive traffic shaping.

Personally, I like the suggestion made in Shamus’s story by Eileen Haggerty, director of product marketing with NetScout:

“An IT organization could set up a PC with a large-screen monitor in the office cafeteria that would run streaming video of the games. Instead of having 15 people sitting at their desks sucking up bandwidth individually, a savvy network administrator could bring all those people together to watch the Olympics during their break.”

Let’s assume for a moment, however, that you aren’t a bandwidth-conscious CTO and would like to be able to keep current on the standings in your favorite events or athletes. (Or that you believe setting up a few televisions is a handy low-tech hack.)

Thanks to Gina’s post on Lifehacker,Watch the Olympics Online, I found Wired’s excellent How-To Wiki for Watching the Olympics Online. (As you might expect, this link has been climbing the charts on the most popular page at delicious).

As the wiki notes, you can catch up to four different livestreams and more than 3,000 hours of on-demand at NBCOlympics.com.

World-wide, there also many other websites streaming Games footage:  CCTVOlympics.com in mainland China, BBC Sports in the U.K., Yahoo7 in Australia or CBC Olympics in Canada.

There’s a catch, however, to the livestreaming, on-demand video goodness: In most cases, users in the United States will be blocked from viewing the footage on any site but NBC.

If you’re savvy enough to follow the advice at Metafilter by setting up a proxy server or using Anonymizer, you should be able to get around location restrictions.

It’s a cinch that the millions of broadcast viewers will be recording and uploading events to YouTube on their own, of course.  NBC has tried to get out in front of the inevitable wave by partnering with Google, with plans to provide 3 hours of highlights and wrap-ups to a dedicated channel onYouTube.

As the authors of the Wired wiki note (nice work, applian, apardoe, mosesofmason and snackfight!), BitTorrent is also an option for watching events after the fact, though P2P files sharing on your corporate network may land you in more hot water than simply streaming the video, given the various serious security risks involved.

What the wiki doesn’t note is what is lying under the hood over at NBCOlympics.com. NBC has partnered with MSN to stream the Olympics using Silverlight, in what will be far and away the biggest test for Microsoft’s alternative to Flash to date.

Anyone that wants to watch the Olympics will have to download and install the Silverlight plug-in, a process that certain to test out exactly how ready for “prime time” the technology is for streaming rich media online. Of special note is the fact that Silverlight encrypts a videostream, which will make recording the events considerably harder (if not impossible).

As a result, tech pundits, geeks and network executives will no doubt be watching the race to crack the streams and distribute unauthorized video nearly as closely as the games themselves.

Enjoy the Olympics!

Video: Jimmy Wales on Google’s Knol

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, talked to WNYC’s Brian Lehrer about Google Knol, a new competitor to the world’s largest online encyclopedia.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/6PYO-fN_VgU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Company names that are Populr

Hold your horses, blog editor — that was not a typo in the title!

So I was reading about a new magazine the other day – it’s called ELDR (http://www.eldr.com/) and its target readers are elderly and affluent. I’m sure the editors of ELDR dropped the trailing “e” as a means for conveying a new and hip title. And that got me thinking. I like to read a lot about start-ups and emerging technologies and I’ve noticed a pattern, whereby lots of new companies are dropping that trailing “e” from their name.

I guess the early adopters on this front were the Motorola RAZR phone and the photo sharing site flickr, which is now a part of Yahoo. Who else is out there? Well, with some digging into my memory bank and a large assist TechCrunch, I found the following:

• Dopplr, which lets you share your travel plans with friends, family and colleagues
• graspr, a site that contains a wealth of instructional videos
• jaxtr, a service that allows you to link your phone to the web
• Frappr, a web-based community mapper (acquired by Platial in 2007) [side note: when my friend goes to Starbucks and gets a poorly made drink, he calls it a frappr ]
• YouCastr, which allows anyone to become a sports broadcaster
• Zapr, which allows you to take files on your PC and share them with friends

I’m sure there are others out there. If you know of one that I haven’t listed, drop a comment below to let us know!

I’m not crazy about this “populr” trend (I guess I’m “old school”). So let me give a shout out to a company who did it right: Revver!

Bit.ly: A better URL shortener for developers, data geeks and microbloggers

The old adage about not reinventing the wheel doesn’t quite extend to Web applications. URL shorteners may have been around for years but there is plenty of room for improvement. This list of 68 URL shorteners from Honkiat.com show both the competition in the space and the need for innovation. There’s certainly plenty of demand: TinyURL.com, for instance, which has been around since 2002, purports to receive over 1.5 billion hits a month. While that seems a little high, the emergence of character-limited microblogging platforms like Twitter and long, forgettable Web addresses spit out by content management systems has resulted in a need for effective ways to simply Web addresses.

Enter bit.ly. Bit.ly was created by Betaworks, the NY-based software concern that created Summize. Summize was recently acquired by Twitter, if you’re not following the rapidly evolving Web.20 startup space.

Dave Winer used a post announcing the launch of bit.ly on scripting.net to explain why bit.ly fills a number of other needs:

“They asked what it would take for me to use bit.ly, I said: data. I need to know how many clicks each pointer got and where the clicks came from. They gave me that, and thumbnails, permanent caching of the pages I’m pointing to (goodbye linkrot) and a lot of smart stuff going on behind the scenes that we’re not ready to talk about yet. (Though we told Marshall and he explained.) Here’s the info page for this post.

And, most important, an XML/JSON interface, so I can process all that data with my own programs. Here’s the XML readout for the shortened link to this post.”You can use your own keywords to the URL, organizing your links like tags.

Winer also notes that he’s a minority investor in the service, so while you can take his words with a grain of salt, try the service out and weigh its merits for yourself.

 I will say,  however, that bit.ly is easily the best URL shortener I’ve used to date.  It accomplishes its core mission quickly and easily, converting long URLs to short ones on the bit.ly homepage or using a bookmarklet you can drag to your Web browser’s toolbar. (It’s even kinda cute; note the blowfish mascots on the right.)

If you’re a Web developer or simply a data geek, the ability to pull all of the data about a given shortened URL through a XML or JSON interface will be quite helpful for analyzing your traffic and audience behavior.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of bit.ly’s other nifty features:

• display your 15 most recent shortened URLs below the entry field
• tracking of both clicks on shortened URLS and referring pages
• an API for creating shortened URLs from web applications, which is quite useful is you’re a Web developer
• automatic creation of thumbnail images that can be displayed on a webpage next to shortened URL

If my excitement about bit.ly doesn’t move you, Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted a glowing review of bit.ly at ReadWriteWeb that thoroughly explains why bit.ly is worth a try, along with an endorsement of bit.ly’s advanced URL tracking capabilities by Lifehacker.

If you like bit.ly, please recommend it to others. The larger the bit.ly community grows, the more effective and useful this nascent index of the Semantic Web will become. That’s because bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters. All the data gathered is available in public RSS feeds. bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of the database of submitted links.

What is the strategy behind Microsoft’s release of Hyper-V?

Will the virtualization wars of the ’00s parallel the browser wars of the ’90s?

Bill Gates may not be actively involved in pulling the levers at Microsoft on a day-to-day basis after his retirement earlier this month but the Redmond-based software giant is no less focused on “maximizing shareholder value.”

That has generally meant moving powerfully into new markets for software, often once other companies had proved the viability of such ventures.

In the 1990s, the threat of a network computer from Oracle and Sun and then a browser-based computer from Netscape resulted in an epic battle for the desktop.

Now, of course, Google is the Internet juggernaut that Microsoft is now confronting on multiple fronts, especially with respect to search and office productivity applications. You’ve no doubt come across the term “cloud computing” by now.

When it comes to virtualization, however, VMware is the story. VMware, easily the global leader in the server virtualization market, with more than 80% market share at the beginning of 2008, pulled in more than $1.3 billion dollars in revenue last year.

Redmond noticed. (So did TechTarget: SearchVMware.com launched in 2007.)

In June 2008, Microsoft officially released Microsoft Hyper-V Server. A chorus of industry analysts immediately noted that Hyper-V directly competes with VMware’s products.

In its initial release, however, the only non-Microsoft operating system to receive official support for virtual machine creation with Hyper-V was SuSE Linux. Xen-enabled Linux distributions can, however, be run using paravirtualization. Microsoft engineers are working towards support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux  in the next iteration. Other operating systems, like Ubuntu or Fedora, have been successfully installed by members of the development community using a variety of patches and workarounds. Unlike VMware, Hyper-V does not initially support “live migration,” a feature in which virtual machines can be moved from one server to another.

The massive install base of Microsoft users, substantially lower pricing plans when compared to VMware’s price points, integration with Microsoft products and (crucially) inclusion of Hyper-V with Microsoft Server 2008 are all likely to help Hyper-V gain traction.

Questions may linger about bundling Hyper-V with Microsoft Server 2008 if adoption soars to the detriment of VMware.

That the dismissal of co-founder and CEO Diane Greene by the VMware board earlier this month coincided so closely with the introduction of Hyper-V also no doubt reflects growing concern over increasing competition in the market, including Citrix’s XenServer.

Use GreenPrint for that White Paper

Long before the green movement came along, I utilized green practices when sending documents (or document excerpts) to the printer.  For technical documents, like White Papers, I’d always skip the cover page when printing.  After all, I knew the title of the document and I didn’t need any logos or branding to take up an entire print page.  I’d also skip printing the table of contents and any trailing pages that were either blank or just had a few sentences on it.

Traditionally, I’d use the “Print Preview” function that’s available in MSWord and many other applications.  Or, I’d scroll around in Acrobat Reader and figure out which pages to exclude (when printing).  Now, there’s something even neater.  It’s called Green Print and a neat demo can be found here:

http://www.printgreener.com/tutorial.html

Basically, “GreenPrint” becomes your print device (in Windows) and provides you with a “print preview” function (called GreenPrint Preview) that’s got some neat features.  First, it identifies potential “waste areas” for you and highlights them in red.

You can remove selected pages from the print job or remove all text or images from a page.  If you’d like to be truly green and not send the modified document to the printer at all, GreenPrint allows you to save the document as a PDF file.

Another neat thing is the GreenPrint Report, which tabulates the number of pages saved, along with the associated cost savings.  So, use of this latest discovery means that you’re not just being green, you’re saving green too.

A digital nursery rhyme for online gurus and clever children of the Internet

Amit Agarwal posted the clever, useful graphic below over at his Digital Inspiration blog. The graphic has been making the rounds online; if anyone knows who originally created and uploaded it, please let me know so that I can properly credit him or her.

If you’re a geeky parent, this might be an upgrade on “A is for Apple.” Oh, wait. That part doesn’t change.

Most of these should be familiar to most netizens but, just in case you’re mystified, here’s a digital nursery rhyme to help you remember:

A is for Apple, user-friendly as can be

B is for Bluetooth, which connects printers to me

C is for Core Duo, a faster computer chip

D is del.icio.us, a social bookmarking trip

E is eMule, a file sharing client

F is for Facebook, a social networking giant

G is for Google, which searches most knowledge

H is for Holon, an Israeli college

I is for iPhone, a touchscreen smartphone

J is for Java, a language well-honed

K is Kazaa, another file sharing service

L is for Linux, an open source OS

M is for MSN, Microsoft’s portal

N is for Napster, which made record companies mortal

O is for Office, for presenting and writing

P is for Playstation, for gaming that’s exciting

Q is for Quicktime, used for videos large and small

R is for RSS, syndicating to us all

S is for Second Life, the 3D metaverse

T is tagging, creating folksonomies of verse

U is for USB, the universal connection

V is for Vista,  Microsoft’s OS correction

W is for Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia

X is for XP, the standard OS selection

Y is for YouTube, of online video fame

Z is for Zuma, a free silly game.

Now that you’ve relearned your ABCs,  next time won’t you sing with me?

Happy naptimes, future digerati.

Have you got your avatar yet? Gartner says you will.

It’s 2008. Do you know where your avatar is?

Only three years to get your avatar unless you want to be lumped in with the bottom 20% — by 2011, Gartner says that the vast majority of Internet users will have avatars to represent them online in various gaming and non-game virtual environments. Which, I guess, are expected to proliferate. The clock’s ticking — Gartner predicted that last year at their Symposium/ITxpo 2007 Emerging Trends.

And they aren’t talking about the 2D image that pops up beside your posts in forums. I mean, even I have one of those. And she’s cute, if a little on the flat side. But she’s no Lara Croft — her ass-kicking ability is extremely limited. And I can’t see the world from her perspective, in a 3-D immersive world.

I have friends in virtual worlds, have had invitations extended — but so far, I haven’t wandered into one. I completely understand the appeal. Wow — talk about a rich fantasy life! My stock response, though, is that I don’t have time for my first life, let alone a second one.

I guess I’m going to have to make time. According to Gartner and near-futurists such as Gerri Sinclair, more and more of our online activities will move to virtual environments and our interactions will be conducted by 3D representatives with all the capabilities we and others possess in the real world — and then some. Sinclair is executive director of the master’s degree program for digital media at the Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver and her students are creating a parallel virtual university.

Here’s an interview on MSDN’s Channel 10.

Apparently, the future of online interaction is going to be pretty much conducted by avatars, in 3-D surround everything. I was thinking about that — my worklife avatar would be plunked in front of a computer looking at a computer screen and my online leisure time avatar would best represent me by sitting around chatting in book store cafes. But then, I guess, “I” could wander over to the shelves and find something to read or go get some sprinkles on my latte…

Maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part. In a 3-D immersive world I can be and do — virtually — anything… Hmmm… Well, it looks like I’m going to get sprinkles on my latte. Then… on the way to the counter I feel inspired to… do a triple backflip. Hey! Perfectly executed — and not a drop spilled! Now I’m going to drink my coffee. For real.

~ Ivy Wigmore