I recently
wrote that collaborative applications market remains strong. Here is more good
news as Businessweek reports that IDC predicts that global tech
spending is set to rise by 3.8 percent, to $1.5 trillion this year after
falling by 4.2 percent in 2009. In addition, Gartner predicts a surge in
worldwide personal computer shipments—which are on track to rise 22 percent
this year.

In my last post on collaborative
applications I mentioned the potential success of best of breed players. The
Businessweek report suggests that large players, Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, Adobe
Systems and others have all reported strong earnings. Microsoft has sold 150
million copies of Windows 7 since its debut in October, making it the
fastest-selling operating system in the company's history. Despite this Apple
recently pulled ahead of it in market capitalization, at least for the moment.

In another survey by
KPMG, tech executives indicate excitement over the newer, high-growth areas
such as mobile computing, cloud-based software, and applications that can
smartly analyze reams of data. Part of the growth is coming from newer markets.
Sixty percent of tech executives surveyed by KPMG said they expect China to
contribute more than any other country to their revenue growth over the next
year.

Let the good news keeping rolling in. 

I have covered a number of the Retrevo studies here. One of their
latest studies looked at the iPad and the mobile market. They asked consumers
what would prevent them from buying an iPad, of those who don't already own one
or plan on buying one, the most common answer was don't need one (53%), followed
by "too expensive" (38%) While 10% where looking for a good excuse to
buy the iPad When we looked at the iPhone owners in that group we found only
26% of those thought they didn't "need" an iPad. This predicts a
robust market.

There was also interest in Google’s Android. They asked people
interested in buying an a tablet, "What would make you buy an
Android-based tablet over an iPad?" They found that 53% said they would
get the Android-based tablet, "If it was less expensive than the
iPad." Also, 33% said they would get the Android-based tablet, "If
Verizon was the carrier" And 28% say they'd get the Android-based tablet,
"If it was discounted as part of a subscription service (like a cell phone
contract)." In addition, 22% said they would d get the Android-based
tablet, "for other reasons” while 16% said they would still buy an iPad,
regardless.

Many people seem to like multiple gadgets (see New York Times
article, Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price). Retreveo founds
that e-Readers and iPads will co-exist nicely in the gadget world as they found
a significant number (40%) of consumers who own or plan to own an e-Reader also
plan to buy an iPad this year.  
We are looking into creating an iPad app for the Darwin Ecosystem’s
Awareness Engine and are encouraged by these findings. 

This
should not be a surprise but a recent study by Retrevo confirms that netbooks are
getting stiff competition from iPads.  They found that of people currently looking to buy an iPad or
Netbook, 78% of them are leaning toward an iPad. 22% are leaning toward a
netbook.  They also asked if buyers
held hold on buying a netbook after the iPad was announced in January.  Here the results were mixed: 30% said no
I went ahead and bought a netbook, 40% said yes but I eventually bought a
netbook, and 30% said yes and I bought an iPad.

The
study was one of many conducted by Retrevo. The sample size was over 1,000
distributed across gender, age, income and location in the United States. It
also found that with laptops getting cheaper and lighter they are squeezing
netbooks on the other end. Of those consumers who wrestled with the decision to
buy a netbook or laptop, 65% chose the laptop and 35% chose a netbook over a
laptop. In a similar way those now considering a laptop or netbook over the
coming year 35% are leaning toward a netbook over a laptop and 65% are leaning
toward a laptop over a netbook.

My friend Thierry Hubert has an iPad and I am impressed with its innovations. I can see its appeal.

I recently attended the 2010 Enterprise Search Summit in New York. It was a very
useful conference. My Darwin partner Thierry Hubert and I presented a session, Deriving Order
From Chaos Through Discovery and Awareness.  Here are my
notes from other sessions. I hope they are useful.

Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Search for Customer Satisfaction at
Standard & Poor’s

Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Improving Findability Inside the
Firewall

Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Sharpening Enterprise Search
Performance and More

Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Search and Discovery Patterns

Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: BI in the Age of Social Media

Here is a guest post by by Charles Homes
who is a consultant at Hosting.com. For more information on Charles and his
firm check out their web site. I am pleased to have guest
posts on occasion and thank Charles for this one. As a disclaimer, he provided
me with nothing more than useful content. In turn I simply offered the
space. 

We need more research like this. I
recently read an interesting study by my friend Kate Ehrlich at IBM and her
colleague Sadat Shami, It is titled, Microblogging Inside and Outside the
Workplace and looks at how corporate employees use microblogging tools. This
effort conducted a content analysis comparing over 5,000 posts between March
and June 2009 from individuals who were using an internal IBM proprietary tool, Blue Twit, and
Twitter simultaneously.  Within
these 5,000 plus posts, 58% were done with twitter and 42% were done with the
internal tool so there is a reasonable balance for the comparison.

The abstract reports that
in “both settings, posts that provided information or were directed to others
were more common than posts on status. Within these categories, it was more
frequent to provide information externally than internally but more common to
ask questions either through broadcast or directed posts internally than
externally.”  In other words,
questions were more likely asked of colleagues within the trusted environment
of the enterprise. This makes sense and it is nice some empirical evidence to
support this assumption.

The
users reported that Twitter was a great source to learn about and share
breaking news that other sources, However, they were more likely to ask a
question with their work community and more likely to proactively look for
questions to answer within this same community.  The study reported that “participants talked of
using Twitter as an alternative to an RSS feed or feed reader, because the
information was already filtered to match their interests and they knew enough
about the people providing the information to be confident in the quality of
the information they provided.” This resonates well as it is exactly one of my
main uses is Twitter.  

On the other hand, people
inside the enterprise used micro-blogging, in part, to enhance their reputation
as someone who is knowledgeable and helps the community.  In contrast many of the external posts
were done to enhance the reputation and awareness of the organization by
providing company news. In keeping with the differences in usage, 15% of the
internal posts had links and 26% of the external ones did.

I think this is very
useful study and more systematic work needs to be done in this space to supplement
our intuition and anecdotal observations. 

We need more research like this. I
recently read an interesting study by my friend Kate Ehrlich at IBM and her
colleague Sadat Shami, It is titled, Microblogging Inside and Outside the
Workplace and looks at how corporate employees use microblogging tools. This
effort conducted a content analysis comparing over 5,000 posts between March
and June 2009 from individuals who were using an internal IBM proprietary tool, Blue Twit, and
Twitter simultaneously.  Within
these 5,000 plus posts, 58% were done with twitter and 42% were done with the
internal tool so there is a reasonable balance for the comparison.

The abstract reports that
in “both settings, posts that provided information or were directed to others
were more common than posts on status. Within these categories, it was more
frequent to provide information externally than internally but more common to
ask questions either through broadcast or directed posts internally than
externally.”  In other words,
questions were more likely asked of colleagues within the trusted environment
of the enterprise. This makes sense and it is nice some empirical evidence to
support this assumption.

The
users reported that Twitter was a great source to learn about and share
breaking news that other sources, However, they were more likely to ask a
question with their work community and more likely to proactively look for
questions to answer within this same community.  The study reported that “participants talked of
using Twitter as an alternative to an RSS feed or feed reader, because the
information was already filtered to match their interests and they knew enough
about the people providing the information to be confident in the quality of
the information they provided.” This resonates well as it is exactly one of my
main uses is Twitter.  

On the other hand, people
inside the enterprise used micro-blogging, in part, to enhance their reputation
as someone who is knowledgeable and helps the community.  In contrast many of the external posts
were done to enhance the reputation and awareness of the organization by
providing company news. In keeping with the differences in usage, 15% of the
internal posts had links and 26% of the external ones did.

I think this is very
useful study and more systematic work needs to be done in this space to supplement
our intuition and anecdotal observations. 

I have written a bit about the convergence of TV and the Web. Here is useful tool
to monitor and take advantage of this trend. Clicker is a search service to
find what is available in video on the Web. There motto is “What’s On
Online.”  At the site you are
greeted with a simple Google style search filed as well as links to what’s new,
what’s hot, recommended and your playlist if you have signed up for the premium
service. The basic features are free. You can search by show or by topic. Clicker indexes television shows, movies,
music videos, and original web content. 

Clicker recently received $11 million in expanded
venture capital funding. The series B round was led by Jafco Ventures. Benchmark Capital
and Redpoint Ventures also participated. The company has now raised
approximately $19 million since its launch in January 2009. The site does not
provide video itself. It links you to the growing amount of content that others
are producing. The Clicker catalog now includes more than 600,000 episodes from
10,000 shows. It lists those titles in more than 14,000 categories.

Jeremy Scott provides a nice Clicker review at ReelSEO,  Clicker Wants To Be Your Web TV Search
Engine – They’re Mine. He writes that Clicker solved his frustration in finding
out what is on the Web after he dropped cable. Jeremy gives the example of searcing for his favorite show, Lost. It “reveals a host of options. 
The first thing you’ll notice are some brief stats:  there are apparently
129 episodes of Lost available online for free, with another 86 available for
purchase.”  Plus there was a lot of
related content on the same theme.

This is a
nice discovery and one that will make Web video content much more attractive to
me. It will be interesting to see how Clicker evolve as the Web and broadcast
TV continue to converge.

Google’s recently
launched its online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services. The
Google Apps Marketplace makes it easier for more than two million Google Apps
customers to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and
related professional services. By integrating with user account and application
data stored in Google Apps, these cloud applications provide a simpler user
experience that can increase business efficiency and reduce administrative
overhead. It is another step in Google’s move to become a player in the
productivity software space, especially the cloud version.

Brightidea brings the capabilities
of social computing to the idea generation and implementation process. Their WebStorm^TM product is an
Idea Collection and Ranking Portal that facilitates the innovation process. I have covered them before (see: Brightidea.com – Brings Focused Enterprise 2.0
Capabilities to Innovation).

Now collaboration is
forecasted by Forrester to be one of the big drivers for smart phone usage in
2010 (see Smartphone Surge
in 2010). In line with this
trend Brightidea has announced the release of Brightidea
Mobile^TM. 
Designed exclusively for Apple’s iPhone and iPad, as well as the Google Android
platform, the native App brings the Brightidea platform to mobile users.

The Brightidea Mobile^TM
app supports public or private communities and is designed to support the
rigorous security requirements and access controls required by large
enterprises that host many online brainstorms simultaneously.  

Users of Apple’s iPhone and iPad can move between
multiple Brightidea WebStorms through the familiar iPhone interface and simple
navigation menu with built-in access to all accounts, campaigns, ideas, and
comments.  With Brightidea Mobile, users can view, post, comment, vote,
and share ideas as well as use Brightidea’s corporate micro-blogging feature
that allows users to post and follow activity within their innovation
community.

One of Brightidea’s first clients to roll-out the
mobile app is The Nielsen Company. Brightidea Mobile TM
can be downloaded directly from the iTunes store. I think the migration to
mobile instances of enterprise 2.0 collaboration software will continue. Most
studies have shown that moving to mobile is a major direction for enterprise
software (see for example, Global Intranet Trends 2010 Report). 

Brightidea was also recently selected by the city of San Francisco to power their program to get more employee involvement in improvements for the city.  They are also supporting Ireland's efforts to get more citizen involvement in improving the country in the Your Country Your Call effort. A mobile app should be very useful in these cases.