| Business Bits: How CEOs Will Use Social Media in the Future, Productivity Myths, and More |
Welcome to Business Bits, a collection of hot business technology links from around the Web that will help your company be more productive.
How CEOs Will Use Social Media In The Future
As younger CEOs replace their predecessors, news consumption habits
change, and social media continues its march toward saturating every
aspect of life, the person on top will need a strong understanding of
social media. Mashable details what they'll need to do in order to be successful.
Busting 3 Common Productivity Myths
Companies spend millions of dollars on software designed to keep employees from checking Facebook, watching YouTube clips, and other activities viewed as time-sucks and lost productivity. But are employers' concerns legitimate? GigaOM takes a look at this and two other productivity myths.
Your Employees Are More Mobile. Why Aren't You Giving Them Better Tools?
The ubiquity of mobile devices in daily life is enabling mobility for a growing number of employees. With increased business travel and the trend to more flexible workstyles, the mobile workforce can be seen everywhere. Smallbiztechnology analyzes the impact of this on SMBs.
Business Equipment: Should You Buy or Lease?
Virtually any type of business equipment can be acquired via a lease, from computer equipment and software to copiers and fax machines. AllBusiness ponders the benefits of leasing rather than owning as it increases a company's productivity and profits. | | Dimdim 6 Released: New Collaboration, Online Meeting Features | Today, Dimdim annouced the availability of Dimdim 6. The latest version of the cloud-based Web collaboration and conferencing platform offers several new enhancements, such as:
- An improved myScreen feature which allows users to share as much or as little of their screen as they like.
- Instant poll creation and reporting.
- Secure cloud-based document storage for presentations, PDF, Word, and Excel documents.
- The ability to share a secure Web link to original documents at any time.
- Enhanced Web mashups with the integration of YouTube, Picasa, and any other embeddable Web object within the Dimdim meeting.
- A four-way, full-screen video chat.
- Available meeting room, e-mail, and template customization so businesses can apply their branding to the Dimdim 6 platform.
Dimdim 6 is now available for download. | | Workstreamer Wants You To Stop Searching, Start Listening |  The World Wide Web is a filled with an ever-growing about of chatter from customers, critics, colleagues, and competitors, which can make filtering the data a challenge. Enter Workstreamer, an app in public beta that acts as a "social CRM" tool that can help you keep track of the talk.
Workstreamer gets its real-time information from an array of sources ranging from blogs and published news articles, to Twitter, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, and more.The results (featured on your account page, or sent to your inbox by e-mail) are processed and filtered in an attempt to deliver highly relevant business data.
You can sign up for the free tool right now.
[Via GigaOM]
| | Business Bits: Remote Management, CMS Alternatives, Collaboration Tools, and More |  Welcome to Business Bits, a collection of hot business technology links from around the Web that will help your company be more productive.
Are You Remotely Managing Your Business?
Smart phones are wonderful do-it-all devices that let you check e-mail, visit Web sites, and edit and read documents, but are they robust enough to let you run your business remotely? American Express Open Forum explores the issue.
Five Lightweight CMS Alternatives for Small Businesses
Creating and maintaining a Web site can be challenging, especially if you
want a CMS platform that's deeper than Tumblr or Posterous, but not
quite as complex as Drupal or WordPress. Mashable takes a
look at the developers creating lightweight CMS systems.
Three Collaboration Tool Startups Use for Short-term Projects
WebWorkerDaily tapped three startups to discover what they use to complete short-term projects. Ta-Da, Notable, and Pivotal Tracker were the tools mentioned.
Six Lessons from IBM's Social Media Guru
Savvy SMBs know that an an online presence can heighten brand awareness and drum up new business. What's overlooked, however, is that a lack of a clear plan will lead to social media failure. Smallbiztechnolgy has the story.
Box.net Addss Social Media Features
The online collaboration service has added a newsfeed filled with activity updates to make it easy for business to share information. InformationWeek SMB takes a look. | | Cloud Computing Cisco-style: Quad |
 Murali Sitaram, Cisco's Vice President/General Manager of Enterprise Collaboration Platform and Doron Aronson, Cisco's Public Relations Manager of Corporate Communications stopped by PCMag's offices today to introduce me to Cisco Quad, Cisco's new collaboration platform.
Cisco Quad is unified communications plus social networking for business. The Quad platform lets employees create and manage personal online profiles, collaborate on any kind of digital content and can dyanamically form and participate in virtual communities. Quad is currently targeted at larger enterprises for deploying in a private cloud, but Sitaram told me there will be public cloud Quad service for SMBs in the near future.
Sounds like Facebook? Sure. That's the kind of experience Cisco wants users to have. But this is Facebook for the corporation. Integrated with all of the cool, social stuff is enterprise security and policy management, business system integration, and contextual and semantic search.
I watched a video demo of the product. Quad truly incorporates all aspects of communications: blogs, wikis, forums, IM, video...etc.
Cisco as a collaboration platform vendor? Yes, there's Cisco's own WebEx, but Quad is a much deeper offering. It's more on par with SalesForce and its new Chatter platform--except Quad is not Sales-focused. It's more encompassing and seems to be a very sophisticated product. I expressed my surpise to Murali that Cisco would undertake such a project. His response gave me pause;
"[Quad] is not about where Cisco wants to be. It's where the world is."
That world being dominated by Google, social networking and all things cloud. The ways we prefer to communicate and exchange content has changed. Big vendors like Cisco have taken notice.
The cloud is here and Cisco is going after it.
| | Microsoft Releases Exchange 2010 SP1 | style="TEXT-ALIGN: center">
Today, Microsoft's Exchange Server Team blog posted that Exchange 2010 SP1 is available for download. The Service Pack delivers several new features and enhancements that have been eagerly awaited by Exchange Administrators and Microsoft Partners. Some of the major new updates include:-
The ability to now manage Active Synch in the Exchange Control Panel.
- SMS Sync -- a new feature within Active Synch that works with Windows Mobile 6.1 with the Outlook Mobile Update, and with Windows Mobile 6.5, and provides the ability to synchronize text messages, Inbox, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Notes between a smartphone and an Exchange 2010 Inbox.
- Outlook Web Apps now has 27 themes.
- Enhanced monitoring and troubleshooting of MailTips.
- New functionality to detect and repair corrupted mailboxes and Exchange databases.
- Improved Calendar Repair Assistant.
- .PST files can now be imported without using Outlook, through the Mailbox Replication service.
- Exchange Management Console user interface enhancements.
- New retention policy user interface.
- New mailbox audit logging.
That's just a fraction of the new and improved featues. Enhancements cut across the board affecting Unified Communicatins, voicemail integration, and compliancy issues. Here are complete details on what's new in Exchange 2010 SP1. | | RNA Teams With Mellanox for 12X Faster Memory Virtualization Performance |  RNA Networks announced today
that it will partner with Mellanox
Technologies to demonstrate the performance
improvements achievable through memory virtualization.
The demo
(held during VMworld in San Francisco's Monscone Center from August 30 to September
2) will show how the recently debuted RNA MVX 2.5 combines with
Mellanox ConnectX-2 40Gb/s InfiniBand adapters to create memory
virtualization -- a new technology that consolidates memory across
servers into a single, distributed memory service. This "memory cloud"
extends server memory, and speeds up storage. The result? Up to 12X
performance improvements in virtualized environments.
The memory
cloud accelerates IO throughput by leveraging memory across
servers as a compute tier cache, which brings active data closer to apps
while offloading storage. As such, the memory cloud increases virtual
server performance, and maximizes the benefits and utilization of
existing processing and memory resources.
If you're attending
the conference, the showcase will be held at Mellanox' booth, No. 1412. | | Campaigner Adds New Features to Enhance SMB Email Marketing |
Campaigner, an email marketing service provider, announced a set of new features within the Campaigner service to enhance email marketing for small businesses. These new features include:
- Integrated image editing capability: It's now possible to import an image into the Campaigner library and use the powerful image editor to crop, rotate, and resize images while building an email newsletter.
- Opt to have business contact information appear in email templates automatically: This auto-fill feature saves you the trouble of manually entering information. Additionally, favorite templates can now be saved for easier re-use.
- Email preview function: This allows viewing and testing the look-and-feel of emails before sending. Users can also see how an email will look to a recipient who has images turned off in an email program.
- Contact imports: Users can now import email contacts from Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! to quickly create a database of contacts without creating or managing lists. Duplicate contacts are checked for during import and permission levels are maintained when an import is complete.
Campaigner offers a free 30-day email marketing trial as well as a free eBook with tips and techniques to get started on effective email marketing.
| | Business Bits: Central Desktop, Slideshare Goes Freemium, and More |  Welcome to Business Bits, a collection of hot business technology links from around the Web that will help your company be more productive.
Central Desktop Brings The Cloud To Microsoft Office
WebWorkerDaily takes a look at Cloud Desktop, a tool aimed at SMBs that's designed to let them share documents (and collaborate on them) via the cloud.
Slideshare Goes Freemium
Slideshare, a service for sharing presentations, has announced that it's switching to a "freemium" business model that caters to professionals, small businesses, and enterprises. Mashable has the story.
6 Questions To Ask Before Creating An App
The iPhone platform is popular, with thousand of apps available across a variety of genres. Many businesses see the advantage of having an iPhone app--should you? MarketingSherpa explores the issue.
Cloud Computing: Managed File Transfer
Managed file transfer is a cloud-computing service feature that gives companies a more secure way to transfer large amounts of data without the constrictions of FTP and e-mail. AllBusiness breaks down the technology.
| | Dimdim Business Brings Web Conferencing To SMBs |  Dimdim has launched a new version of its Web conferencing software that targets SMBs: DimDim Business.
Dimdim Business is a Web conferencing solution that lets users customize meeting rooms, company URLs, and even email templates. This lets a business brand meetings with its logo, company name, trademark, symbols, and colors, to add a more professional look. Businesses can also embed Dimdim Business inside their sites using open APIs, which also facilitates integration with Facebook, Twitter, and other Web services.
Interested? Dimdim Business is priced at $33 per user per month. | | Egnyte Allows Businesses to Make Hosted Services Look 'In House' |  Egnyte recently introduced a Branding Kit, allowing its cloud file server and online storage services to be integrated seamlessly with a company's existing brand assets and IT infrastructure.
Egnyte's Branding Kit allows businesses small and large to use Egnyte's services without sacrificing corporate identity and control. Companies can configure their cloud file server to reflect the company's brand identity, using their corporate logo, color schemes, and map the Web URL to their Internet domain. All communications from the cloud file server can be customized and branded, as employees and business partners access and share files.
Existing branding and management policies can be applied consistently across infrastructures so users accessing files on a local server will have the same user experience as they would accessing the same files through cloud storage. This gives both cloud and in-house storage infrastructure synchronized active file repositories, assuring users are accessing the most current files in the office or from the road. | | Xobni Makes Outlook Work Better |  As indispensable as Outlook is, none of us are completely happy with it. That's where Xobni (free or $29.99 Plus version) comes in.
It's an Outlook plug-in that helps you search faster, communicate better, and just get more done. It lets you include social media links for all your contacts and automatically generates profile info.
The downside is you may suffer from information overload--and your system performance might take a minor hit. PCMag.com reviews editor Dan Costa has been using Xobni for months now and finds it is the best way to wade through mountains of e-mail and my cacophony of contacts. Get the full scoop in his in-depth Xobni review at PCMag.com. | | Cloudmark's Pro Antispam Well Worth the Price |  Cloudmark DesktopOne-Pro Mode does everything its free version does, but for multiple accounts. It can whitelists your correspondents, automatically purge old spam, and more. The price gets you two licenses, so it's a real steal at $19.95. | | Business Bits: Being a Successful Remote Worker, Starbucks to Capitalize on Free Wi-Fi, and More |  Welcome to Business Bits, a collection of hot business technology links from around the Web that will help your company be more productive.
The 7 Hats of a Successful Remote Team Member
If you are a remote member of a virtual team, you're responsible for the role for which you've been contracted. But, as your virtual team thrives, you may need to adopt additional hats. WebWorkerDaily explains the skills you'll need to succeed.
How Starbucks Plans to Capitalize on Free Wi-Fi
Starbucks now offers customers free Wi-Fi, which will let its millions of customers connect to the Web. But the offering isn't totally altruistic; the Starbucks Digital Network (coming this fall) will offer exclusive and premium content from hand-picked content providers, such as Apple, The New York Times, and more. Mashable has the story.
Testing Out Panasonic's Video Conference System (VC500): From New Jersey to Florida
Smallbiztechnology posted a YouTube clip of a VC500 HD Visual Communications demonstration. The participants viewed each other through a 60 frame per second, 1080i plasma TV using the 360-degree HD Audio. The result? People felt as though they were looking through a window. Could your business use this tool?
Betting That Customers Want Online Banks to Be Simpler
The Wall Street Journal reports on banksimple, an online bank that looks to take the kinks out of the banking experience. Banksimple plans to partner with established banks that will take care of the back end (from making sure accounts are FDIC insured, to paying and charging interest), and create a unique user experience and mobile apps.
How Twitter Helps Small Firms Snag Customers
AllBusiness
reports that small businesses are acquiring more customers using
Twitter than large companies, even though big companies spend more money
on social marketing.
| | Meraki Launches Traffic Shaper, Adds Auto RF to Wi-Fi Optimization Suite |
Cloud-based wireless networking provider, Meraki, today announced the launch of Meraki Traffic Shaper, an application aware bandwdith control system integrated with Meraki's wireless networking solutions.
Designed for those administering SMB wireless networks, Traffic Shaper allows administrators to analyze network traffic by application or application class and enforce traffic shaping policies (e.g., limiting each user's peer-to-peer traffic). It also enables administrators to prioritize critical applications using QoS policies and stay up to date with hundreds of constantly updated application signatures.
Meraki has also announced the addition of high-resolution spectrum analysis to its cloud-based wireless optimization system. This added feature is called Auto RF and with it, Wi-Fi network administrators can detect and mitigate non-802.11 interferences sources (i.e., from Bluetooth devices,microwaves, etc.). This capability can help optimize coverage, throughout and reliability. Read more on both announcements at www.meraki.com.
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| Taiwan's HTC: iPhone's `quiet' challenger
(AP)
|  AP - East Asia is the world's electronics factory, yet unless they are Japanese, producers are largely anonymous. Now HTC Corp., a Taiwanese maker of smart phones, is moving out of the shadows and trying to establish its own brand name as it competes with Apple's iPhone.
| | 1 'censored' bar won't stop online prostitution
(AP)
|  AP - Craiglist's "adult services" section has been shut down in the U.S., but prostitution on the Internet is alive and well — even, quite possibly, on Craigslist.
| | AP source: Oracle, ex-HP CEO Hurd in talks for job
(AP)
| | AP - Former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Mark Hurd is in talks to take a top executive job at Oracle Corp., the database software maker run by his friend Larry Ellison, a person with direct knowledge of the discussions said Sunday. | | Able to unplug from work while you’re on vacation?
(Ben Patterson)
| | Ben Patterson - Fighting the urge to check your work e-mail while you’re on holiday doesn’t exactly qualify as the worst problem in the world; after all, it’s pretty nice to have a job at all in this tough economy, right? Then again, the pressure to hang onto a job seems to be driving more and more connected workers to stay plugged in even while they’re trying to tune out. | | Mobile users still wary of being found, survey says
(Ben Patterson)
| | Ben Patterson - Feel the need to "check in" on Foursquare or Facebook every time you saunter into a restaurant, browse the goods at your neighborhood grocery store, or cram into a rock concert? Well, if you, you’re still in the minority — and you’re also probably a guy below 40 — according to the latest research. | | LittleFin's Chronicle tracks monthly bills
(Macworld.com)
| | Macworld.com - Mac users of personal finance software tend to fall into two categoriesâthose who use Quicken, and those who hate Quicken with the red-hot passion of a thousand suns. No finance management alternative has yet captured the mindshare of the Mac market, but LittleFin Software steps up to the plate with the release of Chronicle 3.4. (Note: this Mac application is no relation to the Chronicle for iPad journal app.) | | Texas opens inquiry into Google search rankings
(AP)
|  AP - Google Inc.'s methods for recommending websites are being reviewed by Texas' attorney general in an investigation spurred by complaints that the company has abused its power as the Internet's dominant search engine.
| | Apple Photoshops One Icon Too Many on the New iPod touch
(Mashable)
| | Mashable - The new iPod touch - with Facetime, multitasking, and the Retina display - is so close to an iPhone that even Apple can sometimes get confused. | | E.U. Could Investigate Chinese Subsidies to Modem Makers
(PC World)
| | PC World - The European Commission is considering opening a second enquiry to investigate if China is illegally subsidizing tech companies that produce wireless modems. | | Should You Search Social Media Sites for Job Candidate Information?
(Mashable)
| | Mashable - This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. | | Aiptek I2 Shoots 3D Video on a Budget
(PC World)
| | PC World - Aiptek has introduced the i2, a pocket-sized twin lens camcorder that can record 3D video, at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin. | | Leaked Google Documents Reveal How Much Big Brands Spend on Search Ads
(Mashable)
| | Mashable - Ad Age has obtained an internal Google document that highlights some of the biggest AdWords buyers for the month of June 2010, offering insight into how big brands are using Google and how much they are spending. | | WordPress upgrades free app for blogging on the go
(Appolicious)
| | Appolicious - The free WordPress for Android app was upgraded thanks to feedback from faithful users. Updates include fixes to numerous, annoying bugs like unexpected app crashes, log-in issues and more.Most notable in the recent upgrade is a new comment feature, which displays comments in real time as comments arrive in your Droid notification bar. | | The Real Reasons iOS 4.1 is Important
(PC World)
| | PC World - Only two days left until Apple releases the first major upgrade to the iOS 4 mobile operating system on Wednesday, September 8. Apple lists a number of enhancements and features that will be added with iOS 4.1, but the things that make iOS 4.1 a critical update are buried in the Apple fine print. | | Disk Storage Still Bouncing Back, IDC Says
(PC World)
| | PC World - The market for enterprise disk storage systems grew strongly in the second quarter, continuing to recover from a slump brought on by the economic slowdown of 2008 and 2009, research company IDC said on Friday. | | Facebook Glitch Let Spammer Post to Walls
(PC World)
| | PC World - A clever spammer found a glitch in Facebook's photo upload system and used it to post thousands of unwanted Wall messages this week. | | Apple Browsing Share Tops Linux, Android Steals Share Everywhere
(PC World)
| | PC World - More people browsed the Internet last month with a device running Apple's mobile operating system, iOS, than used Linux to do so. That's a first for Apple, according to NetMarketShare, a firm that produces metrics on the market share of browsers, operating systems and search engines. | | Jordanian websites shift political dissent online
(Reuters)
|  Reuters - Mocking officials online, exposing high-level corruption and discussing political tension could land journalists in many autocratic Middle East states in jail.
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