Cisco to bring social networking to big media
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Company is developing software to help big media companies integrate social networking and community into their Web sites.
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NEW YORK -- Cisco Systems Inc. on Tuesday will introduce new products aimed at protecting and expanding one of its biggest sources of revenue - computer-networking equipment for small businesses and branch offices.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco's highly publicized cooperation with Microsoft on unified communications will focus on sharing presence information as well as on voice mail, Web conferencing, and other areas, a Cisco executive said Tuesday. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pledged last month to make their companies' technologies work together even as they compete in areas like voice call control. Details of the effort have been scarce, and some critics have called the Webcast promise a mere show of peace between two companies struggling over the lucrative communications and collaboration business. Unified communications is a buzzword for combining all forms of IP communications, making them accessible on a single client or from within applications. Because voice calls, text messaging, videoconferences, and online collaboration can all be controlled by software now, Microsoft is pitted against Cisco and longtime telecommunications vendors in the battle for this market. Rick McConnell, Cisco's executive sponsor of the partnership in the unified communications area, outlined one key objective of the effort in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday. Currently, Cisco federates all the presence and availability information from its unified communications systems and publishes that data to Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS), which can then push it to Microsoft clients. Microsoft doesn't reciprocate. The companies are working on making the same kinds of information go from Microsoft's software into Cisco's, said McConnell, who is vice president and general manager of Cisco's Unified Communications Business Unit. The way it is now, if an enterprise uses Cisco's Unified Communications Manager call control software and an employee picks up the phone, a colleague's Microsoft Office Communicator messaging client will show that employee as being on the phone. But if an employee indicated in Office Communicator that she was away from her desk, that information wouldn't show up on a colleague's Cisco IP phone. Making federated presence work both ways will make that possible, McConnell said. Cries for cooperation are rampant among Cisco's customers, according to McConnell. "I'm on the phone with at least one customer per day ... that's asking us about our Microsoft integration roadmap," McConnell said. Cisco's network domination and Microsoft's software role make that inevitable. "We're going to interoperate, frankly, in almost every account that we participate in," he said. "We have a deep interoperability roadmap, we'll deliver against that roadmap, and then the customer gets to pick," McConnell said. Most customers so far have chosen Microsoft for client software and Cisco for call control processing and multimedia conferencing, and he expects that to continue. Senior Cisco and Microsoft leaders in unified communications meet at least quarterly and typically more often, he said. But McConnell didn't mince words when discussing Microsoft as a competitor. The software giant has taken limited steps to share users' presence and availability information because doing so would let users adopt any kind of unified communications client, and Microsoft wants to own all the clients, he said. And Microsoft's forays into call management are weak compared with Cisco's more seasoned offerings, he said. "I think it's going to be some time before Microsoft really gets call control right," McConnell said.
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Yahoo, disconcertingly unable to&#160;develop a popular social networking site, will try to accentuate the social networking capabilities of Yahoo Messenger when it releases on Tuesday a beta upgrade of this widely used instant messaging service.Among its new features, Yahoo Messenger 9.0 will allow people to invite friends to watch videos or flip through photo albums in real time, sharing those activities as if they were sitting side by side in one&#39;s living room.Made possible by what Yahoo calls an &quot;in-line media player,&quot; this feature is one of several new ones designed to boost interactions among Messenger users.Another such feature is a redesigned &quot;friends&quot; list that provides more space for each contact entry and makes it easier to establish an IM, voice or SMS link with another user.Now the question is whether Yahoo plans to leverage the more than 94 million people who use Messenger and build a social network around that base, giving the company, finally, an answer to MySpace and Facebook.While she wouldn&#39;t provide a direct answer to this question, Sabrina Ellis, vice president of Yahoo Messenger, acknowledged that the service has an inherent social networking component.&quot;In some ways, if you look at it, Yahoo Messenger is a social network in that people have actually defined who their friends are and these are people they communicate with,&quot; Ellis said.The new features, such as the ability to share and watch videos virtually together, will let people deepen their interactions on Yahoo Messenger beyond what has been possible so far, she said.&quot;These elements will really help people develop relationships and expand some of their friendships,&quot; Ellis said.According to comScore, last month Yahoo Messenger had 94.3 million unique users, up almost 30 percent from September 2006 and second worldwide to Microsoft&#39;s Windows Live Messenger with almost 227 million.Still, Yahoo hasn&#39;t been able to find its groove in social networking. It recently announced it will phase out its social networking site Yahoo 360 and migrate its features and content to a &quot;universal profile system&quot; that will more closely tie Yahoo&#39;s various online services together.Asked how Yahoo Messenger will fit within this integrated, centralized platform, Ellis said the IM service will be part of that effort, along with Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Answers and other services.&quot;We&#39;re committed to making sure that all of our users can benefit from all different Yahoo services,&quot; she said.Other new features in the beta version of Yahoo Messenger 9.0 include the following:-- Localized versions for the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India (in Hindi), and Vietnam-- The ability to transfer files of any size, lifting a 1GB limit-- Call forwarding, to send calls from Yahoo Messenger to a mobile phone or landline as a voicemail-- The ability to share photo sets from Yahoo&#39;s Flickr service in real time
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Social networking shows no sign of slowing. In April, major networking sites MySpace and Facebook reached 67 million and 38 million unique visitors, respectively. &quot;Increasingly, people seem to want to communicate with one another openly and in public, with other people able to participate,&quot; says Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com. USA TODAY&#39;s Mike Snider looks at several notable innovations in interaction.
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Blog: The social networking company plans to launch an API to connect to other services.
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The balance of power in social networking is moving from the Web site to the user, and that could be accelerated with a new tool released Friday by Google -- a Social Graph API (application programming interface).
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The online community is introducing tools for developing games, media-sharing features and other programs that better integrate with the Internetâs leading social-networking site.
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With the Apple iPhone trademark battle now fading from memory, Cisco has forged ahead to its next mission: new business collaboration tools to compete with Avaya and Nortel.
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Changes to the social networking site will make the names and profiles of its members available to nonmembers.
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Cisco is set to unveil a data-center networking platform that  could take the place of switches that link servers as well as  Fibre Channel devices.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems is continuing to buy its way into social networking, acquiring some assets of the company that operates Tribe.net while letting the site remain independent. Cisco announced Monday it has bought selected assets of Utah Street Networks, a seven-person San Francisco company founded in 2003. It did not acquire Tribe.net, a social-networking site that has been overshadowed by the success of big names such as Friendster, Facebook, and News Corp.'s MySpace. Cisco did not reveal the terms of the deal, which has already been completed, in a statement Monday. With the purchase, Cisco gets a proprietary software infrastructure that Utah Street has used to create and maintain online communities on Tribe.net. The dominant networking vendor will integrate that software into its Cisco Media Solutions Group (CMSG), and certain Utah Street employees will join that team to continue software development, according to Cisco. Cisco started moving into content infrastructure last year with the formation of the CMSG, which made its first acquisition last month when itÂ bought social-networking software company Five Across. On Monday, Cisco announced that acquisition had been completed. The San Jose, California, company sees social networking as a key part of the way media companies and other enterprises will approach their customers. On Tribe.net, users can set up personal profiles, join interest groups, post blog entries and pictures, and review local businesses, among other things. Versions of the site exist for dozens of U.S. cities. Utah Street brings unspecified capabilities to Cisco that Five Across -- and even well-known social networking sites -- don't have, said Eric Chan, strategy and marketing director for CMSG. "This is also a company that has been going through the wars of running a social networking site over the past few years," Chan said. Among other things, that real-world experience taught the company lessons about how people use such a site, he said. Cisco is finished buying social-networking companies, at least for now, Chan said. CMSG's mission extends beyond that technology to a range of other tools for enterprises to make closer connections with their customers, he said. Most enterprises haven't yet started using social-networking technologies, but they could prove great tools for communication even within companies, said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. Enterprise IT departments, which typically dictate what tools employees should use to communicate, should instead provide a variety of methods users understand and let them choose, Kerravala said. Cisco can pave the way for that change by combining several such tools in one package for enterprises to deploy. "I think it's very forward-looking by Cisco," Kerravala said. Demand for such consumer-style software will grow as today's young people enter the work force, he said. In fact, Kerravala thinks Cisco should go one step further into the future by buying Second Life creator Linden Research.
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Cisco forged a partnership with Fujitsu wherein the Japanese company will market Cisco&#39;s CRS-1 core router to carriers and large enterprises in Japan.
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CHICAGO _ The Internet's booming social-networking trend has reached a new milestone: Web sites are beginning to pay for content.
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Who:  Ben Gibson, director of Enterprise Mobility Solutions and a Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) enterprise technology partner.
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Raketu will add two new features to its social networking service in a move to attract consumers on the go.
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The Sabre Travel Network will add social networking capabilities to its GetThere corporate travel booking tool by the middle of this year.