Living Large Small Companies Yield Big Results with Web Collaboration Technology
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(Source: Webex)  Last year 671,800 small businesses opened, while 544,800 shuttered their doors. Not all of these failures were due to bankruptcy. One major culprit was travel expenses. See how you can proactively react to increasing travel budgets and literally eliminate most if not all of them through web collaboration solutions.
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Small companies tout their media products, many of which integrate various types of software and connectivity.
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A search startup comes up with a system for compensating its web workers instantly, an idea that's aimed at the internet's growing casual work force. By Michael Calore.
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By Woods, Lynn; Kahn, Kathy  Remember the days when computers were giant mainframes housed in garage-sized rooms at big companies? There may be a lesson in that model certainly a market, as Symbio Technologies has discovered.
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Company beefs up online service for shipping business information between firms over the Net.
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Companies will demonstrate how their technology will work together.
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The beta of Microsoft's new online service reveals some good collaboration features for individuals and small businesses, but there are problems that still need to be ironed out.
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(Source: Webex)  Without huge investments, businesses are expanding their reach in the marketplace and closing more sales.  Web meetings save them time and money and allow them to better sell, train, support, market to and collaborate with customers, prospects and partners.  And you can reach a global audience without the burden of travel.
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TechWeb - The company expects to fill what it sees as a market void -- Web-based software that's affordable to small businesses with up to 50 employees.
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By Heck, Mike  WIKIS  Latest offerings get users swapping knowledge quickly  CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS usually won't work as collaboration tools. Although a CMS does ease content creation, the resulting Web sites have rigid navigation and formal publishing workflows.
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TechWeb - The partnership builds a content aggregator for databases, business applications, spreadsheets and directories.
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Nearly one-fourth of companies surveyed by ChangeWave Research are now using Web 2.0-social networking software in some form, and another 8 percent intend to do so within the next year.The study is the organization&#39;s first stab at tracking Web 2.0 in the enterprise, said Joshua Levine, editor of ChangeWave Investing, an advisory service from the Rockville, Maryland, firm.&quot;I think Web 2.0 has been simmering a lot for the last couple of years under the radar, at least in enterprises; 2008 looked as we were coming toward it that this stuff would be exploding,&quot; Levine said.Overall, 39 percent of respondents said their firms are very or somewhat willing to use social software. In addition, among respondents whose organizations are already using such software, 35 percent said spending on it will rise in the next 90 days and just two percent said it will fall.Twenty-six percent of companies currently using social software said they plan to invest most heavily in wikis, followed by blogs (15 percent), social networks (13 percent), mashups (5 percent), RSS feeds (5 percent) and collaborative tagging (3 percent).However, the trends were somewhat different among future Web 2.0 users. They said their companies intended to spend the most money on social networks and blogs, which scored 22 percent and 21 percent, respectively.While 79 percent of current Web 2.0 software users said it is being used to improve internal communication and collaboration, only 48 percent of future users said the same. Future users were more focused on external goals, such as better customer service, greater brand awareness and increased sales.&quot;That&#39;s something we really want to drill into next time, why that is,&quot; Levine said. The company plans to repeat the survey, possibly by as soon as midyear.ChangeWave&#39;s report also tracked which vendors are benefiting from the Web 2.0 trend. Microsoft ranked highest in each of the six software categories, followed by IBM in a number of categories.However, open-source and in-house-developed software both showed strength. Some 31 percent of respondents whose companies are using or will begin using wikis within the next year are doing so with open-source technology, and 28 percent of those using mashups developed them in-house, according to the study.ChangeWave surveyed 2,081 people in September.
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Company attributes "remarkable year" to growth of its Web site network.
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This scenario is all too familiar to office workers who collaborate electronically on projects: E-mails get passed around with differing versions of documents-in-progress attached. Instant messages whizz by. Web sites are cited, then lost. It's often a jumbled mess, with no central online location for shared data. There must be a better way.
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A small company learns to think big -- meeting the needs of its enterprise-class customers -- by building an infrastructure it can count on.
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(InfoWorld) - As Web 2.0 technologies continue seeping into business systems, a new generation of corporate users is starting to gain access to the collaboration capabilities they are demanding from IT, according to attendees at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week. But before use of the tools spreads too far, they noted, companies must strike a balance between the Web 2.0 wants of users and the needs of corporate IT. The conference, described as a collective experiment by its long list of sponsors, was organized in two months using the online productivity and collaboration tools that are the focus of the event, organizers said. Jonathan Rochelle, product manager of Google's spreadsheet product, predicted that real-time collaboration capabilities, as provided in the Google Docs & Spreadsheets tool set, will become a key part of the next generation of office tools. Employees are increasingly demanding tools that will let them collaborate online when creating documents, he noted. "The consumer expectation [for Web 2.0 tools] is being brought to the workplace," he said. "Work groups are taking the product in because they like working with it, and they are more productive." Indeed, within Google itself, workers are now derided when they attach documents to e-mail instead of using the online editing tool in Google Docs, he noted. The traditional route is now viewed as a drain on productivity, he added. Richard McAniff, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office, also predicted that Web 2.0 tools will become interwoven into corporate life over the next few years. For example, combining a social networking tool like Facebook with productivity tools could "really change the way people do work," he noted. "We really have to look at ... how we can have a complete game changer in terms of what the workforce is really doing," he said. Still, companies have to reconcile the demand of its employees for the new tools with the inevitable productivity bumps that come when new technologies like Web 2.0 tools are added in the workplace, he added. "What people want on the desktop is one thing, [and] what IT might want is something else," he said. "You have to strike a balance between the two." Danny Kolke, founder and CTO of Etelos Systems, a provider of hosted Web applications, noted that many IT organizations are actually under assault by end-users who are demanding Office 2.0 features and tools. "The reason I use Spreadsheets in Google ... is because I know I can create it and share it easily," Kolke said. "IT comes along and says, 'We need control over this data.' A lot of [IT] organizations are defending their turf right now because they are get assaulted. The demand [for Web 2.0 tools] is there." The speed in which these Web 2.0 technologies are being developed -- and then moving into the enterprise -- is increasing the strife between IT and users, he added. "The market wants [office 2.0 tools] before we're ready to deliver it in many cases," he said. "We can't keep up with the demand. If you listen to the market and innovate for what they are hoping for you don't have to sell your product."
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Companies are teaming up to bring their technology to your living room.