How SocialText is breaking the collaboration mold

Last evening, Ross Mayfield, co-founder of SocialText held a conference call with some of the Irregulars to run through the latest incarnation of the company’s flagship product. The surprise he held up his sleeve was Signals, the Twitter for enterprise clone and the topic of much debate today. Unusually for Ross, he seemed hesitant to make too much of this development yet I believe this is one of the most important additions that company has made in its evolving enterprise 2.0 platform.

During the conversation, Ross mentioned that many years ago, Erik Keller, one time Gartner analyst and the person who dubbed our group with its moniker said that many supply chain problems could be solved through some form of instant messaging. Signals represents the first iteration of what that might look like. Most important, SocialText is providing the essential linkage between people and context with some elements of process. That’s crucial for this type of application to make sense in a corportae environment. However, such messaging systems are not without their critics.

Larry Dignan suggests that:

Sounds great, but will enterprises bite? For all the talk about Twitter’s enterprise potential the fact remains that CIO eyes glaze over–if you’re lucky–when you ask about micromessaging. In fact, I’ll be lucky if this post doesn’t lose page views. The interest in Twitter just isn’t there yet.

In my view Larry has this wrong on three fronts, although I accept the general view that many CXO’s don’t know about this kind of thing. At SAP TechEd for instance, I estimate that 95% of those in the main conference areas had not heard of Twitter.

First, ESME already has a global player running its service and building out business use cases that provide the process context that is almost, but not quite there in SocialText. Others are in the wings. I cannot say more but it is real. (Disclosure: I am part of the ESME team.) I would not be surprised to find other global companies making the same exploratory investments.

Second, Larry is assuming that CIO’s will have an initial involvement with this type of service. That is most unlikely. The use cases I am seeing are being developed by business process experts who have no tie to IT except tangentially. These are the people who try and engineer the best ways of getting things done with large systems like SAP, Oracle and IBM.

Earlier in Larry’s article, he says of these Twitteresque services:

Some folks love it, but frankly I need more filters and less noise. In fact, some peace and quiet is kind of nice once in a while. Ever notice how much work you can get done when you’re not connected to everyone?

He’s right but misses an essential ingredient. Enterprise forms of these applications don’t necessarily mean that users experience the noise of which he refers. As Ross correctly pointed out, the beauty of these services is that they are ‘opt-in response’ mechanisms. I can take advantage of the ambient nature of these communications methods and ignore them if I choose. In similar fashion, services that allow me to create and destroy groups provides the first filter I need to both accelerate my ability to get things done without imposing an intrusive technology. These same technologies allow me to refuse requests in much the same way as LinkedIn provides. So what’s missing from SocialText’s offering right now?

Processes are both formal and informal. SocialText 3 provides the informal elements and a potential repository for corporate intelligence. It doesn’t have the full gamut of communications that telepresence might offer but it has most of the other ingredients presented in a contextually logical way. What it is missing are the explicit linkages to back end formal processes that fuel the informal conversations. That is a matter for integration.

Quite how this will pan out has yet to be worked through but should be moderately straightforward for those systems that provide open APIs. It is at that point I would expect CIOs to prick up their ears. By then, departmentally priced solutions like SocialText may well be embedded in the fabric of what people want to use.

In the meantime, if SocialText can successfully articulate business use cases that have resonance then the self evident nature of its product should allow it to leapfrog the potential competition.

Ballmer needn’t fear the Mac…just yet

outique analyst firm Freeform Dynamics took a run at standardizing on Macs but the switch was not worthwhile. They’re now back in the Windows fold. Their report starts by posing a series of questions about business benefit. They found that when pressed, business users were hard put to come up with anything other than woolly answers. So what usually happens when an average business user switches to Mac?

With the world and his dog essentially standardised on Microsoft Office for business, how does the average Mac user in a mainstream commercial setting handle that? Well, they typically run a copy MS Office in a Windows virtual machine using Parallels or VMware Fusion. Most say they flip to this to do a lot of their more ‘boring’ work such as messaging and collaboration via the Exchange server, and participation in the document production/review/approval cycle with colleagues, clients, suppliers and so on, then do everything else in OS X. Of course the big question then becomes what does “everything else” actually translate to – accessing corporate applications and the Web through a browser probably – i.e. things that the desktop OS has little bearing on.

What happened in Freeform’s case?

The answer is actually pretty simple – we found that as a business, we were far more reliant on Microsoft Office under Windows than we had anticipated, and while most of the other productivity and business apps we use had native Mac equivalents, this was not true for all of them. The end result was that we couldn‟t get away from Windows, so ended up with a hybrid Windows/OS X environment which got in the way of productivity.

In other words none of:

• Improved uptime compared with Windows Vista
• Fewer critical security patches
• Ease of networking
• Faster operating (at least natively)

…could overcome the lock that Microsoft has placed in their business? That seems short sighted.

I’ve operated solely in the internet ‘cloud’ for some three years now with nothing other than the occasional glitch. The only time I use desktop applications is when Google or Zoho can’t ‘read’ something, most often from a PowerPoint deck. I’m not alone.

OK so I’m a one man band and accountable to no-one but myself. Yet both Google and Zoho are picking up plenty of business. All the indications suggest that the inevitable price pressures arising out of the impending IT spend squeeze would favor a re-consideration of those Microsoft licenses. That’s what GE thinks.

Of course you don’t need Mac to make that sort of switch but as anyone will tell you, both IE6 and IE7 present challenges when working with internet applications. Users could switch to Firefox as the day to day browser but most will simply use whatever they’re given.

The question then comes down to TCO. The Mac acquisition cost is an order of magnitude more expensive than Windows machines but as my Irregular colleague Zoli Erdos said last month:

I started to chronicle the hassle of just running a Vista PC and dealing with random, unexplainable failures, but more or less gave up. Compare this to the anecdotal evidence of my Mac-user friends, who, despite occasional hiccups all agree: it just works.

And that’s the point. As someone who is constantly creating content of one kind or another (including accounts data) productivity matters. A lot. I’ve never had a Mac equivalent of BSOD, rarely need to power down and reboot (though I do so more these days as an energy saver) and have never had any real problems other than crappy battery life.

I’ve not seen any recent comparative studies about Mac v PC TCO but my experience mirrors that of my Mac using colleagues. Macs work. Period. Whether it is possible to generalize our experience to fully networked operations is another matter. All I know is that my Express based wifi home network works just fine.

Given the SMB sector is Microsoft’s bread and butter by volume and recent news that Apple’s laptop products are doing rather well, perhaps Ballmer should have something to worry about. But only from those who are prepared to view a move to Mac as an opportunity to completely re-evaluate how they are using IT to run their business. For some that will be a breath of fresh air, for others their Wintel addiction will be too powerful.

Oracle OpenWorld: a view from the cheap seats

While Sam Diaz and Mike Krigsman are slaving away in the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld I get the pleasure of observing from the comfort of my office in downtown Hicksville, Spain some 5,500 miles away. Once more, Oracle dropped the ball for us lowly bloggers but by the power of live video streaming, Twitter and eventtrack, I get to follow the nuanced action as seen by the crowd. It’s not the same as being there of course but it does provide another view - one from the cheap seats.

Gartnerian Thomas Otter was in the audience and kicked off by making observations on the sartorial achievements of the speakers. I was impressed with the fact Oracle wheeled out Jan Muchez, KPN’s CIO who gave a spirited defense of Oracles vertical market offerings in the telco space. And despite the now almost customary pops at SAP, credit should be given to Charles Phillips, Oracle’s president for acknowledging the world doesn’t start and stop at Redwood Shores but that Oracle needs to integrate with SAP and many other vendors. That’s considerably more generous than the ‘not invented here’ attitude that pervades large parts of SAP.

David Haimes, who works for Oracle as a software director in financial applications was none too pleased with the much vaunted Oracle Beehive demo, declaring that the screens were hard to follow. I didn’t think they looked too bad and the slideware was sufficiently clean for me to easily get the ‘we are open’ message. Though of course there’s open and open. In Oracle land that usually means the mix of Windows, Linux and Mac they support and not open as in open source.

From Mike Gotta’s notes on Beehive:

• Integrated and secure
• Built from scratch, new architecture
• Collaboration server, communicate, coordinate, etc
• Collaboration fragmentation - all apps come with their own databasem own admin, own security/identity, etc
• Beehive integrates all of this
• Rules, groups, preferences, centralized administration
• Shot at SharePoint and number of servers you need to gain scale
• Beehive integrates with WebCenter, Oracle Applications, and the rest of the Oracle infrastructure
• Choice of clients to alleviate user experience issues
• Unix or Linux
• Co-existence with certain products such as Microsoft Exchange, Cisco Call Manager, etc
• Includes development platform as well

Much more will be written about Beehive over the coming days but I suspect this is really a shot across the Microsoft Sharepoint and Exchange bows. Presenters Chuck Rozwat, EVP product development and Charles Phillips made particular point of comparing the reduction in number of servers that Beehive needs compared with Sharepoint and Exchange in similar environments.

During the keynote there was hardly any mention of the F-word - that’s Fusion to you. That should not be a surprise as expectations in that area have been very low among my Irregular colleagues.

Over email, I asked Mike Krigsman to give a flavor of the ‘buzz’ which he assessed as relatively low key. Thomas Otter concluded with a digital shrug, declaring: “Digesting the keynote. Not a lot new really.” A little earlier, Eddie Awad gave up the ghost assessing the NetApps guy to be at risk of speaking to empty seats and complaining about the spotty wifi.

Such is the fun of Twitter and the benefit of observing from the cheap seats.

After Attack on Indians, Germany Fears For its Reputation

Three days after eight Indian men were attacked, injured and chased through an Eastern German town by a mob while the townsfolk looked on, Germany is worried that this latest incident will hurt its image abroad and scare off foreign investors.

SPIEGEL ONLINE

A Nazi swastika daubed on a bench in the town of Mügeln.

The Indian government has demanded a rigorous investigation into the attack on eight Indian men (more...)by a mob of at least 50 Germans shouting "Foreigners out" in the eastern German town of Mügeln, near the city of Leipzig, on Saturday night.

"We expect the culprits to be caught quickly," India's ambassador to Germany, Meera Shankar, told Berliner Zeitung newspaper. Earlier she asked the German government "to take measures to tackle this issue and prevent such events from occurring in the future," a spokesman for the Indian foreign ministry said.

The attack has triggered fresh public debate about far-right extremism in the formerly communist east of Germany, which has seen a string of racist assaults since unification in 1990. Politicians and business leaders have expressed concern that the country's reputation abroad may have been hurt and that foreign investors be deterred from coming to Germany.

Wolfgang Thierse, Social Democrat vice president of the Bundestag lower house of parliament, said: "The worse Germany's reputation becomes, the fewer people who we need for our progress and prosperity will come here," Thierse told Berliner Zeitung.

German parliamentarian Sebastian Edathy, who heads the Bundestag's domestic affairs committee, said: "People of dark skin color are far more likely to become the victim of an assault in Eastern Germany than they are in Western Germany."

PHOTO GALLERY: MANHUNT IN MÜGELN

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Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (7 Photos)

The eight men were attacked by a mob of around 50 Germans at a street festival in the early hours of Sunday in the small town of Mügeln in the Eeastern German state of Saxony. The trigger for the violence was a brawl on the dance floor in a party tent shortly before 1 a.m., police said. The reason for the brawl was not yet clear.

The Indians left the tent where the dance was being held but were then attacked by a number of Germans who chased them across the town's market place until they took shelter in a pizzeria run by an Indian. The owner let them in, but the mob tried to kick in the doors of the restaurants as a large crowd looked on. The restaurant owner's car was also seriously damaged.

Police arrived in force after one of the men called them from inside the restaurant, and the mayor of Mügeln, Gotthard Deuse, has been criticised for claiming that the attack wasn't racially motivated. Local business leaders were also shocked at the incident, which has drawn nationwide media coverage.

"These events don't just cast a negative light on Leipzig as a business location, but also on Saxony and the whole of Eastern Germany," said Thomas Hofmann, head of Leipzig's chamber of commerce. He said Germany's economy would be hurt if the country doesn't get to grips with the racist attacks.

"This applies to foreign investors who are already active here and potential investors who are still deciding where to invest," said Hofmann.

DDP

Anti-neo-Nazi protestors on Tuesday responded to the attacks in Mügeln: "Stop the Nazi Terror!"

The Central Council of Jews in Germany accused the government of lacking a national plan of action to combat the far right. Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Council, said foreigners were evidently in danger in the east of the country. "They should be warned not to live in certain regions and towns of Eastern Germany," he told Netzeitung. "That not hysteria, that's a bitter fact," he said. "Yesterday it was colored people, today it's foreigners, tomorrow it will be lesbians or homosexuals or perhaps Jews."

Georg Milbradt, the conservative mayor of Saxony, where Mügeln is located, denied that the region was a no-go zone for foreigners. "We should wait for the results of the investigation into what happened in Mügeln," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Of course one mustn't play down such events but one shouldn't immediately label every dispute between Germans and foreigners as xenophobia."

No one has been charged with the attack so far. Some 200 left-wing radicals demonstrated against the far right in Mügeln on Tuesday.

Influential Groups Lay Out Road Map for Improving U.S. Education

By now, many people are familiar with America's poor academic performance on the international stage. Forty years ago, the United States had the highest high school completion rate in the world. Today, it ranks 18th out of 24 industrialized nations. In 1995, the rate of Americans going to college was among the highest in the world. Since then, 13 other countries boast higher college graduation rates than the United States. What can the United States learn from countries that seem to be doing a better job of preparing students for the 21st-century economy?

That's the question that three leading organizations representing governors and state educators say they want more states to ask themselves. A report from the National Governors Association (NGA), the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), and Achieve Inc. outlines several recommendations for rebuilding the U.S. education system. Among them is the idea that states should adopt common academic expectations that are linked to the best international teaching practices. Other ideas include improving textbooks, recruiting better teachers, and making sure schools are accountable for raising achievement through the use of international best practices.

"The global race is going to continue, and it's going to intensify in the coming years," said CCSSO Executive Director Gene Wilhoit. "We are unwilling to be on the losing end of this race."

The report,"Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-Class Education," raises a growing concern for the United States. American companies that once outsourced only low-skilled jobs to developing countries are now also exporting research jobs. If the United States wants to keep those jobs at home, the authors of the report say the government should focus more resources on education and import best practices from top-performing countries.

That's the approach that other countries have taken. Germany, for example, put together a team of experts to study what other high-performing countries were doing. The investment led Germany to adopt several reforms, including opening 10,000 all-day schools, that led to higher student achievement. Singapore, which now leads the world in math and science achievement, made a similar investment after trailing other countries in similar international comparisons in the mid-1980s.

In contrast, the report says, the United States has largely ignored the international benchmarking movement in education.

There's plenty of room for improvement, the authors say. The curriculum that the typical American eighth grader studies is two full years behind the curriculum that students in the top-performing countries are studying. In science, American eigth graders, for example, are memorizing parts of the eye while students in top-performing nations are learning about how the eye actually works.

Making textbooks and assessments more focused and better aligned would also help, the report suggests. Textbooks often present a "laundry list" of topics, which has led to the criticism that Americans are learning curricula that are "a mile wide and an inch deep." Mitchell Chester, education commissioner of Massachusetts, said the goal of international benchmarking is to help the United States know not only how it measures up to other countries but also what the high-achieving countries are doing that can be put to use in U.S. classrooms.. To that end, he says, federal lawmakers must allocate more funds to states that want to adopt these reforms. "We're not going to have all states march in lockstep, but there is a much greater sense of urgency than ever seen before" to adopt these reforms, says Mike Cohen, executive director of the school reform group Achieve Inc.

Solid Snake's last stand

If the names Solid Snake, Liquid Snake, Big Boss and Raiden mean anything to you then I'm guessing today is an important day.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots hits the shops today as a flag bearer for the PlayStation 3 console.

The game hasn't launched with the marketing hype and blitz of titles like Halo 3 or Grand Theft Auto IV, and I'm guessing that hardcore fans of the series are probably thankful - the franchise has tended to attract a more cerebral player over the years.

There was a decent sprinkling of fans at the San Francisco launch, reports Kotaku and a modest crowd in Tokyo, according to Famitsu.

PS3Fanboy has some photos of creator Hideo Kojima at the New York launch in Times Square.

But it's been interesting to see how expectations for the game have become slightly dampened over the course of the last few months.

Once held up as an example of how the PlayStation 3 was going to revolutionise gaming, even the title's creator Hideo Kojima has seemed a bit more pragmatic about his achievement. He even seems to suggest that the PS3 itself constrained his vision, which may be why Sony itself has not tried to extract a marketing dividend for the console from the game's launch.

Review scores for the title have been modest, with lots of eight out of 10s.This perhaps reflects the game's high barrier to entry.

Gamerankings.com, says the average score for the game is 92%. I don't trust aggregators by and large - but I will say that the two outlets I place my trust in habitually - Edge and Eurogamer - both gave it an 8 out of 10.

If you haven't followed the intricate twists and turns of the plots then you are going to struggle. Metal Gear Solid is so complicated it makes an episode of The Wire look like Balamory. The plot does span six games and about 20 years, to be fair.

Here's some of the reviews:

1Up - A

These parts are also a stark reminder that video games have a long way to go before their narrative comes within spitting distance of the best Hollywood has to offer. Fans of balletic violence will be in heaven watching the gloriously rendered mayhem on display, but those who prefer solid acting and effective emoting are likely to be disappointed by the game's uneven performances and scripting.

Edge - 8/10

The cutscenes here are sure to invoke that thousand-yard stare, two in particular coming perilously close to the 90-minute mark.

Eurogamer - 8/10

Flawed, intractable, unspeakably tedious at times, and yet blessed with incredible production values, imaginative design, and a brilliant, brave willingness to think and do the unexpected and impossible.

The fact there are two almost 90-minute cutscenes seems, to my mind, a touch absurd.

There are those who argue that video games can be that mix between films and interactivity -
but I prefer something a little more subtle that Kojima's offering.

More than six years ago reviewing MGS 2, I wrote: "Computer games should be about interaction and not just passive viewing. If you want to watch a DVD movie on your PS2 you can simply rent one."

The games industry may have upped the polygon count in the intervening years but Metal Gear Solid 4 still feels like a long way from the breakthrough game that will deliver on action, narrative and interactivity.

Despite all those reservations I am very much looking forward to sticking my copy of MGS4 into the Playstation 3 - not least for the opening sequence.

As all MGS fans know, no-one does an intro sequence quite like Hideo Kojima.

All together now: "Da da daaaa, da da da da daaaa, da da daaa, da da da daaaaa....."

Mice suspected in deadly cat fire

Mice may be responsible for a blaze that killed nearly 100 cats at an animal shelter near the Canadian city of Toronto, officials say.

Mice or rats are thought to have chewed through electric wires

The fire at the humane society shelter in Oshawa also killed three dogs and some rats that were up for adoption.

An initial report from the fire marshal says mice or rats chewing through electrical wires in the ceiling are likely to have sparked the blaze.

Offers of help have been pouring in from animal lovers across Canada.

"It's unfortunate and ironic that mice caused the fire that killed the cats," Toronto Humane Society spokesman Ian McConachie told the BBC News website.

"Unfortunately, the mice probably perished in the fire as well," he added.

The $250,000 (£137,000) fire is still under investigation by the Ontario Fire Marshal's office.

Mr McConachie said it would be some days before a final report would be released.

In all, only nine dogs, two cats and one rat were rescued in Wednesday's early morning blaze.

They are being housed in a nearby municipal shelter, while volunteers rebuild the burnt-down shelter for the Humane Society of Durham Region.

Turin shroud 'older than thought'

The Shroud of Turin is much older than suggested by radiocarbon dating carried out in the 1980s, according to a new study in a peer-reviewed journal.

Tests in 1988 concluded the cloth was a medieval "hoax"

A research paper published in Thermochimica Acta suggests the shroud is between 1,300 and 3,000 years old.

The author dismisses 1988 carbon-14 dating tests which concluded that the linen sheet was a medieval fake.

The shroud, which bears the faint image of a blood-covered man, is believed by some to be Christ's burial cloth.

The radiocarbon sample has completely different chemical properties than the main part of the shroud relic Raymond Rogers

Raymond Rogers says his research and chemical tests show the material used in the 1988 radiocarbon analysis was cut from a medieval patch woven into the shroud to repair fire damage.

It was this material that was responsible for an invalid date being assigned to the original shroud cloth, he argues.

"The radiocarbon sample has completely different chemical properties than the main part of the shroud relic," said Mr Rogers, who is a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, US.

Fire damage

He says he was originally dubious of untested claims that the 1988 sample was taken from a re-weave.

"It was embarrassing to have to agree with them," Mr Rogers told the BBC News website.

The 4m-long linen sheet was damaged in several fires since its existence was first recorded in France in 1357, including a church blaze in 1532.

It is said to have been restored by nuns who patched the holes and stitched the shroud to a reinforcing material known as the Holland cloth.

"[The radiocarbon sample] has obvious painting medium, a dye and a mordant that doesn't show anywhere else," Mr Rogers explained.

The shroud first surfaced in France in 1357

"This stuff was manipulated - it was coloured on purpose."

In the study, he analysed and compared the sample used in the 1988 tests with other samples from the famous cloth.

In addition to the discovery of dye, microchemical tests - which use tiny quantities of materials - provided a way to date the shroud.

These tests revealed the presence of a chemical called vanillin in the radiocarbon sample and in the Holland cloth, but not the rest of the shroud.

Vanillin is produced by the thermal decomposition of lignin, a chemical compound found in plant material such as flax. Levels of vanillin in material such as linen fall over time.

'Older date'

"The fact that vanillin cannot be detected in the lignin on shroud fibres, Dead Sea scrolls linen and other very old linens indicates that the shroud is quite old," Mr Rogers writes.

"A determination of the kinetics of vanillin loss suggests the shroud is between 1,300 and 3,000 years old."

In the 1988 study, scientists from three universities concluded that the cloth dated from some time between 1260 and 1390. This ruled it out as the possible burial cloth that wrapped the body of Christ.

The shroud is stored at the cathedral of Turin, Italy

That led to the then Cardinal of Turin, Anastasio Alberto Ballestrero, admitting the garment was a hoax.

Michael Minor, vice-president of the American Shroud of Turin Association for Research, commented: "This is the most significant news about the Shroud of Turin since the C-14 dating was announced in 1988.

"The C-14 dating isn't being disputed. But [the new research] is saying that they dated the rewoven area."

But since the announcement of the 1988 results, several attempts have been made to challenge the authenticity of these tests.

"The sample tested was dyed using technology that began to appear in Italy about the time the Crusaders' last bastion fell to the Mameluke Turks in AD 1291," said Mr Rogers.

"The radiocarbon sample cannot be older than about AD 1290, agreeing with the age determined in 1988. However, the shroud itself is actually much older."

Some now hope the Vatican will give approval for samples of the shroud to be re-tested.

But, says Mr Minor, "the church is very hesitant, very reluctant for that to be done, because they've been given so many conflicting opinions".