Google Terminates Six Services -- Google -- InformationWeek

The company's ax is falling on Dodgeball, Google Catalog Search, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebook, Jaiku, and Google Video. Economic cycle... nothing is free, not even for Google... The Finnish Jaiku is now ending its story, but the owners made considerable money in the transaction, good for them!

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How Nike's Social Network Sells to Runners: a very good case how social media is used in more traditional products

The Nike+ site is drawing hordes of runners, and its success may hold lessons for brand building on the Web. This case is an interesting example of a company that implemented social media using the web and information collected using a sensor in the shoe.

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List of “White Label” or “Private Label” (Applications you can Rebrand) Social Networking Platforms, Community Platforms: let the acquisition start

Scores of vendors are now in the social-networking platform business and the market is ripe for some major acquisitions, according to Forrester Research Instead of a proprietary platform like LinkedIn or Facebook, such companies offer a framework to enterprises or individuals wishing to build an online community tailored to their tastes and needs. The platforms are being used for everything from marketing and branding to internal enterprise use. The white label social networking category is booming, too many players and too few users. Let the acquistions start!
Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research has a very good an updated list in his recent blog entry on all of the White Label or Private Label social networking platforms and community platforms.

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DotNetNuke Moves to CodePlex

Microsoft and DotNetNuke announce that the popular DotNetNuke Web development framework has fully moved to the Microsoft CodePlex community source site, enhancing an existing collaboration between the two entities. Beginning with the DotNetNuke 4.9.1 and 5.0.0 product releases, DotNetNuke is now leveraging CodePlex's infrastructure for its core product distribution. DotNetNuke is an open-source Web application framework written in Visual Basic for the ASP.NET framework.This is very good news for the DotNetNuke community and the rich ecosystem that it has created. I am very impressed how the platform has created a healthy commerical ecosystem with lots of skins, modules and applications built on-top of the DotNetNuke infrastructure. Way to go!

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CRM 2009 - Companies to Watch For: The Up and Coming Companies of 2009 Social CRM/CRM 2.0 Space

A ZDNET Blog has a very comprehensive article about players in the upcoming 2009 Social CRM/CRM 2.0 space. It is fascinating to see how social media, social networking, business intelligence and CRM technologies are merging and there is a need to really understand the actions, the behaviour and results of customer engagement. This can not be done in historical and traditional means, it has to be done with tools that support it. This article demonstrates a few of these tools that exist on the marketplace.

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Social media redefines traditional business intelligence strategies

A ZDNET Blog about Social media and how it redefines traditional business intelligence. My company works with organizations within social media, social engagement marketing, competitive intelligence and influcense marketing. Since we also do business intelligence, I was wondering whether anybody had written about the intersection of tradtional BI and social media. Volaa.. there was an article that describes well what was on my mind. I seriously think that organizations need to start listening to their environment from a social media perspective as this will have a direct impact on the numbers that always drag behind. I recommend this article.

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CES: Tech firms brace for painful year

Tech companies are battening down the hatches for a year of slow sales and little large-scale development investment. This article highlights how CES in Las Vegas views this year 2009 and the technology market.

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What Your Home Data Center Needs: My Proposal for a New Stor

Over the holiday break, I scored a 1 Tb Fantom External Drive for the post-rebate price of $89! After I attached it—replacing a 160 Gb external drive, thus illustrating the truism that more capacity begets more need—I began thinking about the role of storage in the home. A good article by Bernard Golden from CIO.com of the mess that exist in the home media/storage market. I recently bougth a HP Windows Media Server and have played with it for a while. Nice and seamless device and there is really no management at all with that device. The only issue that I have is the lack of standards on anything that has to do with home media. Sonos, Linksys, and many others exists on the market, but none of them talk to each other. That is where the industry needs to consolidate and merge. My home system is build in a way that you really have to know what you are doing.. and that is not good.

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Keeping up with the Microsoft confabs

A ZDNET Blog by Mary-Jo Foley about upcoming Microsoft events. This is a good check-list where one needs to to be if working with Microsoft technology

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