• Whom to watch in business this year
  (tags: austin)
• PIMCO: Bearish and Disgusted with Risk-Assets, U.S. Treasuries — Seeking Alpha
  (tags: pimco outlook economy)

• Five 2010 Predictions About Tech Companies – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
  (tags: 2010 predictions apple twitter facebook technology)
• Following Venture Capital for Signs of Technology to Come – NYTimes.com
  (tags: VC tech 2010 outlook)
• Five Tech Themes for 2010 – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
  (tags: web applications trends 2010 predictions)
• The Deal Professor’s 2009 in Review, Part II: The Deals – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com
  (tags: M&A deals 2009)
• The Deal Professor’s 2009 in Review, Part I: No Exit – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com
  (tags: M&A privateequity investments)

• Are Startups Getting Crazy, Or Just IPO Crazy?
  (tags: tech wave ipo startup stocks entrepreneurship)
• The Big Question: Did 'the system work'? – The Hill's Congress Blog
  (tags: security travel)

• Yelp Walks Away From Google Deal, And Half A Billion Dollars
  (tags: Deals yelp google m&a)

• CloudShare raises $10M for cloud-based demos | VentureBeat
  (tags: vc cloudshare cloudcomputing webservices)

• Geolocation wars heat up: Gowalla raises $8.4 million – Austin-based company
  (tags: austin startup funding VC mobile geo)
• List of Companies Providing Social CRM Offerings " Web Strategy by …
  (tags: socialcrm socialeservices socialmedia)

• peHUB » Venture is Back, Baby
  (tags: vc industry financing investing privateequity pe)

• Why Vertical Integration Is Making a Comeback – Rita McGrath – Harvard Business Review
  (tags: industry customerexperience CEM)
• Why Vertical Integration Is Making a Comeback – Rita McGrath – Harvard Business Review
  (tags: ping.fm)

• Motorola Droid- My Take
  (tags: droid iphone)
• A brief history of social network enterprise collaboration tools | VentureBeat
  (tags: e2.0 enterprise2.0 collaboration)
• CIO > 2010's new software star: 'Socialytic' business apps
  (tags: e2.0 enterprise2.0)

• Twitter alternatives that are all business
  Microblogging, or short-form text updates via the Web, has become a hot trend for enterprises that want to help employees share information internally. Here's a look at how three businesses are using Twitter alternatives for microblogging, plus best practices for implementing it.
  (tags: microblogging twitter enterprise2.0 e2.0)

• PGreenblog: Chatting (Not Chattering) About Salesforce – Part II
  (tags: chatter force.com salesforce.com df09 collaborativebusiness cloudcomputing)
• Chatting (Not Chattering) About Salesforce – Part I | Social CRM: The Conversation | ZDNet.com
  (tags: chatter salesforce.com cloudcomputing force.com)

• ROI in Social Media – Where Does it Belong? « StickyFigure
  (tags: ROI socialmedia e2.0 enterprise2.0)
• RealTime CrunchUp: Salesforce’s Benioff Talks Social Enterprise Strategy, Chatter And More
  Robert Scoble: On that point, Salesforce is only used by a small # of people inside corporations. Why aren’t you ripping this out and make this more low cost?

  MB: We are. All Salesforce users can use thus for free. We also have a low cost separate product. And we will be rolling out a free version. We are working on figuring out what that is.

  (tags: chatter salesforce.com force.com collaboration productivity)
• ITSinsider | As a Matter of Fact…
  (tags: enterprise2.0 e2.0 adoption)
• The biggest things last week: Foursquare and Salesforce
  Here’s the quote, I asked him: “Salesforce is only used by a small # of people inside corporations. Why aren’t you ripping [Salesforce's new Chatter functionality] out and make this more low cost?” Benioff answered: “We are. All Salesforce users can use this for free. We also have a low cost separate product. And we will be rolling out a free version. We are working on figuring out what that is.”
  (tags: chatter salesforce.com force.com foursquare socialmedia)
• Salesforce.com: What's All the Chatter About? | AMR Research – Supply Chain Management Experts
  If you get a chance to see a demo, compare Chatter with your own intranet. You’ll instantly be reminded why you seldom go to your own site or sites. In my view, tools like Chatter mark the end of the dead web.

  The customers I talked to at Dreamforce were very enthusiastic. Several CIOs said that it’s exactly what their younger employees have been looking for. All saw immediate ways to benefit from the new software.

  (tags: chatter enterprise2.0 e2.0 salesforce.com sharepoint collaboration)

• McKinsey – The 10 Trends You Have to Watch: and what they mean for IT – summary
  (tags: McKinsey web2.0 economy trends)
• Why Chatter Matters @ crm intelligence & strategy
  (tags: chatter salesforce.com force.com PaaS collaboration collaborativebusiness social socialcomputing enterprise2.0 e2.0)
• The Three Waves of Enterprise 2.0: Climbing the Social Computing Maturity Curve – Dion Hinchcliffe's Next-Generation Enterprises
  (tags: enterprise2.0 social web2.0 adoption e2.0 socialcomputing collaboration analytics)

Here is a link to one of the most intelligent things I believe has been said about the Enterprise 2.0 / Enterprise Social Networking / Enterprise Collaboration space yet … and it was written by a blogger who’s expertise is in CRM intelligence and strategy! It is well worth a read – Why Chatter Matters – and it is about Salesforce.com’s recent announcement of Chatter (coverage here and here)within it’s Force.com platform. Note – Chatter will not be released until the Spring of 2010.

The point Esteban makes in his blog post is that collaboration is infrastructure, and the industry should stop looking for an ROI for this stuff. I think it is great advice. How many buyers have calculated the ROI of email? Yet, I would submit that (until recently) most of us would say that email makes us more productive. Moreover, most of us would go further to say we could not do our jobs without email! No ROI calculations are done on this, yet a ton of money has been spent on Exchange and other email systems and servers over the years, and the dollars continue to flow there.

Let’s move on to core collaboration. Here is a decent demo of a collaborative application built on Force.com by Appirio using the new Chatter capability within Force.com. It is a good example of how a traditional application such as Professional Services Automation can become a collaborative application. Notice the contextual information flow to the user while they are in the application doing their job. Also, note the ability to directly engage other people relevant to the work the person is doing from within the application. This is a different way of working … working collaboratively. Notice that the user did not have to jump out of his workstream to send any emails. The user did not have to open a spreadsheet or download any attachments. Everything was handled within the application, including collaborating with team members, and the relevant information flowed in and out directly to the relevant people and applications.

Now we all know that enterprises have massively complex computing environments, and that not every application is doing to be running on Force.com. So, Chatter can address collaboration within the Force.com ecosystem, but other infrastructure will need to emerge to enable collaborative capability within the other applications across each enterprise computing landscape (ones that include and do not include Force.com) to drive these benefits. The broader point is this capability – this social computing capability (profiles, status updates, activity streams, intelligent listening and filtering, policy management and compliance, group collaboration, conversations, etc.) – is infrastructure, and is necessary infrastructure. We need to stop obsessing about the ROI. As enterprises adopt collaboration in the way they work and provide their people with collaborative applications that enable work to be done as in the demo above, this capability will move from being “nice to have” to a necessity. Like email, enterprises will not be able to survive without it. The bigger question is whether your enterprise be among the first to adopt and reap the benefits of this new collaborative capability, or will it delay and fall behind its competition.

• Taming the Chatter cloud | Software as Services | ZDNet.com
  (tags: chatter collaboration e2.0 enterprise2.0 adoption socialcomputing people)

• Evernote Raises $10 Million From Investors – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
  (tags: evernote funding startup)
• Why You Can't Use Personal Technology at the Office – WSJ.com
  (tags: collaboration computing)
• Whitney Hasn’t ‘Been This Bearish in a Year’ – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com
  (tags: economy,)
• Don't Soft Pedal the Enterprise 2.0 Message – The Connected Web
  (tags: enterprise2.0 e2.0 ngenera tammyerickson)
• Intuit Brainstorm Provides Innovation Management and Collaboration | The AppGap
  (tags: Intuit Brainstorm e2.0 enterprise2.0 collaboration innovation)

• Evernote Raises $10 Million From Investors – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
  (tags: evernote funding startup)
• Why You Can't Use Personal Technology at the Office – WSJ.com
  (tags: collaboration computing)
• Whitney Hasn’t ‘Been This Bearish in a Year’ – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com
  (tags: economy,)
• Don't Soft Pedal the Enterprise 2.0 Message – The Connected Web
  (tags: enterprise2.0 e2.0 ngenera tammyerickson)
• Intuit Brainstorm Provides Innovation Management and Collaboration | The AppGap
  (tags: Intuit Brainstorm e2.0 enterprise2.0 collaboration innovation)

• Enterprise 2.0: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century? | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com
  (tags: e2.0 enterprise2.0 dionhinchcliffe howto adoption roi value)

• McKinsey: What Matters: Using technology to improve workforce collaboration
  But most companies are only beginning to take these paths. That’s because, in many respects, raising the collaboration game differs from traditional ways of boosting productivity. In production and transaction work, technology use is often part of a broader campaign to reduce head counts and costs—steps that are familiar to most managers. In the collaboration setting, technology is used differently. It multiplies interactions and extends the reach of knowledge workers. That allows for the speedier product development found at P&G and improved partner and customer intimacy at Cisco. In general, this is new terrain for most managers.
  (tags: McKinsey enterprise2.0 innvoation cisco p&g adoption collaboration productivity)

• SharePoint Conference 2009 Equals Lotusphere 1999, Minus the Yellow Backpacks | AMR Research – Supply Chain Management Experts
  (tags: sharepoint microsoft lotus strategy apps2.0 enterprise)

• Wikinomics» Blog Archive » 12 Critical Success Factors for Business Platforms
  (tags: nGenera platforms nickvitalari wikinomics tips)

• Computing: Battle of the clouds | The Economist
  (tags: cloudcomputing cloud saas paas iaas)

• Seek Omega: Enterprise 2.0 Caffeine: Let’s Debunk the Non-Debate
  (tags: enterprise2.0 case enterprisecollaboration e2conf e2.0 collaboration solutions)
• Lessons From the War Over Skype – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
  (tags: skype ip ebay legal m&a fiduciary)

• Why Great Innovators Spend Less Than Good Ones – Scott Anthony – HarvardBusiness.org
  (tags: innovation startups entrepreneurship)