Last month, I e-mailed my entire family and suggested they setup Google Alerts on their name. When a week later someone created a malicious Facebook group slandering my sister (very uncool), I was reminded of the importance of knowing what people are publicly saying about you and your products. When I first began working on TechCrunch, I immediately looked for a tool to alert me whenever people… → Read More

When I hear SEO, I think of brilliant quantitative guys shut-up in an apartment somewhere running A/B split tests and writing link-bait. Search Engine Optimization is the way companies make it easy for customers to find their website using Google. Because search engines don’t publish their algorithms, SEO is mostly reverse-engineering. Despite the guessing game, SEO produces quantifiable… → Read More

When twitter recently added a “Suggested Friends” feature, I was more than a little disappointed. Unlike Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature, no explanation is provided for why these people were suggested. In an enterprise setting, the most valuable people are the connectors: “The people who know which people know what”, according to Alan Lepofsky of… → Read More

Intacct just launched the Winter 2009 edition of their SaaS based financial accounting system. Major highlights include a Global Consolidations product for real-time financial reports across international boundaries, integration with QuickArrow for managing professional services teams, and a plethora of partnerships with other SaaS providers. In some ways, this isn’t big news–just the… → Read More

Napera, a recent Seattle-based startup, is looking for 100 IT and Network Managers for a closed beta test of their new 24-port gigabit network switch. Details below. Napera is testing a relatively new concept–targeted security software subscriptions installed onto the network hardware. These security subscriptions recognize that different industries face different threat profiles–for… → Read More

Tomorrow morning Zoho will announce new import functionality for migrating Google Notebooks into Zoho Notebook. This comes on the heels of Google’s decision to stop Google Notebook development and quit adding new accounts. Also updated is a the Firefox Extension for Zoho Notebook. Much like Delicious, the Zoho extension provides Notebook access via a pop-up menu. Handy functionality includes… → Read More

IBM just announced Lotus Notes ActiveSync support will be released later this year. The code is already live, and was demonstrated in a seminar earlier today at Lotusphere. This is native integration with the iPhone–within the native mail, calendar, and contacts. Previously, iPhone users were forced to use the mobile Safari browser to access the Notes Web Access interface. Lotus is playing… → Read More

Genius Inside just released a fully-featured SaaS version of their project management software. And by fully featured, I mean more than just advanced task tracking–like 37 Signals’ Basecamp product. Genius Project includes Gantt charts, project portfolio analysis, and tracking contractor progress in both relative and absolute terms. I just watched a demo here at Lotusphere, and was… → Read More

I’m at Lotusphere 2009 today through Thursday. Main announcements this morning: IBM highlighted partnerships with LinkedIn, TripIt, Skype, and Salesforce.com. On the internal side, the Notes crew demo’d very functional Blackberry integration, voice chat integrated within Notes, and a very nice browser-based UI. The emphasis was clearly on social computing and… → Read More

These days, when I have  technical question, I reach for Google long before customer service. What if customer service could reach for Google? Salesforce.com just launched a new customer service application called Service Cloud. The new application, built on a SaaS model, tries to capture the crowdsourced pools of knowledge floating across the internet and use them for commercial customer… → Read More

A little over three years ago, Ray Ozzie wrote his famous memo re-focusing Microsoft from software to services. We started seeing results of that memo last October, when Microsoft announced Windows Azure. The SaaS emphasis is also hitting mainstream products like Microsoft Exchange. This morning Steve Gillmor and I talked with Rajesh Jha, the VP of Development overseeing Microsoft Exchange, about… → Read More

Pirelli Broadband Solutions, the broadband arm of the Pirelli Group, announced they adopted Neptuny’s Caplan SaaS. Capacity management has long been the domain of large enterprises; it wasn’t cost effective for smaller companies. The cost to implement a capacity management system was higher than the cost savings from optimizing capacity. Neptuny claims the new SaaS version of their… → Read More

LogRhythm just joined the Payment Card Industry Security Council (PCI) with the goal of making log info more secure. IT departments typically use logs to monitor security breaches, whether malicious employees or outside hackers. While it can indicate unsuccessful attacks, the data is particularly valuable for identifying actual intrusions.  Just this week, the IRS put out a report saying they… → Read More

The New York Times had reported that president-elect Barack Obama would announce a national CTO today, but no one has been named as of yet. Also unknown is just how much power the new CTO will wield–don’t expect rumours of Steve Jobs to come true if it’s just a powerless propaganda role. This morning I spoke with Sophie Vandebroek, CTO of Xerox about some of the lessons learned… → Read More

Yesterday, major websites across the US slowed to a crawl when Level 3 Communications, which operates one of the largest internet backbones in the world, experienced technical difficulties. For knowledge workers, losing internet access is a big deal. (How much of your job would be impossible without internet?) But the internet not only enables our jobs, it also frees us to collaborate globally… → Read More

Next month is the annual Lotusphere conference. IBM is giving two free tickets to TC readers–leave a comment saying why you’d like to go to Lotusphere, and we’ll pick the winners by Monday morning. (Note: Passes cover conference registration only, not travel/hotel.) Few pieces of software are as polarizing as Lotus Notes. When my last job forced me to use Notes, I found the… → Read More

This summer, I worked under marketing thought-leader Seth Godin. I’ll never forget his quote about innovation: “Creativity thrives under constraints.” Last spring, I spent a week shadowing one of the world’s top lean manufacturing experts–a Japanese sensei who had worked under Taiichi Ohno. The lean manufacturing movement began when the Japanese realized they… → Read More

I receive my fair share of PR pitches for surveys, analyst reports, and experts offering their opinion. Mostly, I pass–I prefer to post news, not opinions. But with over 100,000 tech employees laid off recently, this survey about orphaned user accounts–accounts left active when an employee moves on–seemed particularly timely. Risk=probability*consequences. While the probability… → Read More

Let’s face it–no matter how tech savvy Gen Y is, enterprises will forever need an IT department. (Some employees can’t figure out how to turn on their computers.) But as more and more data moves to the cloud, the role of IT will change. For example, Cathedral Partners contracted with Appirio to build an entirely cloud-based database on the SalesForce.com platform. The new system… → Read More