Forrester analyst Tim Sheedy writes in a new report that “The Internet and the mobile Internet have effectively combined.” Facebook users who access the social networking site through a mobile device are twice as active as users who don’t. It’s no surprise then to see the announcement of Salesforce.com’s Chatter Mobile, a mobile client for the company’s increasingly popular Chatter social networking and microblogging platform.

Chatter Mobile apps for BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone and the new iPod touch will be available in late 2010, with Android support coming in the first half of 2011.

Sponsor

Chatter’s simple, Facebook-like interface accomplishes the goal of most enterprise 2.0 platforms: making enterprise technologies as accessible as consumer technologies. According to Kraig Swensrud, Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Salesforce.com, Chatter is its most successful product launch yet. The product, which came out of beta in June, is now in use by 20,000 companies. Many are Salesforce.com CRM customers, but many new customers are also picking up Chatter and using it independently of the company’s flagship product. Some companies, like Nokia are even deploying Chatter enterprise wide.

Saleforce.com’s mobile CRM app has also been successful, with over 250,000 downloads from the Apple App Store and over 100,000 from the BlackBerry App World.

Salesforce.com is aggressively targeting enterprise mobility and social networking as several competitors are eying the same space. Yammer recently announced it will expand beyond microblogging into general enterprise social networking and RhoLogic recently released a mobile SugarCRM client. Expect to see this space heating up more in coming months as mobility continues to mainstream.

See our coverage of Chatter from June for more information the service.

Discuss

More Info: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/bGKvrEmLkaM/enterprise-mobility-heats-up-w.php

The Internet of Things, when real world objects are connected to the Internet, has been slow to attract the attention of budding entrepreneurs. However, there has been some startup action in so-called “social objects.” We’ve covered two companies in this domain in recent times, StickyBits and TalesOfThings. The New York Times profiled a third company in this space over the weekend, Itizen.

All of these startups are searching for a business model, but there is massive long term potential in this market. Leandro Agro, CEO of sensor data company WideTag (our review), says that by 2050 objects will be judged more for their ’sociality’ than their aesthetic value. It’s an intriguing notion, so in this post we imagine what a ’social’ tennis racquet might look like in 40 years.

Sponsor

Living Objects

In an interview for Wired Italy and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, transcribed on the WideTag blog by David Orban, Leandro Agro said that "tomorrow a social object might be associated with Italy not because of its aesthetic value but because of its level of ’sociality’." He sees an opportunity for his country, Italy, to take a leadership role in re-inventing the design of objects:

"Every object should tell its own story. The story of its past (what it is made of, where it was produced, how it is used) and its future (how to differentiate it, how to take it apart, how to recycle it). It should be actively self-aware (being sentient or at least having some idea of the time and place for its own use), be connected and social, in other words it should belong to us humans, “living” as part of our digital and social network. "

I expressed skepticism about social objects earlier this year, because the early startups in this domain were attempting to create new social networks on top of objects. I still think that’s the wrong model. However, there is a lot of scope for online data from objects to contribute to your existing social networks.

A Social Tennis Racquet (Circa 2050)

Using Agro’s vision, here is one possible scenario.

Imagine a tennis racquet with an RFID chip embedded in it. The chip specifies the materials the racquet was made with, which factory it was produced in and on what date, the strengths of that particular racquet compared to other models, and so on.

Then when the racquet is bought, the chip tracks the usage of the racquet. It will monitor for damage and wear, how often the strings are tightened or swapped out, and so on. It might also send to and receive information from other computing chips – in tennis courts, other players racquets, inside tennis clubs, etc. This would enable the tennis racquet to, for example, automatically track the tournaments its owner enters and the games it plays in (let’s assume this is an amateur player, since professional tennis players swap racquets every set or so!).

This Internet-connected tennis racquet has a social element because it is being used by a person, who presumably uses the racquet to play tennis with other people. So that data from the racquet can be a contributor to social networks.

Using today’s social networks to illustrate the point (although surely these will be seen as rather primitive examples of social networks in 50 years time), imagine your tennis racquet automatically checking you in to a tennis court on Foursquare. Or the racquet updating your Facebook page when you defeat your mate in a social game of tennis. Or the racquet sending you a DM on Twitter that it requires string tightening (!).

These and many other scenarios will occur over time, as objects get connected to the Internet and the resulting data meshes in with your social networks. So by extension, the tennis racquet will become a ’social object.’

While this is a future-looking scenario, are you aware of objects that are already ’social’? And do you think StickyBits, TalesofThings, Itizen and others are on the right track to realize this vision?

Image credit: Siddhartha Lammata

Discuss

More Info: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/rL3OBgibh6M/the_future_of_social_objects.php

The Internet is a series of tubes – man, that joke just doesn’t get old. Or rather, the Internet is a series of text documents. That isn’t so funny if you’re trying to optimize your search engine rankings for video content on your website. Other than the title and description, videos don’t provide the text that robots from Google and others use to create those search rankings. You can, of course, transcribe your videos but that can be time-intensive and cost-prohibitive, particularly if your site is video-heavy.

Enter SpeakerText which relaunches today with a transcription service that combines both the human and the artificial – a combination of natural language processing and crowdsourced human transcription.

Sponsor

But SpeakerText offers more than just transcription. Once a video is transcribed and time-coded, SpeakerText loads an interactive transcript player beneath each video. Dubbed the SpeakerBar, this player allows visitors to use the text as a controller, of sorts, for the video they’re watching. Click on a word or sentence and the video will skip to that part. Cut and paste a portion of the text to share, and it will contain a link back to that exact part of the video.

And it’s that social element, perhaps, that makes SpeakerText’s service innovative. This isn’t merely a transcript, but an “alternative viral pathway” for video. As CEO Matt Mireles points out, the sort of “closed caption” transcription that we are accustomed to is really a relic of the broadcast era – “linear old school television.” SpeakerText, he argues, is “native to 21st century technology.”

Currently SpeakerText works with video players from Brightcove, YouTube, and blip.tv. SpeakerText stores the transcripts in the cloud where they can be accessed server-side via an API or a WordPress plugin.

Transcription services – both human and machine-based – are notoriously mediocre, but Mireles says that the process his company has created is designed to improve both quality and automation over time. SpeakerText starts at $20 a month, with a $2 per minute charge for the transcriptions, a price that seems competitive to other similar services.

Discuss

More Info: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/QGmYuTgRE38/speakertext_builds_the_missing_text_layer_for_onli.php

Here at ReadWriteWeb, like other major blogs, we get a ton of email tips everyday from entrepreneurs, PR companies and the general public suggesting story ideas and requesting product reviews.

Surprisingly, considering the size of our site and the pervasiveness of spam in general, most of these emails are quite interesting and useful. Some of them, however, appear to be blasted out to a list of seemingly random blogs with little forethought, or worse, a political screed written in all caps.

Sponsor

For small businesses and startups especially, getting the word out to relevant media outlets, while important, can be a time-consuming task that competes with each day’s list of to-do’s.

So how can businesses streamline their media outreach? One answer is MediaSync, a service from Web marketing firm mBlast. MediaSync is a free database of media contacts that enables you to find individual journalists and bloggers based on the topics they tend to cover and the outlets they write for.

For example, a search for “social media” will return a list of bloggers for Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, CNET and others.

Each writer has a profile containing basic contact info, a brief biography, links to their social networking profiles, as well as data about the topics and beats they cover.

MediaSync currently boasts 521,899 media contacts in its database, and that number is sure to be growing on a regular basis.

The database is evidently a work in progress, as not all media contact profiles are populated, including those of a few high-profile bloggers and journalists. Nonetheless, MediaSync remains a good way to do some initial research into which media professionals might be most receptive to a given request for coverage.

Most tech and business bloggers see a ton of emails fly across their desktop and mobile phones each day, so targeting the right ones might improve your message’s chances of getting read and, if you’re truly onto something, acted upon.

Discuss

More Info: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/HyOfv8nL0dE/improve-your-companys-media-outreach-with-msync.php

Google rolled out a new inbox last week that, in theory, separates your important emails from your unimportant emails and lets you speed through work faster.

Most of the initial reaction reflected users’ concerns as email recipients – excitement about reading email faster, worry about missing something urgent because Google didn’t think it was important. But most of us who receive email also send email, and we want those emails to be read. Are we entering an era of optimizing our emails for the Priority Inbox, just as we optimize our websites and blogs for Google search?

Sponsor

The death of email marketing?

Email marketers in particular were scrambling after Google announced Priority Inbox. The blog Marketing Professor introduced a new term to describe the divide between priority emails and non-priority emails – the “Priority Inbox Fold.”

The marketing blogosphere’s conclusion seems to be that Priority Inbox is going to cripple marketers who rely on blasting out messages to a massive list of email addresses, but that it will be a boon to marketers who are trying to figure out how to really engage their audiences.

Excerpt and illustration from a post on the blog Marketing Professor about the “Priority Inbox Fold.”

Some marketers have kicked around ideas like adding the word “important” to every email, emphasizing upcoming deadlines in the text or having a competition that requires your subscribers to reply. But most are upbeat – as marketers often are – about Priority Inbox.

“Gmail’s Priority Inbox Isn’t a Threat, But An Opportunity,” booms a headline on email marketing blog Notes from the Lab. “Doesn’t this just place a spotlight on what email marketers should be doing better than anyone? Providing value so the minute an email comes in from a sender, it’s received with positive thoughts in mind? If you’re doing things the right way, you shouldn’t worry but be confident you’ll be tagged as important.”

Fretting about getting priority for outgoing email

But what does Priority Inbox mean for ordinary users? The feature seems to err on the side of assigning too much importance to email, as Google doesn’t want to burn users right away by burying an email from the boss or a reminder from the dentist. ReadWriteWeb’s fearless new researcher Micah Vandergrift tried valiently to send me an email that would be marked non-priority, to no avail.

Emails that were marked Priority included the subject lines, “This is interesting” (about pizza), “This is not a priority at all” (copy of an email from the Gotham City Beardsmen’s Alliance), and a subject-less email which was a list of Micah’s favorite bands from Last.fm.

Tough to game

But Priority Inbox is like a recommendation engine for email. It assigns a list of attributes to each email and watches for patterns as you gently mark emails important or not important by hand. I’ve only been using Priority Inbox for a week, so it hasn’t fully learned the way we do things around here (not priority: humorous emails from uncle, press releases from Vespa. Priority: discount airfare).

As time goes on, I have faith that Priority Inbox will learn what I think is important. That’s great for receiving email, but a little unnerving for sending it. The personalized algorithm makes it extremely tough to optimize for exposure in Priority Inbox the way we’ve learned to optimize for Google’s search engine.

No doubt tricks will arise, like including urgent-sounding buzzwords in the subject line and making sure that you are included in the recipient’s social graph. But based on early experiments,

But that probably reflects reality – senders and recipients are not always in agreement concerning the importance of an email:

Are you worried your emails won’t get marked “Priority”?

Discuss

More Info: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/xr7fuIYghp0/optimizing_for_gmails_priority_inbox.php