Skip to main content

Home/ Cloud Productivity Platform Wars/ Group items tagged Google-Apps

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Gary Edwards

Why companies are switching from Google Apps to Office 365 | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...google-apps-to-office-365.html

Office-365 gDocs

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps. Motorola’s recent decision to move from an elderly version of Office to Google’s cloud service bucks the more common trend of companies who have been using Google Apps switching to Office 365.
  • 87.3 percent are using Office 365 services, with each organization uploading an average 1.37 terabytes of data to the service each month.
  • That fits what identity management company Okta is seeing. Office 365 is the most commonly deployed application among its customers (beating even Salesforce) and adoption is growing faster than any other cloud applications. It’s also the cloud service customers use the most, probably because that usage includes all the email users send and receive.
  • The only industry segments where Google Apps has more share than Office 365 are in technology; media, Internet and software companies. The smaller the company, the more share Google Apps has among Okta’s customers; but even in the smallest companies Office 365 is still in the lead.
  • “There are different dynamics that matter based on the company size,” McKinnon points out. “Large companies need manageability, security, reliability. You wouldn't see this acceleration of Office 365 in large companies without Microsoft doing a lot of work [in those areas].”
  • The majority of new Office 365 customers are moving from on-premises, but even companies that have already adopted Google Apps for Business are switching to Office.
  • Microsoft claimed they won back 440 customers in 2013, including big names like Burger King and Campbell’s, and the trend is continuing. Some of that may be the halo effect of the Office 365 growth making companies that picked Google Apps question whether they made the right decision. But often, it’s because of dissatisfaction with Google Apps itself.
  • The simplicity of Gmail and Google Docs clearly appeals to some users, but as one of the most widely used applications in the world, the Office software is familiar to many. “When you put these products into companies, the user interface really matters,” McKinnon says. “For email, the user interface really matters.
  • Google Apps is dramatically different from Office and that’s pretty jarring for people who’ve been using Outlook for a long time. It's like it beamed in from outer space; you have to use a browser, the way it does conversations and threading with labels versus folders, it's pretty jarring.”
  • Even if you like the Google backend better, you have thousands of users saying ‘what happened to my folders?’”
  • And it’s hard to use Outlook with Google, many customers report. “Some companies, they go to Google and they think they are going to make it work with Outlook; what they find out when they start using the calendar is that it just doesn’t work as well with the Google Apps backend as it does when you’re using Office 365. The user interface is so important that it pulls them back in.
  • If you’re pushing somebody who's used to an Office environment into a Google cloud, they're going to feel this vacuum because they no longer have the programs they're familiar with. It represents a huge investment in time that people aren't going to be receptive to. And you have Microsoft saying ‘for just $3 a month more you could have all these great programs you're used to. Now they’ve got the pricing so you get more than you get on Google, what Microsoft is offering is fantastic, and for $3 more it’s a premium worth paying. Microsoft is still the king of hill for a reason.”
  • “Quite frankly, Google is completely outclassed by Office 365 in this arena and despite the price difference corporations who made the switch to Google Apps to save money usually end up coming back within a year.
  • The primary driver of this appears to be Outlook integration over everything else, followed by the inability to do some advanced things that Microsoft Office excels at.”
  • For larger companies, this goes beyond the familiarity of Outlook into advanced features. “You can integrate Skype into Outlook, you can integrate OneDrive for Business into Outlook.
  • It becomes essentially like a command center, and there is nothing Google gives you that does that.
  • “The reason people have been moving to Google is cost,”
  • But a lot of people don’t find the usability and collaboration nearly as effective as Office 365.”
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.Office 365 is even more popular with the 21 million customers of Skyhigh Network’s cloud security services, where 87.3 percent are using Office 365 services, with each organization uploading an average 1.37 terabytes of data to the service each month.
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15
     
    "The combination of familiar software and enterprise-class support is bringing early adopters disappointed by Google's lack of progress back to Microsoft."
Gary Edwards

Enterprise Productivity Apps Are Dominated By Google And Microsoft - ARC - ARC - 0 views

arc.applause.com/...rkplace-productivity-apps-data

Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • “Our data revealed some very interesting findings,” wrote Okta’s director of analytics and big data Cathy Tanimura and content manager Katie Hahn, in a blog post. “Traditional on-prem software companies are successfully reinventing themselves in the cloud. Enterprises continue to build out their library of applications with new and emerging apps. And, no app is invincible.”
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 16
     
    "Google Apps and Microsoft's Office 365 compete to be the workplace productivity tools of choice. But they are not mutually exclusive as most companies find room for both. A report by cloud identity and mobility management company Okta said that 40% of its customers used Google Apps and Office 365 on a daily basis. According to Okta's 2016 Businesses @ Work report, different departments within a corporate infrastructure are happy to use different parts of the apps for specific tasks such as email or spreadsheets. Around 30% of "overlappers" use Office 365 for Excel, Word and PowerPoint while Google Apps is used for email and inter-office collaborations. Certain industries prefer one to the other, Okta said. Around 82% of financial companies and 77% of biotech firms use Office 365. Google Apps is used by 50% of Internet-centric companies. Office 365 is the dominant force in IT, nonprofit, construction, healthcare and telecommunications. Google Apps is the preferred tool in marketing/advertising and education. Software companies are almost split down the middle-around 27% use both, while Google Apps is used by 38% of companies compared to the 35% who go for Office 365."
Gary Edwards

How ProsperWorks, a CRM App, is Helping Google Best Microsoft 365 - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...-best-microsoft-365-028695.php

ProsperWorks Google-Apps Google-4-Work Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • "We integrate directly into the tools that people use to communicate with their customers," CEO and founder John Lee told CMSWire. There are numerous advantages to this approach: no training, the elimination of duplicate data entering and fresh data that is more accurate. The app provides an extension that sits within Gmail, he explained. Then, when a potential lead contacts the sales rep, he or she can search for the prospect's name throughout the organization. "If anyone else was contacted by 'John Smith' at the organization, the rep is able to see that correspondence. She doesn’t have to hunt for information." That feature alone, Lee said, saves a huge amount of time usually spent doing preliminary customer research.
  • Familiar Interface A feature called Chrome extension for Gmail illustrates ProsperWorks larger MO or approach to the CRM space. It was specifically created to help employees work smarter and faster by automating mundane tasks, intelligently organizing customer data and prompting sales actions all within Google's familiar interface, Lee said.
  • Google has been incrementally making its workplace products more and more functional — all, it seems, with one goal in mind. It would like to eat Microsoft Office 365's lunch. When it first launched Google Apps (now called Google for Work), the best feature was the cost. The products were free to use, although there was little in the way of service or advanced business functionality. But that's been changing. More companies are piggybacking on Google for Work's foundation to launch their own products and, as these products mature, continue to invest and expand them. One of the latest examples is ProsperWorks, the developer of Simple CRM for Google Apps. 
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Apr 15
     
    "Google has been incrementally making its workplace products more and more functional - all, it seems, with one goal in mind. It would like to eat Microsoft Office 365's lunch. When it first launched Google Apps (now called Google for Work), the best feature was the cost. The products were free to use, although there was little in the way of service or advanced business functionality. But that's been changing. More companies are piggybacking on Google for Work's foundation to launch their own products and, as these products mature, continue to invest and expand them. One of the latest examples is ProsperWorks, the developer of Simple CRM for Google Apps.   "
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps in use together for many enterprises - GeekWire - 0 views

www.geekwire.com/...ise-market-new-players-joining

Office-365 gDocs

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Okta, a company focused on verifying identities across devices, found that the average employee has access to between 10 and 16 cloud-based apps. Microsoft Office 365 is the most-used app, with Salesforce, Box, Google Apps and Amazon Web Services also making the top five.
  • Microsoft actually extended their lead over the past year. That may be, in part, due to the growth of Office 365 as the go-to way to licence apps like Word and Excel on mobile and desktop devices alike. And with more employees using mobile devices to get work done, they want the same access to Office apps as they have to things like Slack and Google Apps.
  • Office is also maintaining its dominance even as companies add Google Apps to their offerings, letting employees choose between Microsoft or Google options. It turns out that employees stick with Office apps for many projects they’re getting done on their own, but when collaborating they switch to Google products.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Email-killer Slack is also moving up quickly, with a 77 percent increase in adoption in the second half of 2015. For companies that use Slack, it is used widely throughout the organization. While Amazon Web Services are used by less than 10 percent of employees on average, Slack is in use by nearly three-quarters of employees at organizations that use it at all. That puts Slack behind just four apps (including Microsoft Office 365) in terms of saturation.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Mar 16
     
    "Microsoft has held its dominance in the software market in part because it is the go-to provider for many business solutions. Word, Excel and Powerpoint are essential pieces of software across almost any industry, whether they are used for presentations and memos or tracking expenses and marketing products. However, enterprise apps from competitors are growing in popularity, according to a new report from Okta, with apps and services filling gaps left by Microsoft's products. That doesn't mean Microsoft is losing ground, though. In fact, Okta found that Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 use overlaps at more than 40 percent of companies."
Gary Edwards

Apple vs. Google and Facebook messaging - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/and-facebook-messaging-2015-12

Messaging ChatBots ChatOps

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Or look at the fact that you can call a Lyft car from Slack, or an Uber from Atlassian's HipChat, without ever leaving a chat window. The idea is pretty straightforward: People like to chat and don't like leaving chat to open another app. Put the app in the chat, and you get the best of all possible worlds. It's a proven concept in Japan. There, the mega-popular messaging app Line is so successful that it was able to introduce mobile payments and taxi services of its own right next to the main chat functions.
  • Once you get or buy an app for Facebook Messenger — or Slack or whatever Google once — you have it anywhere on any device. Same for Slack or HipChat.
  • You don't even have to install these apps, really. Since they live in your chat app, installing Facebook Messenger more or less automatically installs your apps, too. They'll work the same way on every device you own, and every device you ever will own, as long as it runs Messenger.
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Mar 16
     
    "There's a quiet revolution going on in messaging. Companies like Facebook, Google, Atlassian, and Slack are expanding their messaging apps beyond merely sending text, video, and audio and into something a little bit more like an operating system. On Tuesday, for example, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google is working on a new chat app that will let developers build apps that plug right into an instant-messaging window by way of a simple text interface. It sounds like a competitor to the Facebook "M" project, a virtual assistant that aims to help you do everything from shopping to making restaurant reservations, right from within Facebook Messenger. Right now, at the tail end of 2015, these souped-up chat apps look like an interesting trend. Some tech types call it ChatOps. But if I were Apple, I would be losing a lot of sleep over the rise of the smarter messaging app."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Vs. Google And The Battle For Workplace Supremacy - ARC - ARC - 0 views

arc.applause.com/...icrosoft-enterprise-cloud-apps

Productivity workplace microsoft

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The young prefer Google while large, old enterprises go for Microsoft.
  • Microsoft Vs. Google At Work: Age Is A Factor In what will come as surprise to nobody, size and experience matters. The report found that larger, older organizations prefer to use Office 365, while newer companies—startups, for example—prefer to use the Google suite of office tools. IT teams at companies that use Office are five times as large as those that work on Google Apps, although project collaboration between employees is more likely with Google—84% of large enterprises that have switched from Office to Google Apps report that they have experienced a rise in worker interactions.
  • In addition, companies who have a workforce aged between 18-34 years of age are 55% more likely to use Google Apps than Office 365, a scenario that the authors of the report believe is linked to the fact that most youthful entrepreneurs have grown up with Google. Office 365 users, on the other hand, are likely to work for companies that have been using the various iterations of Office for many years—the majority of which will be using the local version installed on their workplace PCs.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The report also found that the age of the customer was a significant path to adoption of either suite of tools. Companies that were founded, say, in 1982 were more likely to use Office 365 and adopt a cautious attitude to cloud adoption—hybrid as opposed to full integration—while the cloud-centric Google Apps was found to be the preferred option for organizations founded after 2010 whose workforce was filled with Millennials.
  • Back in February of this year, Google stated that it wanted to take 80% of Microsoft’s customers. BetterCloud doesn’t see that as happening in the near future but lines of engagement are certainly being decided.
  • “Office 365 organizations are easing into the cloud, allowing employees to choose their preferred working style, rather than abruptly shifting to a cloud-only workplace,” the report said. “Google pushes organizations to undergo transformational change, deploying Google Apps rapidly and over the course of a weekend, or in the case of a larger organization, several weekends.”
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 16
     
    "As a means of measuring for how technology is being adopted in the marketplace, the most common metaphor is usually war. Companies are always involved in battles for consumers, new products are launched at strategic dates in the calendar and there is often an overwhelming sense that victory must be achieved at any cost. In the software sector battlefields are vast, ongoing and filled with casualties. More often than not, the definition of who has won and who has lost is blurred-victory is defined by market share and by how and by whom the technology is being used. In the last decade, there has been a war in the workplace, especially when it comes to the integration of the cloud into daily working and collaboration practices. Both Microsoft and Google want to be the dominant players in the arena, but it appears that neither side can currently claim total victory."
Gary Edwards

Everything Google knows about you - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/-google-knows-about-you-2016-5

Google-History

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 May 16
     
    "When you use Google, you are making a deal. You get to use services like Gmail, Drive, search, YouTube, and Google Maps for free. In exchange, you agree to share information about yourself that Google can share with advertisers so their ads are more effective. For instance, airlines want to target people who love to travel. Children's clothing makers want to target parents. Google uses a lot of methods to learn about you. There's the stuff you tell Google outright when you sign up for its Gmail or to use your Android phone. This includes your name, phone number, location, and so on. But Google also watches you as you scamper around the internet, deducing your interests from your internet searches - what do you search for? click on? - from your use of Google's other services and from other websites you visit. By visiting a hard-to-find page called "Web & App Activity," you can see what Google is watching. Then by visiting a site called "Ads Settings," you can see what Google thinks it knows about you, and you can change what it's telling advertisers about you. Read on for the details:"
Gary Edwards

Google Extends Program Incentivizing Microsoft Office 365 Defections - Page: 1 | CRN - 0 views

www.crn.com/...soft-office-365-defections.htm

Office-365 Google-Apps

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 16
     
    "Google on Tuesday extended the duration and scope of an aggressive program meant to lure customers to Google Apps from rival cloud-based office productivity products, primarily Microsoft Office 365. The subsidiary of Alphabet introduced in October the incentive, which allowed midsize businesses locked in contracts with other vendors to use Google Apps at no cost until those contracts expired. The offer officially ended April 14. But pleased with its success, Google decided to maintain the incentive until the end of 2016, while also making it easier for smaller companies to qualify, wrote Neil Delaney, sales director for Google Apps for Work, in a company blog."
Gary Edwards

Workplace Productivity Battle Being Won By Microsoft - ARC - ARC - 0 views

arc.applause.com/...doption-increases-in-workplace

Productivity workplace microsoft

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Google Apps is still favored by small companies—deemed to be those with less than 500 employees—with 22.8% of respondents using the tools available, as compared to the 21.4% who have installed Office 365. Once you get past that employee level, however, Microsoft is dominating the space.
  • Office 365 is used by 30% of enterprise-level companies as part of their working practices, a 500% increase from 2014. Google Apps only accounts for 15% of the market, although it is worth noting that both cloud apps have grown from a 5% share only 12 months ago. Private companies tend to go down the Google route, 24% compared to Microsoft’s 21%, but 34% of publicly-traded organizations go for Microsoft over the 22% that use Google.
  • Cloud adoption is at an all-time high and Microsoft is winning over Google. The surprise is that large corporations, even in heavily regulated industries, are gaining confidence in using cloud apps. The increased focus on security, including the emergence of third-party security services from cloud access security brokers , are filling critical gaps, paving the way for broader adoption of cloud apps in the enterprise.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 16
     
    "Microsoft's Office 365 is winning the hearts and minds of the workplace, overtaking Google Apps as the preferred productivity tool by an increasing number of business enterprises, a recent report says. According to the second annual Cloud Adoption Report conducted by cloud access security broker Bitglass-subtitled Episode II: Attack of the Clouds and bizarrely using Star Wars as a recurring theme-Office 365 has trebled its user adoption rate in the space of a year from 7.7% in 2014 to 25.2%. Over 34% of organizations with between 500 and 1,000 employees use the Microsoft tool, as opposed to 21.9% who work with Google Apps For Work, an indicator that the authors of the report say confirms that cloud applications are now a significant player. Following a survey of almost 120,000 global companies-both small and enterprise level-the report said that there had been a rise of 20% from last year in the number of businesses that employed a cloud application as their prime productivity tool. In 2014, 28% of respondents used the cloud with that figure increasing to 48% 12 months later. Granted, the sample size had also risen from 80,000 in the first survey, but the results bear out a perception that cloud-based solutions will become the norm."
Gary Edwards

Google - Web & App Activity - 0 views

history.google.com/history

Google-History

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 May 16
     
    https://history.google.com/history/ Google uses a lot of methods to learn about you. There's the stuff you tell Google outright when you sign up for its Gmail or to use your Android phone. This includes your name, phone number, location, and so on. But Google also watches you as you scamper around the internet, deducing your interests from your internet searches - what do you search for? click on? - from your use of Google's other services and from other websites you visit. By visiting a hard-to-find page called "Web & App Activity," you can see what Google is watching. Then by visiting a site called "Ads Settings," you can see what Google thinks it knows about you, and you can change what it's telling advertisers about you.
Gary Edwards

Facebook Messenger: inside Mark Zuckerberg's app for everything (Wired UK) - 0 views

www.wired.co.uk/...inside-facebook-messenger

Messaging Conversation Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • It's the job of Marcus, a gently spoken 42-year-old French-born fintech guy, to turn a proprietary messaging app into this all-encompassing platform - essentially, an operating system on which third-party apps, and entire businesses, can be built in ways that lock them into the Facebook ecosystem. The Chinese have already shown what's possible: social media giant Tencent enables 600 million people each month to book taxis, check in for flights, play games, buy cinema tickets, manage banking, reserve doctors' appointments, donate to charity and video-conference all without leaving Weixin, the Chinese version of its WeChat app.
  • "The messaging era is definitely now," Marcus says. "It's the one thing people do more than anything else on their phone. Some people were surprised when I joined Facebook, but it's because I believe that messaging is the next big platform. In terms of time spent, attention, retention - this is where it's happening. And it's a once in a generation opportunity to build it." Or, as Zuckerberg acknowledged in a public Q&A last November, "Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking."
  • Some questioned why the company was competing with its own acquisition, WhatsApp, bought two months earlier for what was then $19 billion (£12.5bn). But over the next year, as WhatsApp remained lean, Messengerfunctionality kept growing - video and voice calls, peer-to-peer payments, location-sharing - even as its use was made independent of a Facebook account.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Messenger Platform." Messenger would be opened to outside developers - initially 40 pre-selected partners, including ESPN, Giphy, Boostr, Dubsmash and Talking Tom - to build new "tools for expression" that would let users create and share content inside the app.
  • But Messenger would also, he revealed, let users communicate with businesses just as if they were friends - through simple conversation threads that would let them "make a reservation, buy something, change shipping information…"
  • There are lots of different ways that people want to share and communicate. In a lot of countries, as much as 99 per cent of the people online will use SMS or send text messages - with people sending 15-20 messages or more every single day."
  • Zuckerberg continues, explains the continuous iterations designed to let Messenger"enable you to express yourself in new ways": photo and video messaging; stickers to help you easily display emotions; geolocation to let you find your friends; Messenger for business; and peer-to-peer payments. Now the Messenger Platform would let people "use creative new apps to have richer conversations". "We expect these improvements to continue making Messenger a more useful and engaging experience for people."
  • People send 30 billion daily messages on WhatsApp alone, according to the company - compared with 20 billion daily SMS messages. Even smaller apps such as Telegram are claiming ten billion daily deliveries.
  • And when people are inside messaging apps, they're not encountering web ads or discovering retailers or interacting with an existing social network.
  • "Facebook, Amazon and Google are all threatened by the way the operating-system owner has control on mobile," says Benedict Evans, a partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz who writes widely on the mobile ecosystem. "It's why the Kindle Fire exists. It's too late for Facebook or Amazon to create an operating system, so Facebook is thinking, how do we create our own layer on that power structure? So it's trying to create its own runtime withMessenger. It's about attention or engagement: do we become commoditised as just another messaging app, or do we do something more profound? T
  • service discovery: you put stuff inside a messaging app, so you have social as part of discovery
  • Can you turn this into a discovery acquisition channel, which is what Facebook on the desktop became?" 
  • WithMessenger, everything you can do is based on the thread, the relationship. We want to push that further."
  • Transforming interactions with businesses represents "the first baby steps in a series of millions of steps," Marcus says. "Even calling a restaurant is complicated - but when it comes to calling an airline to change a booking, it ranks with a visit to the dentist - it's painful and nobody wants to do it. And email is completely broken. Look at the traditional e-commerce journey: you go to a website. You have to create an account - that's one email. You add something to your shopping cart and check out - that's another email. The package ships - that's another email. When it arrives, that's another. That's four emails that are distinct threads that are not canonical. And the only thing you can do for interactions inside an email is click on a link and go to a website, where you have to re-authenticate. It's painful on desktop, it's impossible on mobile. That's why, for the majority of online retailers, north of 60 per cent of their website traffic is mobile - but only ten to 12 per cent of checkouts are mobile. And mobile traffic will continue increasing.
  • So the thought is, what would those interactions look like if the web and desktop had never existed?"
  • Messenger's answer is to enable businesses and customers to communicate through conversation threads that its 14-person product team calls "interactive bubbles"
  • Once you interact with a business, you open a thread that will stay forever. You never lose context, and the business never loses context about who you are and your past purchases. It removes all the friction."
  • "There are certain conversations that can be handled by an AI quickly and easily - forms don't work on the mobile web, free search is hard," Chudnovsky says. "AI can solve those pain points for you. You'll say, 'I want the cheapest flights from New York to San Francisco, what are the options?' And if you're not satisfied with the results, you can get a human to help. If we do this right, it becomes your primary interface for getting your tasks done. That sucks in a pretty big part of intent."
  • When you're a business that generates most of its revenues from advertising, it's just a better business," he says.
  • "eBay takes a cut of every transaction and listing; Alibaba does all that for free, and makes money from advertising. Alibaba is bigger than eBay and Amazon combined, and is growing much faster. We take the same approach.
  • We want the maximum number of transactions on the platform, while enabling the best possible mobile experience for commerce. The margins on payments aren't that high, and we want the broadest reach. Businesses will want to pay to be featured or promoted - which is a bigger opportunity for us."
  • Julien Codorniou
  • Codorniou, 37, now Facebook's director of global platform partnerships, runs teams in London, Singapore and the US who have brought in the initial Messenger partners such as Everlane, Boostr and YPlan.
  • Michael Preysman, Everlane's CEO and founder, sees value in "a more human one-on-one dialogue that you can track over time, unlike email, which goes into black holes.
  • Marcus reflects on the hours we spend interacting with businesses. "If you can reduce that time and increase delight, if we can increase the fidelity of the conversations with those you care about, then Messenger will be a very important part of your life."
  • "What's happening in Asia is an inspiration - and not only WeChat," says Chudnovsky, "but that's more about proof of what's possible. It's proof that everything starts from a conversation.
  • The trouble with platforms is that they, rather than the businesses built on top, set the rules.
  • Zynga was once the world's biggest social-gaming company; then Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm to limit how it could promote its games. Yet Facebook's reach is hard to ignore: last year, the company says it drove 3.5 billion app installs across desktop and mobile, and more than five billion pieces of content from third-party apps were shared on Facebook's platform.
  • And yet… the platform's interests will not always align with those of the third-party businesses that rely upon it. Marcus dismisses the risk. "Every business is building on top of other platforms, whether iOS or Android,"
  • It's owning the existing identification platform that gives Facebook a distinct edge.
  • "Plugging in GIF-makers into Messenger - OK, that's interesting. But turning it into a universal notification platform for the web - that's much more interesting
  • We live in a world shaped by the web on mobile, but web is a desktop, not a personal experience. We see the world as people-based. If we can recreate that, it reinvents mobile interactions from the ground up."
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15
     
    ""As Messenger has grown, we think this service has the potential to help people express themselves in new ways, to connect hundreds of millions of new people, and to become a communication tool for the world," Zuckerberg told 2,000 developers at his company's F8 conference in San Francisco in March, as he announced that Messenger was becoming so much more than just an app. "Helping people communicate more naturally with businesses will improve, I think, almost every person's life because it's something everyone does.""
Gary Edwards

3 ways Airtable for iOS can help you ditch spreadsheets | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...lp-you-ditch-spreadsheets.html

Spreadsheet Relational-Database iOS

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Apr 16
     
    "The free Airtable database app for iOS has an edge over spreadsheets, and it lets you easily collaborate with other users. It may be overkill for some people, but its flexibility in storing and sorting data could be invaluable to others." It's been nearly three years since Bento, an easy-to-use database app for Mac and iOS, joined the digital junkheap. During that time, I hadn't seen anything that can truly replace Bento - until I tinkered with Airtable. Airtable is a free iOS app that recently received a big upgrade. It has the look and feel of a spreadsheet app, such as Numbers or Excel, but it has a relational database engine as well. (Airtable's Android app is currently in beta, there's a Google Chrome app, and you can use Airtable's website to create and edit your databases.) New features include the abilities to share records via email, search the database template gallery, and create calendar events from date fields.
Gary Edwards

Uh Oh Google Hangouts, Slack Is Adding Video - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...hangouts-slack-is-adding-video

Messaging

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Now Here’s the Twist There is a technology that is getting disrupted but it is not another real-time messaging app. Instead it is traditional telephony.
  • The survey unearthed that an eye-popping 71 percent of small-to-medium will not invest in another phone system at all or will not increase their investment in these systems, in large part because of real-time instant messaging and video conferencing applications.
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 16
     
    "It says something about the state of collaboration tech that the disruptors of a few years ago are at danger of being disrupted.  For example, take Google Hangouts. A novel development when it was released by Google in 2013, Hangouts can be used to message a friend or co-worker or up to one hundred people for a group chat. But now it could conceivably be displaced by San Francisco-based Slack Technologies, a workspace collaboration tool that has quickly grown in popularity as well as third-party features - and is now adding video and voice to the menu. So could Skype Technologies, for that matter, which Microsoft acquired in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Indeed, Google Hangouts was referred to as a Skype-killer when it was introduced some two years later. Spot the Pattern? New York City-based BetterCloud did and it discusses this trend in its unbelievably well-timed report, "Real-time Messaging Research and Comparison Real-Time Messaging: Data Unearths Surprising Findings on Usage, Distraction, and Organizational Impact." However, the report's finding take on a surprising twist. The disruptors-get-disrupted story line does not pan out. Instead it finds that, as of right now, there is enough room for multiple messaging apps in the enterprise and indeed, we can see with our own eyes that Google Hangouts didn't kill Skype.  More than likely, Slack is not going to turn out to be a Hangouts assassin. More than half, or 57 percent, of respondents told BetterCloud that their organizations use two more real-time messaging apps with little conflict."
Gary Edwards

Paper is Dropbox's new vision for how teams can work together - 0 views

www.engadget.com/...paper-team-collaboration-tools

DropBox Office-365 gDocs Collaboration Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Project managers can add to-do lists, complete with checkboxes and "@" mentions to the member of your team who needs to take care of the associated task. If coding is more your game, you can start typing lines of code right into Paper and it'll automatically format it appropriately. Beyond text, any file you store in your Dropbox can quickly be added to Paper -- if you grab the sharing URL of the file and paste it into Paper, the program automatically formats a preview for you. That way, you can peek at an Excel or PowerPoint file right in line with the rest of your Paper document, or click to see it in full or save to your Dropbox. Google Docs files are even supported here -- it's the first time Dropbox has really integrated with Docs and Drive, itself a competitor to Dropbox's main business.
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Oct 15
     
    " Six months ago, Dropbox quietly announced a collaborative note-taking tool called Notes and launched it in an invite-only beta test. But starting today, the product is being officially branded as Dropbox Paper and the beta test is expanding significantly. You'll still need an invite, but the company gave us a preview of what's probably the biggest addition to Dropbox in years. It's far too early to tell if Paper will be able to keep up with entrenched tools from Google, Microsoft and many others -- but there are definitely some interesting features here that make it worth keeping an eye on. For now, Paper is a web-only app that you can access through your Dropbox account, although the company says it'll have a mobile app ready to go when the product comes out of beta. At first glance, Paper's UI is reminiscent of the scores of minimalist, lightweight text-editing apps that have come out in the past few years, such as IA Writer. But while IA Writer and its ilk are designed for solo composition, Paper is all about working together. As in Google Docs, multiple users can edit a document at the same time. Each is designated by a colored cursor, and the user's full name is displayed in the margins, crediting their contributions to the file. From a text perspective, Paper is quite basic; there's only one font and three sizes available. You can do your basic bold, italics, underline and strikethrough formatting and format text into a block quote, but that's about it. Dropbox specifically said that the purpose of Paper was to keep the focus on sharing ideas rather than formatting. In particular, the company made it so that you can use its app to share pretty much anything, regardless of what tools you might be using."
Gary Edwards

Google adds support for Microsoft Office, Facebook at Work, Slack and others to its sin... - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...to-its-single-sign-on-solution

Google-Single-Sign-On Google-for-Work Slack Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Mar 16
     
    "Google doesn't just offer its own web-based productivity apps, but it also offers a service for business users who want to use Google as an identity provider for accessing other online services using the widely used SAML standard. Today, Google is adding a few new options to this program, which now includes a number of Google competitors. Among the 14 new pre-configured options are the likes of Microsoft Office 365, Facebook at Work, New Relic, Concur, Box, Tableau, HipChat and Slack."
Gary Edwards

Philipp Karcher's blog | Forrester Blogs - 0 views

blogs.forrester.com/philipp_karcher

Office-365 Office-Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Today Microsoft starts shipping Office for iPad, finally plugging the gap in its portfolio that’s been filled by popular document viewers and editors like QuickOffice and SlideShark.   Does this come too late for Microsoft? As much as naysayers like to proclaim Office is dying, people still overwhelmingly use it at home and at work. Office is supported at virtually every organization. Our survey of Forrester clients at the end of last year showed strong strides by Google Docs with 13% of firms using it.* However, the caveat is companies that have gone Google are using Docs to complement Office with collaboration features and mobile support, not to replace it.   You could argue how much incremental revenue Microsoft lost out on, but I don’t think the lack of native Office apps has caused Microsoft to cede ground to other office productivity suites on the PC, where the vast majority of content is still created. Keep in mind that out of the 20% of information workers in North America and Europe that use a tablet for work, 60% of them use some office productivity software on it.** Half of tablets used for work are iPads. So immediately just 6% of information workers will be considering the Office apps as an alternative to what they are using on their tablets today.    Is Microsoft really multi-platform now?
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 15
     
    "Today Microsoft starts shipping Office for iPad, finally plugging the gap in its portfolio that's been filled by popular document viewers and editors like QuickOffice and SlideShark.   Does this come too late for Microsoft? As much as naysayers like to proclaim Office is dying, people still overwhelmingly use it at home and at work. Office is supported at virtually every organization. Our survey of Forrester clients at the end of last year showed strong strides by Google Docs with 13% of firms using it.* However, the caveat is companies that have gone Google are using Docs to complement Office with collaboration features and mobile support, not to replace it.   You could argue how much incremental revenue Microsoft lost out on, but I don't think the lack of native Office apps has caused Microsoft to cede ground to other office productivity suites on the PC, where the vast majority of content is still created. Keep in mind that out of the 20% of information workers in North America and Europe that use a tablet for work, 60% of them use some office productivity software on it.** Half of tablets used for work are iPads. So immediately just 6% of information workers will be considering the Office apps as an alternative to what they are using on their tablets today.    Is Microsoft really multi-platform now?"
Gary Edwards

3 steps to digitizing your work for maximum productivity | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-for-maximum-productivity.html

Office-365 productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Why go digital?One advantage for businesses to ditch paper– and perhaps the single most important factor – is convenience. Digital data is both highly searchable, and is also easily transferrable. What’s more, the mature state of cloud services today means that you can expect the information you store online to be available across whatever devices you may own -- be it a smartphone, tablet, PC laptop, Mac computer – or even a Web browser at a cybercafé or hotel lobby when on a vacation.Digital documents are also clearly suited to data backup. Despite the calibration required to get things set up in a way that works for you, it’s infinitely easier to make a copy of digital data versus photocopying stacks of printed invoices or bills. And a growing list of cloud storage services (Dropbox and SugarSync, to name two) have taken document storage a step further by saving multiple versions of a doc so you can revert to earlier versions of a document if necessary.
  • Finally, digitization opens the door to greater levels of collaboration at work by making it easy to collaborate with coworkers on only the relevant data. On this front, an entire generation of online tools are available for a diverse range of tasks such as time tracking (Toggl), project management (Asana) and collaboration (Yammer) – of which all are captured digitally without printing out a single piece of paper.So how should you go about joining the digital document revolution? More like this 12 Evernote hacks and apps for power users 8 time-saving productivity hacks 20 uses for Evernote that you probably haven’t thought of yet on IDG Answers How to disable the Windows button on a Microsoft Surface tablet?
  • 1. Choose a digital notebook systemOne of the starting points for digitizing your business docs is to decide on a platform for filing away notes, ideas and documents. Not only does it serve a critical role as a virtually unlimited digital repository for filing important details, charts, audio clips or screen grabs, a good digital system will make it easy to organize and find the information when you need it.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Microsoft OneNoteThe popular Microsoft OneNote allows you to enter rich text, images, media files or even drawings into fully searchable notebooks. OneNote works on a variety of platforms, including Windows PCs, Mac computers, Android and iOS devices, and even from a Web browser.The strength of OneNote is its support for freeform data, with complete freedom to align (or misalign) text and all supported objects. The latest version also adds Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for images, making it easy to search for specific words within new images, and adds support for Dropbox on top of Microsoft’s own OneDrive cloud storage service.
  • EvernoteEvernote is another popular, free, online note-taking service. It offers effectively unlimited storage, albeit with a monthly upload cap (which is much larger for users willing to shell for one of the two fairly inexpensive tiers). The advantage of Evernote is its support for an incredibly diverse list of platforms, which includes native support on the BlackBerry 10 smartphone, third-party clients for Linux, and even scanners with the capability to scan straight into Evernote.Notebooks can be shared among multiple users – including those without a paid account – while individual notes can be shared publicly with a unique URL. Evernote also saves multiple versions of a document, which ensures that any accidental edits can be undone. Finally, paid users get to work offline, and can utilize the service to conduct text searches through Office docs and PDFs, as well as stored in Evernote.
  • Other optionsFor those of us who keep a to-do list, Trello and Todoist are digital equivalents that can facilitate collaboration with colleagues. Google Keep captures notes, lists, photo and audio via supported Web browsers and mobile devices. Finally, there is the text-only SimpleNote, or even the Notes feature in Microsoft’s Office 365 or an on-premises Exchange Server deployment.
  • 3. Effortlessly digitize legacy dataHaving the tools and the capability to natively capture your notes, docs and the like in digital form is a good thing. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop receiving paper bills, invoices, statements, receipts, business cards, product brochures and other printed material.One of the best ways to minimize ink-on-paper collateral is to aggressively digitize all documents whenever possible. You have a variety of options. The easiest is to use a smartphone app such as Scanner Pro to quickly capture everything from business cards to paper printouts. Quality may vary, however, depending on such environmental factors as lighting and the quality of your smartphone’s camera.
  • A more robust alternative is to make use of an automatic sheet-fed scanner – such as the NeatConnect Wi-Fi scanner – to scan printed sheets straight to OneNote or Evernote. Portable scanners also exist, such as the battery-powered Doxie Go Wi-Fi and Doxie Flip. The former lets you scan wirelessly to an iPad or iPhone, while the latter is best described as a portable flatbed scanner that can be inverted to scan items that are fixed in place, or which are too thick to pass through a sheet-fed scanner.
  • Finally, the Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600 is a deskbound scanner that simplifies digitizing magazines and bound books. Items are placed face-up on its scanning mat. The scanning takes about three seconds to dump into a USB-connected computer. Any curvature in the pages is automatically smoothed out via software, resulting in a high quality capture.Depending on your needs, the ScanSnap SV600 could allow you to continue scribbling down your ideas and notes in a physical notebook, yet be able to quickly scan the physical pages into their digital notebook of choice at the end of each day.
  • Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to digitizing your work. There are hundreds of tools that exist to facilitate the full range of business activities and processes without ever having to involve a single printed sheet.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 15
     
    "From the earliest days as a marketing slogan, the elusive concept of the so-called paperless office may finally be taking shape, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. A growing number of small businesses and startups, unencumbered by legacy processes, are quietly ditching printouts for an all-digital ecosystem, buoyed by soaring BYOD ownership and growing familiarity with a plethora of cloud services. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, the driving factors are collaboration and productivity, as opposed to any ecological or "green" concerns. With this in mind, we take a look at the advantages of going digital, and outline how workers can embrace this new digital-first paradigm to collaborate more, do things faster and work more efficiently than ever."
Gary Edwards

All That Google Touches Is Not Gold: Channel Partners Jump To Microsoft - Page: 1 | CRN - 0 views

www.crn.com/...partners-jump-to-microsoft.htm

Office-365 Google-Apps

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 16
     
    "Some of Google's most loyal cloud solution providers -- including those who have been working with the vendor since it launched its channel efforts in 2009 -- told CRN it's no longer financially viable to exclusively partner with the Internet giant. A number of those regional Google channel pioneers who had bet big on Apps, the centerpiece of the Google for Work portfolio, told CRN they are adding a Microsoft Office 365 practice. Some are even striking Google from their portfolios altogether. "
Gary Edwards

What Salesforce's acquisition of Quip means for enterprise software startups | TechCrunch - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...r-enterprise-software-startups

Productivity Enterprise-Productivity SaaS Quip Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • So which startups are gunning to take Quip’s place? The answer is surprising: none. There are hundreds of task/project management apps and dozens of communication platforms, yet full productivity suites are few and far between.
  • Sure, there are solutions like OnlyOffice, Zoho Docs and Polaris Office, but these can hardly be considered startups. That last part is important because startups, with their fresh outlook and high risk tolerance, are the true drivers of innovation.
  • Meanwhile, enterprise giants will continue snapping up these enterprise software upstarts to bolster and innovate higher-performance offerings in an attempt to provide customers with a seamless, uninterrupted workflow.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Enterprise software spending is on an upward trend, and is expected to reach $326 billion this year; meanwhile, startups and investors have taken notice. There are currently 1,425 active startups in the space — as listed by CrunchBase — and there’s been an influx of venture funding. According to PitchBook, venture funding of enterprise productivity startups has more than doubled, from $4.75 billion in 2012 to $11.46 billion last year. This year, these software startups have already raised $6.26 billion to date, and the median deal size is up 25 percent compared to 2015, reflecting current market demand and investor appetite. With investors hot on enterprise startups, the market will become more fragmented and saturated than ever before. End users are already inundated with dozens, if not hundreds, of similar software solutions, each which focus on filling one specific business need as effectively and efficiently as possible.
  • In an environment where the biggest technology leaders are looking to startups for new innovation and transformation, there will likely be a coming spike in M&A activity. A historical analysis of CrunchBase data reveals an ongoing trend: enterprise software startups are seven times more likely to get acquired than they are to shut down, while only 4 percent make it to an IPO.
  • Email, communication and collaboration Email clients and collaborative communication platforms are at the epicenter of modern workflows. For a software giant like Salesforce, whose core product (CRM) relies so heavily on email communications, startups in this segment are particularly attractive targets for an acquisition.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 16
     
    "A new player has entered the enterprise productivity race. For decades, Microsoft reigned as the market leader in enterprise productivity - until Google pushed into the space with Google Apps. Now, with the acquisition of Quip, Salesforce is joining Microsoft and Google in the race. The implications, however, extend far beyond productivity and CRM. Recent developments in enterprise software - including Oracle's acquisition of NetSuite, Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn and Salesforce's acquisition of Demandware and Quip - point to a shift in the market. Enterprise software (not just productivity apps) can no longer be siloed applications bolted together with varying degrees of integration. Today's tools are expected to be cross-functional, with native integration, real-time collaboration and smart communication at their very core. Enterprise software giants across different verticals are moving in the direction of end-to-end solutions in an attempt to own more of the workflow - Salesforce's acquisition of Quip will only intensify the competition. For enterprise software startups, it's indicative of more mergers and acquisitions to come."
Gary Edwards

Enterprise startups to bet on in 2016 - Business Insider Deutschland - 0 views

www.businessinsider.de/tups-to-bet-on-in-2016-2015-11

Startups

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Docusign: replacing paper signaturesDocuSignDocuSign CEO Keith Krach. Company name: DocusignHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $508.1 million in 14 rounds Anytime your company’s name becomes a verb, it means you’ve made it. That’s the case with Docusign, whose name is almost used as a verb in the digital-document area ("just Docusign it"). Docusign offers a simple and secure way to sign documents online, allowing businesses to approve transactions on the go. It's used across many different industries, from real estate and auto insurance to technology and travel services. Investors have been lining up to throw money at this company, investing almost $400 million in just the last two years.
  • Zuora is a cloud service that specializes in subscription billing.
  • Tenable offers something called "continuous threat monitoring"
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Slack took Silicon Valley’s startup scene by storm, reaching a whopping $2.8 billion valuation in less than two years.
  • Its work-communication app isn’t just for messaging coworkers — it can do a lot of different things, from getting automatic Twitter notifications to calling a Lyft cab or looking up restaurants nearby.
  • Spark is a way to sift through massive amounts of data really fast. It can be used with a popular way to store all that data, Hadoop, but increasingly, Spark is being used on its own as an alternative to Hadoop.
  • Checkmarx helps software programmers check their apps for security holes.
  • Illumio is offers a security product that protects apps inside the data center even after a hacker breaks into the network.
  • MuleSoft offers technology that makes it easier for enterprise applications to talk to each other and share data.
  • Blue Jeans is becoming a household name in the enterprise videoconferencing scene. It created a cloud service that lets different people on different online video services, like Google Hangouts and Skype, talk to each other. It also has its own browser-based service, and recently expanded to broadcasting services too.
  • Qualtrics offers a service for doing sophisticated online employee or customer surveys. The company has been on fire lately, raising all of its $220 million in venture funding over the past three years
  • Insidesales is making life easy for a lot of salespeople. It can predict the best time and person to contact before making a sales call, using machine-learning and data intelligence.
  • Tanium impressed Sinofsky because it detects when hackers are attacking as the hack is occurring, instead of what usually happens, finding out after-the-fact.
  • Optimizely didn’t invent A/B testing, the standard technique in which two different versions of the same product are tested in the market — it just made it easier for everyone to do it.
  • Xamarin offers tools for writing enterprise mobile apps and has exploded in the past year.
  • CloudFlare is a web-performance and security company that serves as a “digital bouncer” for millions of websites around the world. Its technology filters the web traffic before it reaches its customers’ websites, and sends it on the most efficient route to help websites run faster. The company claims its service handles nearly 5% of all web traffic.
  • GainSight has won the respect of Silicon Valley investors by making a solution to help enterprises keep track of their customers — and help make sure they stay loyal. Customers like HP, Workday, and Adobe all use Gainsight to manage their customer contracts, helping divisions like product development, sales, and marketing all better understand just who's buying their stuff.
  • Adaptive Insights is quickly rising through the ranks in the corporate-performance management (CPM) market, where software is used to improve budgeting, forecasting, and other financial activities. In a nutshell, it’s trying to replace a lot of the work Excel spreadsheets used to do in the past for finance people.
  • Bracket offers software that lets enterprises securely run apps and data on multiple clouds, with a minimum of management hassles.
  • Enterprises are racing to ditch their data centers and use more clouds and there are a lot of clouds to choose from. Some want to mix and match and Bracket helps them do it.
  • While he was an engineer at Facebook, Avinash Lakshman created Apache Cassandra, a "big data" database originally built to handle Facebook’s Inbox Search feature.
  • Lakshman went on to found Hedvig, which offers software that makes all of a company's computer-storage systems act like one really big, really fast hard disk.
  • open-source project called Kafka, which quickly became a popular technology used by many big internet companies: Yahoo, Spotify, Airbnb, and many others.
  • left LinkedIn to launch Confluent, which provides a commercial version of Kafka.
  • created some of Facebook's most popular data-analysis tools, Bobby Johnson and Lior Abraham. They are famous in the big-data world for creating the open-source tools Scribe and Haystack.
  • With this startup, their mission is to do for every enterprise what Facebook did for friendships: Analyze billions of events in seconds to bring you the relevant info.
  • If you’ve ever used Uber before, chances are you’ve used Twilio’s service. Same goes for apps like Lyft, Airbnb, and Match.com. That's because these apps are plugging into Twilio’s service that helps provide communications features like text messages, phone calls, and video chat. So the Uber text message you get is powered by Twilio's service.
  • Twilio has become a top choice for developers looking to add communications features to their apps. More than 700,000 developers have used Twilio’s platform so far, the company says.
  • For small and midsize businesses that hire workers and contractors overseas, Payoneer solves a big problem. It lets them make and receive cross-border payments in other currencies. Payoneer has racked up a user base of millions of businesses and professionals in more than 200 countries, it says.
  • Stack Exchange, founded in 2008, has grown from its modest roots as a question-and-answer site for programmers into a network that provides expert help and advice to over 26 million programmers every month, at all skill levels.
  • SimilarWeb seemed to spring out of nowhere a couple of years ago to become a star in the web- and mobile-app-analysis world.
  • Mesosphere offers what it calls a Data Center Operating System (DCOS). It's a commercial version of an increasingly popular free and open-source project called Mesos that's used by developers.
  • AtScale is an engine that slips almost invisibly into Hadoop and then easily lets business managers use their favorite analysis tools like Excel,
  • Tableau Software, or Microstrategy with the data stored in Hadoop. 
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 16
     
    "The 2015 holiday season is upon us and the year is drawing to a close. Soon our thoughts will drift to our hopes and goals for 2016. For those who are dreaming of a new job at an up-and-coming young company, we've compiled this list to help. All of these companies specialize in making tech for work and business use, a $3.5 trillion worldwide market. All of them had spectacular years in 2015, by launching great new technology or getting a boatload of funding or landing big partnerships and generally setting themselves up for a successful 2016 and beyond."
1 - 20 of 47 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page