Keeping up with every RSS feed item and tweet is hard enough for anybody, let alone someone trying to run a business. That's why at the end of every week, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the week's most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses.
On Tuesday, Fortune magazine writer Seth Weintraub discussed the availability of Google Voice to Google Apps business customers, and what it may mean for companies big and small. Weintraub compares the significance of Google Voice for businesses to that of email, and suggests that "a frugal business can now forgo the purchase of a phone entirely, instead relying on Google Voice."
Here on ReadWriteBiz, we reviewed two new services geared toward small business users. Network Roulette is a Chatroulette clone designed for professional networking, although it doesn't utilize users' Web cams like Chatroulette does. It's brand new, so the user base isn't huge yet, but assuming it takes off, it could become a new way for professionals to meet in spite of geographic boundaries.
Geckoboard is a new all-in-one dashboard for monitoring business data, including Web analytics, social media stats, CRM, project management, and much more. The site is still in private beta, but ReadWriteWeb readers can get early access by entering the invite code READWRITEWEB10.
Our most-read post of the week was our take on how small businesses can benefit from real-time analytics. With affordable price points and more up-to-the-second insights than standard Web analytics, real-time user data is quickly becoming a necessary asset for small businesses to have.
According to a post by Cedric Bosdonnat LibreOffice, the fork of OpenOffice.org founded after Oracle acquired Sun, has seen a surge of new contributors. Reading that made me curious how many of you are regular contributors to one or more open source projects.
Peter Wayner from InfoWorld wrote a story yesterday about the "7 Programming Languages on the Rise". Noting that the "mainstream is broad and deep," he says that most enterprise developers need to know one of the predominant programming languages, which he identifies as Java, C#, or PHP.
But he argues that a number of "niche languages" are beginning to gain in popularity.
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Wayner lists the following as up-and-comers:
Python
Ruby
MATLAB
JavaScript
R
Erlang
COBOL
CUDA Extensions
Some of these make sense: Google App Engine uses Python, for example. And we have written before at ReadWriteWeb about the increasing popularity of the open source statistical programming language R.
But, arguably, it's hard to see JavaScript, Ruby or Python as "niche" languages. And even harder perhaps to see COBOL, one of the oldest programming languages, as such - although the InfoWorld story points to a recent Dice.com search that listed 580 jobs mentioning Cobol, in comparison to the 1070 that referenced Ruby.
Do you agree with the list? If not, what languages should (or shouldn't) be on it?
And just as interesting, perhaps, what should be on the list of programming languages in decline?
Amy Webb wasn't planning on starting another business. But two years ago, as revenue-strapped newspapers began closing down or laying off staff, the former reporter and editor turned digital media consultant decided to step in and help her former colleagues.
Webb, who was already running a successful company geared toward bringing traditional media organizations up to speed with digital technology, pulled together some of her fellow consultants and scheduled a free webinar for recently laid off journalists. Not long after the two-hour primer on must-have digital media skills ended, Webb and her colleagues started getting emails from would-be participants begging to know when the next one would be. By the second webinar, 50 participants had ballooned to over 200, and a third session had 600 sign-ups.
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"I thought this might be an idea for something bigger," says Webb, whose team quickly began building an all-in-one digital media training resource on the Drupal content management system. Almost by accident, Knowledgewebb was born.
For $129 per year, members of Knowledgewebb get access to webinars, live chats, tip sheets and discussion forums on topics ranging from setting up one's home office to social media strategy to advanced SQL programming, all taught by a variety of expert instructors.
What started out as a means for journalists to learn new skills expanded into a learning community for all professionals, entrepreneurs and small business owners. The site's Entreprenuership track contains lessons on non-disclosure agreements, working with contractors, monetizing your website and maintaining a healthy life-work balance. Looking to start a Web-based business? One class offers a comprehensive checklist of everything you need to take into account. Other tracks include Blogging, Code, Social Networks, Metrics/Traffic, and Personal/Professional Development.
It's not just entrepreneurs and media professionals who could benefit from Knowledgewebb's cirriculum, says Webb. "There are a lot of really smart people out there working in whatever field they work in. They're sort of at a point now where they can't sit in a meeting and say I don't really get this Twitter thing. We have a whole bunch of content available for people like that."
After a successful first iteration, Knowledgewebb recently relaunched with new features designed to make the learning process more motivating and social. In what Webb touts as a first for Web-based education, the site now uses Foursquare-style merit badges, which can be unlocked by completing classes. These badges display on the user's own profile, as well as next to their name when they participate in discussions forums, signifying their achievements thus far.
"What we're doing is cultivating experts inside the network," says Webb. "We have the designated experts, and then we have Knowledgewebb users who have taken a lot of classes and earned these badges, so other users can instantly see who's a trusted member of the community."
In addition to badges, Knowledgewebb recently rolled out a course scheduling tool called My Digital Planner, which breaks down a user's completed classes and lists the ones they are planning to take in the future. Once a course is completed, users can generate a report to demonstrate their proficiency to employers or educators.
For Web-based businesses, a foray into social media may seem like a no-brainer, but how can real-world, brick-and-mortar companies use the social Web to drive revenue and growth? Look no further than Green Aisle Grocery, an independently owned, organic grocery store in Philadelphia.
Even before Green Aisle's South Philadelphia storefront opened in Nov. 2009, co-founders Andrew and Adam Erace were using Facebook and Twitter were giving followers a taste of what the store would be carrying on day one as a way to build up local buzz.
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Today, the store has over 780 followers on Twitter and 745 Facebook fans receiving around-the-clock updates about new products, sales and in-store events.
"Social media is definitely a regular part of our business," says Adam Erace. "The speed of social media lends itself so well to our business model."
On a typical day, Green Aisle might use Facebook and Twitter to announce the arrival of fresh-picked apricots, natural almond milk and hummus, all accompanied by camera phone-snapped photos of the actual products as they come in the door.
In some tweets, Green Aisle calls out to specific regulars of the store with timely updates:
In addition to product arrivals, in-store tastings and free samples are announced online, which helps drive foot traffic to the store. When something goes on sale, the store's Twitter followers and Facebook fans are the first to know.
While the real-world success of the social media initiative is not as easy to quantify as, say, page views on a website, Erace says that each day about 40% of their customers mention something they saw on Twitter or Facebook.
Until recently, social media was the only form of marketing Green Aisle used. It was only after about six months of operation that it decided to purchase its first print advertisement in a local magazine covering sustainability.
The success Green Aisle has enjoyed over the last seven months is substantial enough that it's already considering opening a second store in another Philadelphia neighborhood, according to Erace.
In the meantime, the owners are looking to upgrade their website to enable customers to order groceries online. "We do delivery and pick up, just via phone and email for now," says Erace. "It works but we'd like to put a more efficient system in place."
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we report on President Obama's (non)-use of Twitter, take a look at the past decade in the media industry, review the latest statistics about blogging, question if Oxford Dictionary should've chosen "unfriend" as its word of the year, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).
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Barack Obama spoke to a group of Chinese students this week at a town hall in Shanghai. The meeting was streamed live, worldwide on the Whitehouse website and on the Whitehouse's Facebook page. He was asked a limited number of questions by the audience and one was about Twitter, which has been blocked in China since July. President Obama has never used Twitter, despite his account being the most followed there.
It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.
Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank. Postrank published an analysis based on metrics for signals like comments, trackbacks, shared links and online bookmarks for the top 1000 most-engaging feeds online and for 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each year since 2007.
The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its Word of the Year this week. Its selection? unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook. Has Oxford Dictionary made the right selection? ReadWriteWeb's Founder Richard MacManus thinks not. Marshall Kirkpatrick disagrees with him. Both make their cases in this post and invite you to cast your vote in a poll.
Research firm Gartner has put out a list of the top ten mobile applications of the future. Well, not the distant future, but the far off year of 2012. Nothing on the list is all that surprising or, in many cases, even all that new. Instead, the list includes the sorts of technologies that are just now coming into their own and haven't yet seen widespread adoption as well as the already common technologies that are still experiencing growth.
Google Sites is getting an upgrade. Starting this week, Google will provide templates that make it possible for users with no technical background to create web sites with a degree of functionality that includes page layouts, adding links for navigation and embedded gadgets. Templates are available for intranets, project sites, team sites, employee profile pages and other sites that people would use within the enterprise.
In 2008 the idea of another subscription-only music service was enough to get your knickers in a torrent. Sure Rhapsody was doing well, but they'd been around for forever and in 2008, freemium was the music model du jour. With a year to reflect, co-founder of the Future of Music Coalition and longtime San Fran Music Tech Summit organizer Brian Zisk tells us what it takes to survive in today's music environment.
Google held a press event this week outlining more details about its Google Chrome OS. Google plans to launch Chrome OS next year. Google is positioning Chrome OS as "just a browser" - that is, all of your data is in the cloud. Chrome OS will be focused on speed, simplicity, security; every application on Chrome OS will be a web application. Google sees Chrome OS as targeting 3 trends: netbooks, cloud (everything is a web app today), phones getting computing capabilities.
Twitter's own homepage is still the most popular tool for users to update their status on Twitter. Around 46% of all updates are made directly on the site. Social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos analyzed 500 million tweets it collected over the past 5 months and found that TweetDeck is the most popular third-party client. TweetDeck has a comfortable lead with a 8.48% share of the market, followed by Tweetie, Twitterific and Seesmic.
HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things. The giant computing and IT services company has announced a project that aims to be a "Central Nervous System for the Earth" (CeNSE). It's a research and development program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of "tiny, cheap, tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors."
Microsoft Live Labs' latest creation has just launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks impressive and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information.
The Motorola Droid is the newest smartphone on the market to compete for the iPhone's crown. Released by Verizon Wireless on November 6th, the Droid's advertising campaign has been a full-frontal attack on the popular Apple smartphone with a heavy focus on what the iPhone doesn't do. "iDon't run simultaneous apps, iDon't have a real keyboard, iDon't take 5-megapixel pictures,"taunts Verizon's Droid ad.
Today is the big day! It's time for the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. Hundreds of people working on or with real-time web technologies have come to Mountain View, California and ReadWriteWeb staff has arrived from around the world as well.
We'll be live-streaming selected sessions from the event, starting at 8:30 AM PST, thanks to Justin.tv. You can see and join the Twitter-chatter by using the hashtags #rtwsummit or #rtws. We've set up a page displaying both the live video and the flowing hashtag stream at http://readwriteweb.com/summit. Conversation there has begun already. But wait, there's more!
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This next report should be even better - we've interviewed more than 40 companies building or using the real-time web and now hundreds of people will be discussing various parts of the real-time story today at the Summit. All the knowledge we've gleaned from all those conversations will be expertly concentrated into one high-value research report that you can pre-order starting today.
Please note that this is a different beast from the conference e-book documenting Summit sessions that all registered Summit participants will receive at no cost.
And Now Get Ready For a Deep Dive!
We hope you'll join us in person or online for an in-depth conversation with some of the smartest people around the world who are working on the real-time web.
In the meantime, please check out these sponsors, whose generosity made this whole thing possible. Several have come from outside the United States to participate in the Real-Time Web Summit, so please join me in learning about what they do in thanks for their support. See you on the live stream!
Video apps that cater to Twitter users are all the rage at the moment, but this particular bandwagon is filled to overflowing with apps that rock jostling for mindshare with apps that barely function.
We've spent the past couple of days testing and retesting a slew of these sites, and we are ready to present our top five picks for sharing video content on Twitter. Read on to find out which app comes out on top and which ones didn't make the cut.
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5. TweeTube is currently available only for Mac OS X and requires a download, but it allows users to share webcam videos, images, YouTube videos, and links via Twitter. The video component reminded us a bit of 12seconds.tv or Seesmic's video offering from back in the day, i.e., last month. It wasn't our favorite app to play with, and the limitations seem to outstrip the benefits.
Type: Twenty-five second webcam uploads that are embeddable and linkable with Twitter-enabled comments.
4. BubbleTweet is a service we've been trying and testing for several months with mixed results. However, the premise is great for Twitter. The site lets users upload a simple, 30-second webcam recording, which then shows up on Twitter as a small, unobtrusive "bubble" of video over the web interface. BubbleTweet also lets users upload prerecorded video content.
Type: Thirty-second webcam recordings or video uploads that appear in a video bubble over the Twitter web interface.
3. TwitVid.io is the Twitter-friendly video recording and uploading tool from video website-creating service Fliggo. It allows users to record up to ten minutes of video from a webcam or upload videos they've already created and tweet a URL. Co-founder Chrys Bader also tells us they're getting ready to launch an iPhone app soon.
Type: Single-user webcam recordings of up to 10 minutes or video uploads from a drive.
2. Twitcam is a pared-down offering of parent company LiveStream. It runs a Twitter-based chat program alongside the video itself, and videos are archived for linking and embedding after the fact. Unfortunately, the tweet/chat module only allows users to send out one tweet every 30 seconds, which minimizes the real-time fun to be had. Still, it's been one of the easier, more fun apps we've tried today.
Type: Single-webcam live-streamed video with Twitter-based chat module and post-stream archive of video and chat.
1. TwitVid is a great little app we wrote about recently that allows users to record and upload video from a webcam or any video-enabled mobile device or to upload prerecorded video. They also have a nifty iPhone app that works like a charm. The site also lets users auto-post their TwitVids to other sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Best of all, each video has its own "like" and "retweet" buttons as well as Meebo-powered chat, all of which feed back into the Twitter stream. As far as Twitter integration with video, we tend to think TwitVid does it best.
Type: Single-user webcam/mobile recordings with retweet, chat, "buzz," and other Twitter options.
Keeping up with every RSS feed item and tweet is hard enough for anybody, let alone someone trying to run a business. That's why at the end of every week, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the week's most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses.
According to a 
Peter Wayner from InfoWorld wrote a story yesterday about the "
Amy Webb wasn't planning on starting another business. But two years ago, as revenue-strapped newspapers began closing down or laying off staff, the former reporter and editor turned digital media consultant decided to step in and help her former colleagues. 
After a successful first iteration, Knowledgewebb recently relaunched with new features designed to make the learning process more motivating and social. In what Webb touts as a first for Web-based education, the site now uses Foursquare-style merit badges, which can be unlocked by completing classes. These badges display on the user's own profile, as well as next to their name when they participate in discussions forums, signifying their achievements thus far. 
For Web-based businesses, a foray into social media may seem like a no-brainer, but how can real-world, brick-and-mortar companies use the social Web to drive revenue and growth? Look no further than 
On a typical day, Green Aisle might use Facebook and Twitter to announce the arrival of fresh-picked apricots, natural almond milk and hummus, all accompanied by camera phone-snapped photos of the actual products as they come in the door. 
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we report on President Obama's (non)-use of Twitter, take a look at the past decade in the media industry, review the latest statistics about blogging, question if Oxford Dictionary should've chosen "unfriend" as its word of the year, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: 
Barack Obama spoke to a group of Chinese students this week at a town hall in Shanghai. The meeting was streamed live, worldwide on the Whitehouse website and on the Whitehouse's Facebook page. 
It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the 
Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to 
Research firm Gartner has put out a list of the 
Our channel 
Our channel 
In 2008 the idea of another subscription-only music service was enough to get your knickers in a torrent. Sure 
Google held a 
Twitter's own homepage is still the most popular tool for users to update their status on Twitter. Around 46% of all updates are made directly on the site. Social media analytics and monitoring service 
HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the emerging 
Microsoft Live Labs' latest creation has just launched. 
The 
Today is the big day! It's time for the 
Video apps that cater to Twitter users are all the rage at the moment, but this particular bandwagon is filled to overflowing with apps that rock jostling for mindshare with apps that barely function.
