Last night, which was today, New Zealand time, Richard MacManus announced his departure from ReadWriteWeb. He was our founder, navigator, and editor-in-chief, and we will miss him.

Richard is about to start a new chapter in his storied career. He’s writing a book. ReadWriteWeb is also about to make some great changes. The excitement is mutual.

From his home in New Zealand, Richard founded the site in 2003 as his personal blog. It quickly became a guiding force on the early Web for people who sought to understand the rapidly changing environment and its implications for the future.

With help from some of the best and brightest tech writers around, Josh Catone, Jolie O’Dell, Sarah Perez, Audrey Watters, the inimitable Marshall Kirkpatrick and so many more, Richard grew the site into one of the top sources of tech news and analysis in the world.

In December of 2011, SAY Media acquired ReadWriteWeb, moving its headquarters to San Francisco to be closer to the center of the global tech industry. SAY Media determined that the site would benefit from editorial leadership based in the U.S.

Richard’s vision and leadership made ReadWriteWeb an indispensable part of the tech journalism landscape. The editorial team will do its utmost to live up to Richard’s legacy.

We are grateful to Richard for the platform he created that allows us to be thoughtful, creative and analytical. Richard encouraged us to think deeply about topics we are passionate about and his vision will continue at ReadWriteWeb.

Manufacturers want to announce their newest products in such a way as to garner the consumer attention and media buzz. Apple is the king of this, oddly, by doing nothing at all. It does not talk about its new products to the press or respond to rumors and it works brilliantly. By being tight-lipped, Apple has enabled an entire cottage industry in the media that does nothing but speculate and what its new devices will look like, what new features will be in them and when they are coming.

It is via this rumor mill that the Sept. 12 date has been announced. Apple has neither confirmed nor denied the date but most people would be very surprised if Apple does not announce the new iPhone (or something similar, perhaps the iPad Mini?) in the second week of September. 

Most companies cannot pull off Apple’s high-wire act. Microsoft, especially with its signature Windows product, works on three-year development cycles and gradually builds hype for more than a year before releasing the product. Microsoft and Apple may have different approaches but the companies do have one thing in common: each makes consumers wait. The waiting builds anticipation and the anticipation eventually leads to sales. 

Other companies have to rely on a more traditional marketing plan to generate the type of buzz that Apple and Microsoft get. They send out fancy invitations to media weeks in advance promising the greatest new thing and promote those events heavily. Nokia, Motorola, Research In Motion, HTC, LG and others tend to follow this route to varying degrees of success. 

The timing of announcements is a fickle thing. Every company wants its own moment in the sun but also wants to one-up the competitors. It becomes a game of action and reaction. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced a hasty press conference in Los Angeles to announce its Surface tablet a week before Google’s I/O conference where it announced the Nexus 7 Android tablet. In October 2011, Amazon held a surprise press conference a week before the announcement of the iPhone 4S to unleash its Kindle Fire tablet.

Amazon is expected to do the exact same thing this year and other manufacturers are getting in on the act. Shortly after the Sept. 12 date for the iPhone became less of a rumor and more of a certainty, a flurry of announcements and invitations were sent to the media. 

The first shoe to drop was Nokia and Microsoft with an event on Sept. 5 in New York City where the new line of Windows Phone 8 Lumia devices is expected to be announced. A few days later, Motorola and Verizon sent press invitations to an event in Manhattan, promising the day’s “main” event. Two Motorola Android smartphones are expected to be announced. A third large device manufacturer, knowing that there would be significant media presence in New York that week, sent press invitations for Sept. 6 as well as for Sept. 10 in San Francisco (the company has asked us to keep the press invitation quiet for now). Amazon itself sent out press invitations to a Sept. 6 for an event in Santa Monica expected to be the Kindle Fire 2 or something similar. See the full calendar below.

It is a mark of Apple’s influence on the device landscape that its competitors all rush to get their own announcements in before the announcement of the new iPhone. All of the upcoming announcements are not just some weird coincidence. Companies have learned that Apple dominates the news cycle for technology publications and consumer attention for weeks after it announces new devices. Issuing announcements directly after Apple is like dropping a boulder into a flood. You might know it is there, but it is not your primary concern.

Upcoming Announcements:

Sept. 5 --  Nokia/Microsoft, New York City

• Expected: Windows Phone 8 Lumia

Sept. 5 – Motorola/Verizon, New York City

• Expected: Droid RAZR HD

Sept. 6 and Sept. 10 – Android Manufacturer, New York City and San Francisco

• Expected: Significant new smartphone or tablet

Sept. 6 – Amazon, Santa Monica

• Expected: Kindle Fire 2 and/or other products

Sept. 12 – Apple, San Francisco (Rumor)

• Expected: iPhone 5

Sept. 18 – Motorola, London

• Expected: Intel-chip-based smartphone

Sept. 25-28 – Research In Motion, San Jose

• Expected: BlackBerry Jam Americas (formerly BlackBerry DevCon) with new features of BlackBerry 10

Many of the applicants for gTLDs are very obvious. Microsoft has applied for domain names such as .bing, .azure (its cloud service) and .microsoft. Apple applied for .apple, IBM applied for .IBM and so forth. 

Right now, there are only 22 gTLDs that control how users navigate the Internet. Those include .com, .net, .org, and .gov, plus many country-level domains such as .uk (United Kingdom) and .co (Colombia). ICANN stressed that today’s announcement and release of the list of applicants is just the first step. Not all applications will be granted, and many conflicting applicants will have to be resolved. 

Amazon, which is applying through its European office in Luxemburg, applied for 76 gTLDs, which will cost the company millions of dollars in application fees. Some of the more prominent gTLDs that Amazon is shooting for are .cloud, .app and .dev. (Amazon will have competition for .app; in all, 13 companies applied for that gTLD.)

The most aggressive applicant was a company called “Charleston Road Registry Inc.” that applied for 101 domain names. Charleston Road Registry Inc. appears to actually be Google. It was the only entity to apply for specific brand domain names such as .goog, .google, .youtube, .gmail, .android and other properties associated with Google. Charleston Road Registry has also applied for many extremely common domain names such as .baby, .blog, .buy, .boo, .lol, .fly, .free, .game and many more. We have reached out to both Google and Charleston Road Registry to confirm whether the two entities are indeed the same thing.

Update: Charleston Road Registry will be an entity that will manage Google's gTLD portfolio. 

In addition to geographic communities, trade associations, large companies and media organizations (such .abc, .cbs, The Guardian and the Boston Globe), there are many holding companies that have applied for gTLDs. For instance, one of the biggest applicants was Top Level Holdings Limited, which applied for 92 domains that cost nearly $13.5 million in application fees. Top Level Domain Holdings applied on behalf of itself and its clients, looking for common names such as .gay, .green, .home and .hotel. Top Level Domain Holdings is a publicly traded holding company on the London Alternative Investment Market (a subset of the London Stock Exchange) that focuses specifically on consulting and registry services for gTLD applicants. 

We could see the first domain names by the beginning of next year. First, there is a 60-day comment period for all applicants, which will be followed by a seven-month objection period. Starting on July 12, each new proposed gTLD will undergo an independent review. That review will examine both the company or entity that is applying for the gTLD and the consequences of the domain name. For instance, the independent review board will be looking at companies such as The Boston Globe to determine if it can properly and technically administer a domain name and what that means to the community it serves. Once domain names are approved, they will be entered into the Domain Name System (DNS) root and become part of the Internet.

Applicants for gTLDs were overwhelmingly from Western countries. North America had 911 applications of the total 1,930. Europe had 611 applications, Asia-Pacific 303, Latin America 24 and Africa 17. That number is actually skewed more heavily in favor of the United States, though, since Amazon, a Seattle-based company, applied through its European office. 

Bio-sensors have lagged behind other kinds of sensors. Robert McCray, the CEO of the Wireless Life Sciences Alliance, mentioned how many sensors could be found in your average car or phone, which eclipse what is available in the life sciences market. For example, your typical cellphone includes sensors such as a camera, a microphone, a GPS, haptic/touch and an accelerometer. The alliance claims to be the only trade organization focused exclusively on identifying collaboration opportunities within the wireless health sector, and was holdng its annual conference this week in San Diego.

As with other of its prizes, this one attempts to stimulate a revolution and create an ecosystem of innovators in the bio-sensing area. "We want to give inventors a platform to show their stuff to the entire planet to help expand health care to move beyond disease management," said the CEO of X Prize Foundation Peter Diamandis (shown) at the launch of the new competition. Entries will be judged on several metrics, including validity, usability, originality and affordability. Sensors can be developed in several categories, including biofluids, kinematics, body physics, mood and emotion detection.

This contest is partnered with the Tricoder competition. Diamandis mentioned that the sensors coming out of the Nokia challenge could be put into handheld consumer devices that will be developed for these Tricorders. So far, 185 teams from 25 countries have signalled that they will be entering the Tricorder contest, which was announced in January at CES in Vegas.

According to the contest website, "As sensing is an enormous, heterogeneous field, there will be no specific benchmarks established for any of these criteria. Instead, the Nokia Sensing X CHALLENGE will rely on the judges’ expert knowledge and the teams’ submitted material to establish notability."

The generally accepted definition of "cloud services" - even the one prescribed by the U.S. Government (PDF available here) - includes the existence of metered or measured service - usually a flat rate that scales along with the service consumed.  Now one of the cloud's most prominent competitors is opening up its enterprise license program to negotiation, enabling big customers - perhaps including the government itself - to name their price and enter into long-term, fixed-price deals.

Box.net's move, announced this morning, opens the door for potentially very large customers to enter into long-term arrangements that would otherwise be quite expensive.  Think businesses with tens of thousands of users - for example, P&G.

The Return of Deal-making

"It's not at all uncommon for software providers to have an enterprise license agreement [ELA], but very atypical to date in the world of cloud," acknowledges Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck, Box's general manager for enterprise products, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "What we're doing is formalizing a program around enterprise license agreements for Box. Like a typical ELA, this is about purchasing for a wide array of users, with a prenegotiated price, potentially in a multiyear arrangement that locks in a really good price for the customer, so that they're getting the most cost-advantageous deal and that they simplify their overall purchasing with us."

Up to now, for very large customers with tens of thousands of seats, the flat scale of cloud service pricing has actually not been very cost-effective. ELAs remain attractive for this class of customers mainly for this reason, and it could be why they opt to stay with all-on-premise resources and applications. But the on-premise choice leaves big businesses' IT departments stuck in the previous century, especially in terms of procurement (some of which still takes place on paper), installation, testing and deployment. "Why would you buy an ELA up front if it's going to take you a super-long time to roll out to end users?" Bouck asks.

"Usually you'd buy-as-you-go until maybe you hit the halfway mark of rolling out to users, and then consider an ELA," she adds, "which means those first-half purchases you're making are probably pretty expensive."

Managing Larger Boxes

Box's updated administrative console, whose availability also begins today, will enable high-level customers to enter into long-term ELAs, which fix their prices at negotiable, set amounts in advance, and then deploy the entire service to all users immediately after signing. The new console represents the next phase of Box's adoption of a cloud-based version of group policy, where administrators set privileges and capacities, and marshal the storage process for employees who use the service as part of business.

"In the past, our administrator certainly allowed a privileged administrator to go in, see and manage content by user if necessary," Box's Bouck explains. "Imagine if one of 10,000 users had a problem; they'd go to the administrator and say, 'Hey, I forgot my password,' or, 'I'm no longer on this project any more; could you please transfer all my content to the new project lead.' But we didn't make it very easy for administrators to easily do that in a large-scale user deployment, when you need to manage content across many user accounts.  Those one-off types of things are easy, but what if I need to query for content across all 10,000 of my employees that fit a certain set of criteria?  Or pull all the image data from the month of June across all users? That type of functionality wasn't there in our admin console. Now we have it."

The addition of an "All Files" tab, she goes on, lets admins scan lists of stored files across one or more users in the list. Files can be dragged and dropped between accounts. And an enterprise search field lets admins query files across a broad array of users.

"Especially for things like e-discovery, this is crucial," states Bouck, whose last job involved managing an e-discovery suite for EMC. "If I need to pull all the content related to a particular legal matter, and be able to search by keyword, user name, content type, date range, whatever - across my entire portfolio of Box users, or maybe some group of them, I can pull off all that content and hand it off for legal processing as part of that discovery."

Bouck admits this doesn't make the Box service a complete e-discovery tool just yet, though it does enable and even encourage partners such as Autonomy to develop services that make use of the audit tables that Box does generate, and mine those tables for actionable data for e-discovery purposes.

There's a belief (which, for some, has metastasized into a desperate hope) that how you say something online, not so much what you say, directly translates to whether you'll read it. Today, a corporation that's notorious for never changing the way it says anything, announced it's acquiring a company whose business is message adjustment for brands in the social media space.

Prior to Facebook's IPO last week, there was considerable talk about whether its main value proposition - that companies can realize value by approaching their customers as people - would, coupled with six bucks, buy you a cup of coffee. For the last six years, a company called Vitrue has built a business around social relationship management for consumer-facing companies. Not really CRM in the strict sense, its service has evolved around utilizing social media to craft marketing messages that better reach customers through social media. Which seems sensible enough: testing the river before sticking your boat in it.

This morning, for an undisclosed sum of cash, Oracle announced it is purchasing Vitrue and integrating it into its broadening portfolio of cloud-based services, which last February absorbed workforce talent management powerhouse Taleo. With Vitrue comes some unique and sometimes controversial tools, including one that estimates the ROI of your Facebook branding campaign in dollars.

Vitrue made its first public splash in 2007 with a promotion that urged consumers everywhere to produce their own Pringles potato chip commercials, as mashups mixing their own homemade tapes with a stockpile of snack food-related content. At that time, the company was marketing itself as "YouTube for brands." (Vitrue's founder and CEO, Reggie Bradford, has a background in television.) Since that time, the rise of Facebook prompted Vitrue to become an early supporter and advocate of its platform.

In its now widely known September 2010 white paper, "Anatomy of a Facebook Post" (PDF available here), Vitrue makes a compelling case that Facebook users expect a different attitude from what they read there, not just from people but from companies as well.

"As a general rule of thumb, marketers adapt their messages and content to different marketing communication channels," the white paper reads. "The content and format used in direct mail will not necessarily be effective for a direct e-mail. Also, within each marketing tactic, a marketer must determine the best format for that specific channel, i.e. e-mail with HTML or text or variations of subject lines, which results in an extensive 'test and learn' iterative approach to marketing effectiveness for a particular marketing tactic."

That paragraph seemed to imply that as people's attitudes vary with the use of different channels, certain attitudes with social channels will be more colored by individual personalities than by a collective, herd mentality. It's that implication which seemed in stark contrast to the production of its ROI calculator tool, which Google Analytics product marketing manager Adam Singer called out in April 2010, on his blog TheFutureBuzz.com, for cattle-prodding not only individuals but also entire vertical market segments into the same corral, and assuming each unit in that corral is worth the same dollar value.

"The power of Web analytics and data isn’t about coming up with normalized numbers to apply blandly across hordes of consumers, but about segmentation, detailed analysis and accountability," Singer wrote at the time. "It’s about understanding and activating your true fans, and not even treating them all the same. They are not all created equal, after all. These unscientific data points are why companies are blindly chasing bigger numbers for numbers sake – when in reality they are increasing KPI [key performance indicator] metrics and not necessarily objectives."

Vitrue's Bradford appeared to address Singer's argument in an interview with blogger Rob Birgfeld the following month. Said the CEO, "Nothing is an exact science, especially with social media. We developed the Evaluator to help provide a marketer directional and quantifiable information. But increasingly marketers can and should derive their strategies based on solid data, which is what we do here at Vitrue."

One immediately wonders how all that valuable data will be put to use at Oracle, a company notorious for rarely, if ever, modifying the tone or even color (red) of its customer-facing message over the last quarter-century. In early 2010, Oracle explained the motivation behind its acquisition of Sun Microsystems as centering around the creation of a "seamless experience for developers." Later that year, in its acquisition of e-commerce and cell-center platform maker Art Technology Group, Oracle XVP Thomas Kurian stated it was in response to customers needing "a unified commerce and CRM platform to provide a seamless experience across all commerce channels." And earlier this year, after acquiring customer service platform maker RightNow, Oracle assessed the RightNow platform as "help[ing] companies power great customer experiences in a seamless, personalized way across all channels and customer touchpoints: including on the web, in a store, over the phone or via mobile devices."

So it becomes uniquely interesting not just how Singer announced this morning's news on Vitrue's corporate blog, but how he said it. "As you know, marketers have largely led their businesses into social and they are now looking to develop strategies that can help them deliver more meaningful customer engagement. Increasingly, other groups within the enterprise are also utilizing social media to build relationships with today’s socially connected consumer. Enterprises need a more comprehensive social relationship management platform that connects marketing, sales, commerce and customer service together, for a seamless brand experience. Together, Oracle and Vitrue’s comprehensive social relationship management platform will improve companies’ return on investment for social by integrating sales and marketing across paid, owned and earned media; and enhancing customer service through seamless, real-time responsiveness and high touch engagement."

I suppose corporate statements have one way of reaching an audience, and Facebook pages another. Who knows, really? It's not an exact science.

Oracle sign by mrjoro; stock image by Shutterstock

Salesforce users are starting to understand that Chatter, the messaging and transactions system for the entire Force.com platform, is not a chat tool. Rather, it's a communications stream that substitutes for most internal email. Why isn't it a chat tool, you ask?  The only plausible answer - that Salesforce simply hasn't plugged in the chat capability yet - becomes moot next month.

Piece-by-piece, but by no means slowly, Salesforce has been assembling an integrated arsenal of cloud-based weapons aimed squarely at Microsoft's stronghold on enterprise applications, particularly with respect to communication. We've talked about its move to reduce workers' reliance on Outlook, and email in general, as their main mode of indirect contact. Outlook's trump card has been its tie-ins to Windows Live Messenger, which are certain to be augmented by tie-ins to Skype (hopefully within our lifetimes).

But Microsoft shedding light on its Skype integration plans would be like Fischer telling Spassky his queen is vulnerable. While Redmond scrambles to coordinate Skype with Office 14 and Windows 8, Salesforce is integrating its own direct IM system into Chatter. Beginning next month, users of Salesforce or apps built on its platform will be able to launch ad hoc chats in the context of their activity streams. 

Screen Sharing

And by fall 2012, the company will add screen sharing.

"For a lot of the ad hoc collaboration - when somebody needs help on a deal or they're trying to solve a case or write an answer quickly -  are they going to set up a meeting and structure that?  Usually not," says Kendall Collins, Salesforce's senior vice president and general manager for Chatter. Here, Collins is talking about Salesforce's existing tie-ins to Citrix GoToMeeting, its preferred tool for videoconferencing.

ReadWriteWeb asked Collins whether this new one-two punch of IM with videoconferencing endangers that partnership. His response was clever: Users are likely to kick in screen sharing on the fly or in the context of a support call. They'll continue to use GoToMeeting, he said, to set up scheduled conferences between multiple parties. 

"GoToMeeting is an incredible tool for structured meetings, webinars and large, external audiences," he said. "But we've seen as a gap in the market the ability to collaborate in context around a business process." In fact, Collins' meeting with us took place over GoToMeeting - it was scheduled in advance, it utilized single-source screen sharing, and it was moderated. It also involved someone outside the team members' network (myself). "I think that people will have the need for very structured meetings and content delivery," he added.

But this new screen-sharing feature will be localized to team members, and will pop up in the context of a chat initiated through the activity stream in the Chatter tab.

The chat process itself is less than revolutionary, though it fills the most prominent void in Salesforce's cloud arsenal. With the system engaged, users will see point-of-presence indicators beside each team member, indicating their current state of availability. Outlook users have had this ability with Office Communicator for several years now, and it's part of Microsoft's tie-in to its Lync server (formerly Unified Communications).

Mobile First? Not This Time

This is where Salesforce's strategy gets interesting, and maybe a little dicey: The company will roll out its inline chat feature to desktop users first, Collins told us. It's still testing mobile capabilities. Mobile is important because it impacts the very meaning of "available" in the context of Chatter's inline chat. Not long ago, "available" and "accessible" were different properties. You may be out of the office and thus unavailable, for example. If (and probably when) mobile accessibility goes live for inline chat, if you're accessible in any way (that is, if you're close to your smartphone), then you're probably available. Unless, of course, you shut your blinds and make yourself unavailable.

And that, strangely enough, plays into Salesforce's own emerging "karma" metric, which appears below each user's portrait on her profile page. The metric measures relative influence on other members of the team. It's an analytic measurement and a complicated one at that, explains Collins: "Customers have never had an ability to understand the influence and impact of any individual in the graph. So you're starting to see some interesting gamification." He tells a story of a fellow Salesforce employee who discovered to his own shock that, despite making the most comments to the team, he failed to score high on the influence bar. "That pushed him to contribute more," he adds, "and I think the value of any network is based on your contributions."

As Salesforce develops mobile chat, relative accessibility is likely to be a factor in the influence score.

Auditability

One of the barriers preventing big business from moving to a Salesforce-driven system right away has been the need to comply with federal mandates to retain emails and internal communications. If your business uses less email this year than it did last year, that might look suspicious to a judge.

Collins assures us that Salesforce is keeping this fact in mind, especially as it continues to roll out a separate, governments-only service.  "Trust has been a hallmark of Salesforce.com," he says. "Having auditable processes and audible ways to track data is part of who we are, and that's no different with Chatter. In fact, one of the reasons IT customers choose Chatter over competitors is that they trust us for compliance, scale, performance, disaster recovery and all the things they need in an enterprise-grade system. We spent a lot of time building out all the key compliance tables for Chatter... We have gone through audits with various financial institutions, many of whom use Chatter as their employee social network. And we know some customers have explicit requirements around e-discovery. We've had partners build various tools on top of those compliance tables. So, if you have a very stringent industry requirement or specific company requirement that is not something that Chatter does out of the box, we've got a host of partners."

Public sector technology workers can only look with envy on what Salesforce and its Force.com apps have been able to achieve in commercial enterprises.  Even as more and more enterprises eagerly move to the new social apps model, public sector IT functions remain solidly stuck in the 20th century, if not the 19th.

Salesforce is hoping that the excitement of the rollout of its dedicated Government Cloud in for Q3 2012 will sweep federal and state governments into adoption of newer, more collaborative, less expensive software. But when it comes to public sector IT, the image that springs to mind is “unstoppable force meets immovable object.”

The Government Cloud

“It’s a computing platform that government can embrace to transform for the social era,” says Dan Burton, Salesforce’s senior vice president for the global public sector, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. “There’s no IT infrastructure to buy, no data centers to build, no upgrade and maintenance fees to pay - just citizen access to government services anytime, anywhere, at Internet scale.”

Well, at least that’s the goal. Certainly Salesforce has demonstrated the ability to develop and produce this kind of product, and there may be state and local governments ready to make the leap. For the federal government, though, the leap may be a chasm - one with a few big legislative hurdles in the way. 

It’s not that the feds don’t realize that fundamental shifts are necessary in the nation’s IT infrastructure. But the necessary mindset shift from the skillsets that federal IT relies upon today and, say, Force.com truly does require a revolution. Plus, with government job security as high as it’s ever been, any change in the way the U.S. Goverment does business will require the retraining of thousands of workers.

Exclusive Databases

Burton (no relation to the Indiana congressman) tells RWW that Government Cloud will be comprised of exclusive databases separate from its enterprise products. Its foundation will be housed in Salesforce.com’s U.S. production data centers, and will utilize software access controls whose security that have already been declared compliant with FISMA and ISO/IEC 27001. “The dedicated government instance will offer the same high level of security and trust that Salesforce is known for,” Burton claims.

Along with the dedicated Government Cloud instance will be a dedicated App Exchange, which Salesforce expects to be populated with apps that can be readily downloaded and installed out of petty cash - hopefully avoiding the months-long procurement process and competitive bidding arrangements to which governments are presently accustomed.

As an example, Burton used Salesforce Chatter to enable an ordinary citizen to look up information about a building permit, and let a government worker get back to him with downloadable documents, picture, and details. The worker is assigned the citizen just like the salesperson is assigned the customer. It’s a case the worker can follow up on using social media. You can only imagine how enticing this example must look to workers chained to a pre-Y2K environment.

Just the prospects of open collaboration alone, Salesforce’s Burton believes, could transform government into something more like CEO Marc Benioff’s “social enterprise.”

“If you think of government today, there are over 3,000 counties, thousands of cities, 50 states, hundreds of federal agencies, and each one is buying and building custom applications with little knowledge of what other government agencies are doing,” Burton says. “And AppExchange for government will eliminate this duplication by creating an online marketplace that lets government find and deploy applications with a click of a mouse. It’s built on Force.com, it has gone through security reviews, it’s 100% cloud, and it’s available today.  We already have 60 applications from more than 30 partners, and more on the way.”

Will the Revolution Be Televised or Postponed?

Done right, this approach could revolutionize citizens’ everyday interaction with their local, state, and federal government offices. Revolutions are not things that governments tend to embrace with open arms (especially when there's money behind them), but Salesforce is openly positioning itself as a force for disrupting government bureaucracy and protocol.

“Salesforce is all about disruption and transformation,” proclaims Burton. “We are very conscious about that. We think that legacy IT systems are broken, and to have government spend money on IT infrastructure, databases, maintenance and upgrade fees, is holding government captive and not allowing it to deliver the social, mobile, and open technologies that citizens already have and are demanding from government. I think that this revolution will take place faster than people think.”

Salesforce’s announcement today kicks off the company’s Cloudforce D.C. conference.

You've already seen Kaazing push live data to running apps over the Web. That doesn't seem like a new technology on the surface, and in fact, it's not. It's actually a much older technology - session-based, sending characters from hosts to terminals. It's what real-world applications need to communicate with their servers. But to do it on the Web, you have to retrofit it - and that's what Kaazing is known for doing.

"HTTP protocol was originally designed in the 1990s as a way to exchange documents. Because of its design, it's a stateless, sessionless, bidirectional, half-duplex [protocol]. Meaning, it's a walkie-talkie model," explains Yuan Weigel, Kaazing's vice president of marketing, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "I talk, you wait; you talk, I wait. And it's a request/response, meaning unless the client makes a request for you to talk, you cannot come talk to me, the server. That's just the way the Web was designed."

The seed for Kaazing as a company grew from its founders original response to HTML5 caretaker Ian Hickson's call for a two-way, bidirectional protocol that eliminated the need to open up separate HTTP connections for each and every exchanged element of data. First, this deflates the bandwidth consumed by Web apps by more than 90% - a deflation which is absolutely necessary if an "Internet of Things" is ever to take shape.

Second, it eliminates the need for applications servers and much of the back-end middleware (or is it "middle-end backware?") that's needed to facilitate messaging between conventional applications. That's not the best news for IBM, which foresees the entire IoT as a middleware application.

"Today, as you know, app servers sit between the back end and the browser," Weigel explains, "and the browser only speaks HTTP. The back end speaks whatever TCP protocol - JMS, AMQP, whatever. So by having Kaazing sitting in the middle, it actually allows you to extend data that's flowing, let's say, within a JMS system all the way to the browser. There's no translator that needs to sit in the middle. Imagine you're at a United Nations meeting, and you can both speak the same language!"

If you're a Web app developer, you may already know all this. Today's news of the deployment of Kaazing's HTML5 WebSocket Platform on Amazon EC2 ups the ante for any serious player looking to capture the future market of inter-device communication. By putting Kaazing on DevPay, a broader base of small developers can experiment with real-time communication for the first time, on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Weigel tells us Kaazing has added some enterprise features to the platform as well, such as single sign-on, load balancing, failover and disaster recovery. It also adds something called WebSocket emulation support, which enables the cloud to work some serious magic. Quite literally, this feature presents WebSocket-like functionality to ancient browsers that are not, and will never become, HTML5-ready - browsers like IE6. "It's so close that our customers cannot detect a difference between what's emulated and what's native," says Weigel. "So when our enterprise customers choose to deploy a WebSocket-based application, they don't have to worry about whether this is going to work. They can just code to the standard WebSocket API and not have to worry about the browser at the other end."

"In the past, developers spend 75% of their time on glue code. How do you communicate from the browser to the application server? What do you send back and forth? And all these things are not the things that make the application or the user experience compelling," she continues. "It's simply things that you have to do to make it work in a Web environment. Whereas with WebSocket, because you don't have to worry about the communication layer, you can now focus on developing really compelling user experiences - the stuff that makes the customer loyal. It really shifts how your company invests in development time."

oneDrum.com has been in beta for about a year, and its features and people will be integrated into the main Yammer platform. The idea is to incorporate the various Office files that individuals work on into its collaboration network to make them easier to jointly author or edit.

Users will be able to see files that are organized by particular Yammer groups on their desktop, once they download a Windows (and soon Mac) desktop app. So every Yammer group becomes, in essence, a shared folder that is synchronized through their cloud.

There are other desktop sync services, of course, such as Evernote and Dropbox, but none is tied to a microblogging service. Each Yammer file lives at a unique URL where it can be viewed in the browser, followed, shared and discussed. "Following" a file will notify the user of changes. Users can also view a revision history or search the full text of the file from within Yammer. This is very powerful and promises to make collaboration a lot easier than it is now with Google Docs, for example.

Speaking of Google Docs, its users have long had the ability to jointly edit and comment on their documents. But the oneDrum software moves this to your desktop Microsoft Office files, which may make it more comfortable for many companies. The user doesn't have to do anything special, once the desktop app is installed. As with Google Docs, character-by-character changes in the document appear in real time.

As mentioned, oneDrum has been in beta for Windows users, but starting today the beta software is no longer available (boo for Yammer). It will be incorporated into a summer release and rebranded as part of Yammer, along with a planned Mac release. Yammer also plans on moving all 10 oneDrum employees from the UK to its San Francisco office eventually, barring any immigration issues.

Jasper Westaway was the CEO of oneDrum. Ironically, when he first met with the Yammer executives about a year ago, the oneDrum demo was miserable. Obviously, that didn't deter them from working together.

Here is a demo video that shows off the integration and covers some additional features:

The idea is to support very high performance analytics. It has preconfigured hardware that includes a collection of four different servers as part of GoGrid's Professional Cloud plan. You can use this to quickly scale up demand to meet traffic spikes in your Hadoop NoSQL databases, for example. This allows for a complete hybrid cloud solution with the added security of a single-tenant infrastructure. Here is an example of how a typical setup might look, from their website:

Martini Media, the leading digital advertising platform for reaching affluent U.S. consumers, has already deployed GoGrid's Big Data Solution. Martini's platform requires substantial processing power to handle more than 250 million online events each day. "We considered four providers, and only GoGrid offered everything we wanted," said Manicka Babu, VP of engineering at Martini Media. "Most important was the hybrid architecture. The improvements in Cassandra replication and latency are impressive."

GoGrid now has a collection of powerful management and analysis tools that can scale up easily and handle hosted private clouds. While not for everyone, the Big Data Solution is appropriate when you know you will be going from a cold start to fairly heavy data loads quickly. It is now available for $3,800 per month, and all customers that sign up for a year's subscription will get 20% off.

The new services include:

1. Reputation security-based content protection. CloudFlare's core reputation security blocks attacks and malicious traffic of all kinds, including abusive scrapers looking to steal your text, images and email addresses. ScrapeShield layers content protection on top of reputation security. Whether you are protecting your words, images or email addresses, ScrapeShield ensures your content remains yours - and lets you track any misuse.
2. Content theft tracking. If anyone steals your content, the service will track where it appears and take action. Content tracking works automatically on every page of your website that is included in the overall Cloudflare management service.
3. Pinterest blocking. To prevent your content from being "pinned," ScrapeShield can automatically add a small snippet of code to your site that Pinterest respects and will avoid people copying your images to their site.
4. Email obfuscation. Email address obfuscation prevents malicious bots from harvesting email addresses on your site and prevents spam, while keeping addresses visible to your human visitors.
5. Hotlink protection. Hotlink protection prevents other sites from stealing your bandwidth and using images hosted on your site for display on sites that do not belong to you. All images residing on your site are automatically protected if Hotlink protection is enabled. Anyone who attempts to reference an image on your site with Hotlink protection will see a broken image instead.

These services are now included in the pricing structure for the overall CloudFlare-managed services, which include a wide range of security, tracking and ad-serving services. The free plan includes support for a single website for up to three page rules, and other plans start at $20 per month for the first website, and can be used to manage multiple sites and include additional managed services. The new ScrapeShield service is available in both plans.

Starting now, you'll be able to download enterprise-class apps that directly use your Box.net cloud-based workspace, and build what is essentially a virtual desktop around that space. The OneCloud service from the company we now call just "Box" launches today, with nearly three dozen apps in the charter ecosystem, including an iOS version of QuickOffice, the well-known office productivity suite for smartphones.

The goal, which Box VP for Platform Engineering Matthew Self articulated for ReadWriteWeb in an interview, is to eventually enable a cross-platform cloud deployment complex, where all your files in the cloud can be created and edited by apps for iOS, Android and eventually Windows 8 Metro.

"We're transitioning from a world where the enterprise, and all of your enterprise content, are within the confines of your network and with applications you control, to this world where you have the cloud, all these different applications and all these different devices, with their content scattered all over the cloud. What Box is introducing is a solution... that will bring all of that content to a single place. By using Box OneCloud, we can leverage all of the applications that businesses want to use to run their business, and store the data in a single place."

In recent months, consumer-driven storage services like Box and Dropbox have made very fast inroads into enterprises by way of iPad users who need to sync their files across devices. IT departments have been pushing back, looking to establish policies that forbid such services, since they often end up containing confidential files whose accessibility enterprises cannot control.

So to pre-empt this flood of new users from being shut off, Box is building an enterprise apps platform around the storage space. Just like using Finder on the Mac, Self says, you tap a file stored in your Box workspace, and when you're licensed to use the app associated with it, that app opens in-place.

"With QuickOffice, for example, we just open up with that document - [the user] doesn't need to know where it came from or how it was accessed from the cloud, or any of those details. They can just concentrate on their expertise, which is editing the document. When they save back to Box, it actually saves it back to the Box iPad application, and we take care of storing it back into the cloud using the user's credentials."

Self tells RWW that Box will be managing those credentials on behalf of apps that use Box for their cloud storage spaces. This may be a boon to developers who are looking for any help they can get to enable single sign-on (SSO). "For the developers, this is a huge opportunity for them because it lets them concentrate on editing documents and providing their services, without having to build an entire cloud ecosystem just to be able to read and store documents," Self says.

It also shifts a very critical burden onto the shoulders of one company. In the past, an operating system was defined as a control program for launching other programs around a storage device. Essentially, that is what Box.net has become - by the original standard, Box is an operating system, just not on your tablet or your PC. But maybe it doesn't need to be there now, anyway.

In an indication that Box knows full well what it's getting itself into, Self tells RWW the company is extending certain technical benefits to enterprise cloud app developers that use Box as their storage device of choice. Saving document data back to Box is one example of what it's calling app-to-app integration - which is essentially the same as extending its resources to other programs, like any other operating system. Remarks Self, "It's less than a day's work for applications to integrate with Box OneCloud." He tells RWW the company is considering revenue sharing with its apps partners, but for now, it will simply provide those partners a platform for selling their products under their own licenses.

The enterprise-based environment, Self says, will enable enterprises to have direct control over which apps are used and under what circumstances, potentially limiting cases of policy circumvention. OneCloud service for iOS is available now, with Android expected to be picked up in Q2, and a Metro-style app for Windows 8 later in the year, depending on conditions with Microsoft's current public preview.

The card, called the APEX 2800 and pictured above, plugs into any PCIe slot and runs some software drivers to talk to VMware vSphere 4.1, ESXi 5.0 and View 5.0. By offloading image encoding to a separate hardware encoding card, as much as 50% of, CPU capacity can be recovered, at least according to Teradici's own tests. This means you can have each hypervisor serve up more virtual desktops. If you are running a lot of graphics-intensive VMs, such as Windows 7 with the aero interface enabled, you might want to look into this option. The card costs $2000 and is available from both HP and Dell online stores. The server offload card is compatible with all existing PCoIP clients and VMware View software clients.

It is exactly the type of business model that Salesforce is aiming directly at another huge competitor with dominant market share: this time, WordPress. Salesforce is betting that businesses give WordPress its 50-plus-percent market share in the content management system category because it's the most convenient product to adopt, not because it's best suited to the task. And just like before, Salesforce is doubling down all its chips on a simple domain name: this time, Site.com.

If this picture looks like an ordinary Web site... well, frankly that's the point. It is - it's Salesforce's example of taking information that it ordinarily delivers to internal users of a company, and presenting it to customers externally.

"We are extending the social enterprise out to all of your customers, all of your partners, and all of your prospects," says Andrew Leigh, director of product management for the Force.com platform, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb, "by allowing you through a single cloud-based platform to be able to basically publish any data or any content out to an external audience."

Leigh demonstrated a front end for Site.com that would be generally familiar to anyone who has ever used a forms or site layout tool. Although the user can access the CSS style sheets directly, the front end would prefer to let him drag-and-drop components where they should generally appear on the page. Some components, like "Menu," are smart enough to know the layout of the site, so they can present the right menu to the user at the right time. And as Leigh tells us, Site.com manages the process of selecting the right layout template for the end user's browser and device, so the same site appears on a PC as on a tablet as on a smartphone.

"If you look at the Web sites that are built and run on Site.com, they use all the latest social widgets, all the latest multimedia, they have the freshest and most compelling content - it's coming instantly from the back-office systems of the company. They're the most compelling Web sites on the Internet today," remarks Leigh. One live example, he tells us, will be HP's promotional site - some 3,000 pages which have already gone live using the Site.com beta, and which have already increased HP's site traffic, according to Leigh, by 30%.

The structure of the site is determined through a simple menu system, where classes of "Site Map" pages are assigned to specific templates just as any site designer would expect. "Landing Pages" pertains to resources whose URLs use specific filenames, as opposed to general classes. Obviously from this angle, Site.com is more geared toward publishing static content. However, the dynamic components you drag into place do gather dynamic content from elsewhere in the customer's Force.com stream of assets, including from Salesforce.com itself and from its Data.com resource.

"If you look at the platform that runs the social enterprise, you'll see an amazing amount of common data that's being shared across that enterprise, both with the internal employees and the external customers, partners, and prospects," explains Force.com's Leigh. The roles that employees play in an organization, he adds, may be published externally as descriptions of possible future careers, for a Web site directed toward prospective employees. All the products managed and maintained by a company, and the retail pricing attributed to it, may be integrated into the external site. "Just about anything, whether it's shipping information, order information, billing information - any kind of information you're tracking and managing inside your company, is at some point in time being exposed out to your customers and your prospects to communicate what your business is doing. And that's what Site.com is all about."

Leigh tells RWW that some surcharges may apply in extreme circumstances, to a minority of users for whom bandwidth use explodes. But from now until April 30, all charter customers can sign up two publishers and two contributors for the first site, for a discounted rate of $825 per month. The regular price is $1,500 for that package, plus $125 per month for each additional publisher, and $20 per month for each additional contributor. He reminds us that this is not a beta; Site.com is generally released today.

There are lots of other providers that do offer payouts for missed service milestones, of course. But I liked the way they are making it easy to see their metrics and what you will get when they are off. Take a look at the screenshot below:

For example, if you have to wait more than three hours to spin up a dedicated server, you can take 10% credit on your next bill. (Like that piggybank icon? A nice touch.) Or wait more than an hour to a first responder to your trouble ticket? Take 5% off. One of the features unique to their Bill of Rights is a report card-like functionality that allows SingleHop's customers to see how well their account is being handled. The detailed report shows service records as they compare to the company's guidelines.

SingleHop has two different SLA tiers: the regular SLA (where we took the screenshot) and an enhanced SLA that has faster guarantees and higher credits. All support requests from SingleHop are handled by American employees, and an actual employee and not part of a call center. Now that is bringing a new level of service too.

For example, let's say you want to use Rackspace's Mongo DB service but want to use Amazon for storage. vCider will put encrypted tunnels between the two IaaS providers and give you private IP addresses for your traffic to traverse. One customer, a biochemical library, is running a Cassandra database in Holland and using AWS in the US for storage and has connected the two locations. They claim the latencies are small and network performance isn't an issue. Using vCider means you don't have to deploy OpenVPN or other equivalent solutions too, which in some cases provides a big boost in performance. The customer cited above saw a six percent improvement by forgoing OpenVPN.

New to the v2 version is a virtual network switch that can cloak your network access, so only traffic from the encrypted tunnel is allowed into your servers.

vCider is available now for any cloud-based instance of modern Linux kernels v2.6 and above. It is not yet available for any Windows instances. You can deploy up to eight systems free of charge, and prices start at $100 per month for up to 16 systems in a virtual private cloud. You can get more information on vCider here.

The idea is to deliver Amazon EC2-style features but behind a corporate firewall.

You can read more about the details of the Nimbula Director v2 release here. The 2.0 version is in beta and expected to be available next month, and will be free for existing users and up to 40 cores, with a fee-based service for larger installations.

That product had been described as a "virtual storage appliance" - in fact, it was given that name in Red Hat graphs we used. Today, Red Hat announced the, um, virtual version of that, for use in pooling elastic storage from Amazon Elastic Block Storage.

Here's the full and complete name of the product now: Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services. Although there will probably continue to be folks who call it "Gluster for Amazon."

"After the acquisition, we essentially rebranded the virtual storage appliance for Amazon Web Services for Red Hat," says Tom Trainer, Red Hat's software product marketing manager, in an interview with RWW. "The basic premise here is that we deliver inside Amazon Web services NAS in the cloud."

Trainer tells us his strategy in competing against object store technologies such as CAstor will be to emphasize ease of transition and ease of management for data centers' existing file structures. Since Amazon's EC2 storage structure is POSIX-compliant, and Linux-based data centers are also POSIX-compliant, he characterizes deploying a massive database in Amazon's cloud via the new Red Hat Virtual Appliance as more of a relocation than a transmutation.

"If you're not rewriting your applications, then you have been reliant upon a physical appliance in the data center to package up those files, turn them into objects, and push them to the cloud," explains Trainer. "And in most cases, those objects that are being pushed to the cloud are for backup or archiving. The problem therein lies is, they're providing a bridge but they're not really solving the widespread dilemma that users have had, in being able to port their applications directly into the cloud."

One charter customer he described specifically eschewed the use of a bridge or an appliance for changing the data structure, even if the effects of those changes were abstracted and the result looked like an ordinary storage pool. It wanted a one-to-one transfer, especially since its applications were geared for Amazon EC2 instances. "Now they're building their development apps in the cloud, and running it just as if it ran in the data center," he says, "but not buying the additional compute servers and mass hardware appliances that they traditionally purchased, and then had to keep for three to five years to amortize it over time. They've taken their cap-ex and physical software licenses, and moved it to an op-ex environment where they're only paying for services and time."

So if a new customer wants to deploy a clustered file server with two EC2 instances and 150 TB of storage, the Red Hat appliance will attach that much EBS to those instances as part of its automated installation procedure. "We stripe our whole file system across all of that, and we benefit from parallelization of the I/O," Red Hat's Trainer explains. "That helps to compensate for and overcome a lot of the performance issues that users have faced in trying to build something like a file server within Amazon. What they run into is the mass network bottleneck that could exist within a public cloud."

Once this customer began moving its own customers' resources into Amazon's cloud through Red Hat's appliance, Trainer reports it could then completely renegotiate new terms with those customers, reducing their costs in turn.

Earlier today, Amazon announced a big price drop for its S3 storage service, weighted towards its lower-capacity users. S3 is an object store, unlike EC2 which utilizes virtual devices.

Like other social Intranet products, Alfresco users can like or follow particular content streams. Enterprise v4 has integrated connectors to Google Docs, Microsoft Office, QuickOffice, Adobe Creative Suite and Apple's iWork app. You can also publish your content to YouTube, SlideShare, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Pricing for an Alfresco Enterprise subscription starts at about $25k for the typical enterprise. You can download the new software here.