Your next suitcase might follow close at your heels as you make your way through the airport. Tell Roomba to clear out space in the closet.

Built by a member of CargoCollective's creative online community, Hop (think: bellhop) uses three built-in sensors that communicate via Bluetooth with your cellphone. Hop! follows your phone at a set distance with the aid of two simple caterpillar tracks built into the bottom.  

Should Hop get separated from you (or the signal become too weak to receive), the suitcase will lock itself and alert your phone. It’s not clear how you would find the suitcase after it has alerted you to being lost - this is a prototype and the webpage is sparse - but some sort of GPS tracking device is probably in order.  

Hop doesn’t shake, beep and unpack itself yet, but its creator has big dreams, calling it the “next generation of luggage.”  

“If a suitcase can move by itself, besides facilitating the lives of a large number of travellers, families, disabled people, [it] could also spare all the elements that moves externally the baggage (conveyor belts, carts),” writes the unnamed creator on the official Hop website.

Multiple Hops can also be programmed to follow one another - a nifty feature for family-friendly travel.

If you do your best thinking in the shower, you either have soggy wads of paper on the floor or a lot of forgotten ideas. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Check out Aqua Notes. For $7, you get a waterproof notepad on which to jot brilliant ideas that occur as you're scrubbing down. Finally, multitasking while getting your shower on, and, potentially, turning inspiration into realization.

The reason we forget, is a notion psychologists call retrieval failure, which means if information is not retrieved and rehearsed, you forget it. So what's the answer to remembering -- truly remembering? Writing it down so it doesn't decay!

This isn't the be-all for we memory-impaired, but let's be honest, you're more likely to use Aqua Notes for shopping lists or as a reminder to call the woman you met -- after the obligatory three-day wait is satisfied.  

In either case, it's worth $7 not to forget.

Photo by Steven Depolo

If Intel has its way, touch will be just one of the ways to control Windows 8 ultrabooks. The chipmaker is looking to add voice commands and Kinect-like gestures for what it calls “perceptual computing.”

On Tuesday, Intel announced a partnership with Nuance Communications to put a locally hosted voice recognition app on certain Windows 8 PCs, including devices from Dell. Intel has also partnered with Creative Technology - formerly known as Creative Labs, one of the early designers of PC sound cards - to design a Kinect-like camera that could eventually be integrated into the notebooks just as Webcams are now a standard feature for portable computers.

To kick things off, Intel also announced a software development kit to enable software developers to start creating applications that can take advantage of the new interfaces. Features include 2D/3D object tracking to enable augmented reality applications and even a sort of facial recognition to identify and personalize applications to specific users.

Perceptual Computing

“Your gestures, face, voice - all of those provide a more interactive, immersive experience, said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group at Intel, speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

(For more on the Intel Developer Forum, see Intel Dabbles In Science Fiction and Is This The World’s Smartest Coke Machine?)

Windows 8 PCs will be convertible, detachable and swivel-able. “The industry is going to bring more hardware innovation in the next 12 months than I’ve seen in 20 years at Intel,” Skaugen said.

The move beyond touch is a revival of sorts for voice control and dictation on the PC, which sprang into the market years ago with Nuance, Dragon Systems, and even Microsoft’s built-in voice commands. But the technology essentially fizzled, as users chose to use simpler, faster keyboard shortcuts and simply learned to type faster. Although Skaugen didn’t call them out specifically, the resurgence of voice control in Apple’s Siri and Google Android’s voice commands are clearly helping spark interest in voice control.

Meanwhile, the Interactive Gesture Camera from Creative, a development platform, will track the user’s eyes, nose, and mouth, and be able to detect smiles and other moods. Skaugen said the 720p camera will cost about $149. Eventually, according to Intel’s PC processor chief Dadi Perlmutter, the technology will be integrated into a standard notebook.

The camera, which actually looks a bit ugly squatting on top of a monitor, will track the user’s face, identifying the user and possibly limiting his access. That’s important, Skaugen said, as he described handing over his tablet to his young son. “I hand him the tablet to play Angry Birds to get ten minutes of shuteye, and the next thing I know he’s emailing my CEO.”

The camera will also be able to identify a user’s hands and fingers, sensing the presence of the user from 6 inches to a depth of three feet. That’s ideal, Skaugen said, for kitchen applications where a user doesn’t want to get his touchscreen monitor greasy. The camera will be able to detect gestures and hand positions, such as a thumbs-up gesture. Intel also claimed that its software development kit or SDK will be able to superimpose 3D virtual objects onto a person, such as a pair of glasses or a virtual hat.

"80% of communication is non-verbal, so smiles, blinks, gestures and all these sort of things make communication more immersive," Skaugen said.

Skaugen showed off two example prototype apps that took advantage of the camera: one, a virtual solar system, "exploded" into view when the user spread his hands. The other, a cute kung fu game, challenged a user to block patty-cake-styled "attacks" from an animated squirrel.

What’s Behind The New Interfaces?

"We've had voice and gesture for some time, but it hasn't really worked,” said Martin Reynolds, a vice president and fellow with Gartner. “Part of the reason is the software and part of the reason is the peripherals, and enough processing power to make it run. What we're seeing here is Intel attacking on this on all three fronts: developing the software, bumping the performance and working on the peripherals. Now how long that will take to create great results? Not clear. But this is clearly a shift." 

“This is a long-term initiative,” added Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights. “It brings in two industry buzzwords: the Internet of things, and also natural user interface. But the essence of it is new ways to interact with your PC. So voice and machine vision. What’s going to happen is that the computer will understand context, it will understand everything that’s going on around you and interact with you and with other devices in new ways. That’s really the big picture.”

Perhaps influenced by the consumerization of IT, where iPhones and Gmail are invading the data center, or simply by the realization that you can surf the Web just fine on a three-year-old PC, Intel has ditched the “speeds and feeds” discussions of previous years - a decision that an Intel source said prompted some grumbling among the company's more traditional, engineering-oriented employees.  Granted, the company did announce its fourth-generation of Core microprocessors, code-named “Haswell.” But Intel completely glossed over mentions of core voltages, cache sizes and even clock speeds. Today’s watchword is “capabilities.”

Intel is even working with Sony on the Tap 20 - an all-in-one PC that’s resembles a giant tablet. (Think of it as a desktop PC with batteries.)

Overall, though, Intel continues to focus on ultrabooks - MacBook Air-like thin-and-light notebooks that Intel claims could comprise 40% of all consumer PCs sold this holiday season. By the end of the year, more than 70 different ultrabook designs will be on the market, Intel predicts, many of them equipped with touch capability, and priced starting at about $699. Apparently, Intel sees ultrabooks as a perfect delivery platform for perceptual computing.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. Other images by Mark Hachman.

Can a computer that is slightly more expensive than others with the same components, doesn't run the software people are accustomed to, relies on users to store their personal treasures on someone else's cloud, and may or may not recognize the devices plugged into it, really find success? Are we really asking this question as though the answer could be "Yes"?

A personal computer is inherently different from a software platform. Historically, consumers and businesses haven't invested in computer equipment for the quality of its software platform alone. If they did, the Macintosh question would have been settled in 1985. Instead, the majority of buyers make investments (often with great reluctance) in software platforms by virtue of their being supported by safe, reliable and compatible systems that won't get them into trouble.

There is nothing about the new generation of Web apps that will magically change this trend. To be frightfully honest, there is nothing about the virtue of being a Web app that elevates it to the level of good. Yet Google's repeated gamble with the second round of Chromebook and Chromebox (introduced Tuesday; for more details see New Chromebook and Chromebox Are Good Enough to Grab Minds and Market Share, by ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell), is that the quality of Web apps in themselves has risen to such a level that consumers will be willing to overlook the discrepancies between a Web platform and a real operating system, and actually spend a small premium for something inferior to a typical PC.

If consumers refused to spend less money (as was the case in the 1980s and '90s) for something that was clearly more than a PC, it seems certain now that they will refuse to spend more money for something that is less.

Lest We Forget the Spec Sheet

A Samsung Chromebook is today, in essence, an Intel Celeron 867-based PC system with a 16GB solid-state drive instead of a 320GB (or thereabouts) hard drive, 4GB of (apparently non-expandable) RAM, two USB ports and no built-in DVD drive. Its suggested retail price is $549 which, if it were applied to the Windows ultraportable market, would probably translate to a street price of less than $500. But discounts come as a result of competition with other machines in its class, and as Google keeps reminding us, there are no other machines in this class. So for now, $549 is probably the street price.

Let's take the perspective of actual consumers and businesses. Let's ask the kinds of questions that humans will ask when they see one of these Chromebooks for the first time. 

First, obviously there's no optical disc drive, yet the software would have me store all my files on this cloud-based service called Google Drive. So how do I get my existing files from here to there? Presumably I would plug a storage device into one of the USB ports. Will the operating system recognize my storage device? This is an important but unanswered question. Perhaps this thing recognizes most flash-based USB thumb drives in the world (again, an assumption) but will it read data from a Western Digital My Passport or Seagate Expansion drive? Windows 7 needed to download new drivers to recognize the latest My Passport drives (I've watched it happen). When a new class of hardware comes out, is Chrome OS equipped to download the latest drivers?

The driver issue is important for another reason: Can I print stuff? Granted, it doesn't cost that much these days to go buy another printer (the ink is another story, of course). But how do we know whether any particular printer will work with a Chromebook? And even assuming it "works," what does that mean, exactly? Do users have to upload photos before they print them? Can you look at the photos on your external drive or Google Drive (or wherever), select a handful of them, send them to the printer and make photos? Or do you need an app for that? And if you do need an app, which one?

And what about video cameras? This Chromebook thing doesn't have a DVD player, but can it play movies? One of the tremendous responsibilities of a real operating system, which we may tend to forget, is that it must recognize, welcome and interface with all classes of hardware. Equally important is the requirement to play nicely with a variety of classes of media. Media comes from many places, not just online. It would certainly be convenient if all the media producers were to suddenly adopt a single format. It would be even more convenient for Google if that format was WebM. But this will never happen.

As nice as it might be to pretend our digital lives will be seamlessly transported (like a plot from a lesser Star Trek movie) to a world in the cloud, this too will never happen. No so long as people worry about the security of their precious media.

Whom Do We Ask for Help?

For a consumer standing in a Best Buy or similar retail store, asking these real-world questions of the salesperson and watching her fidget as she tries to remember whom she should ask to get the response, there's not going to be a lot of confidence. Especially when they're standing next to a variety of competing machines, say Lenovo's ThinkPad 2338A (known elsewhere as ThinkPad X130e-2338-A14). 

First of all, Lenovo is a better-known brand than Samsung, and the machine comes with the same Intel Celeron 867 1.3 GHz processor, as well as 320GB of storage built-in and three USB ports instead of two. Online shoppers, meanwhile, might look at Dell's Vostro V131, whose starter configuration also features the Celeron 867. 

Either way, there are no worries about plugging in just about any external device, and the machines cost about $500, which either matches or beats the Samsung's price. For a little more, they could upgrade to a Core i3 processor, which is like upgrading from a four- to a six-cylinder engine.

At this point, you have to ask what is so special about not running Windows that it's worth paying extra for? ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus points out that Chromebook users won't have to buy software (More Bad News for HP: The New Google Chromebook Compared to a Typical HP Laptop), but that misses the point. After all, you can run Chrome for Mac or Windows right now if you want to. Besides, there is already a market for slightly-less-than-average-performance, slightly higher-than-average-priced non-PCs. Just look inside any airport, coffee house or design studio: Apple has absorbed that market in totum.

In Search of a Bottom Line

So remind me, once again: Is there some sensible value proposition for owning a Chromebook that I completely missed? If I'm going to make this leap of faith, what exactly should I expect to get? Our friends at Engadget have an answer. Writes Dana Wollman, "Seriously, folks, you're looking at a $449 netbook-like machine whose island-style keys put thousand-dollar Ultrabooks to shame."

And there you have it. A Samsung Chromebook with Google Chrome OS is a system with those Mac-ish square keys, but at half the price! Of course, to add 3G connectivity (which I would need in order to, say, access all my files whenever I need them), then that's a $100 extra option. Even without it, though, doesn't it look like a real Mac, almost? For that matter, doesn't anything from Vtech look slightly like a real PC?

When everyday consumers and businesses look at supposedly knowledgeable computer-types as though we're from Mars - it's usually because we're from Mars. We've become so in awe of the idea of "mobile connectivity" that we forget to ask questions. Thankfully, real people haven't yet lost that ability. Which is why the Chromebook will never become a real PC until it has a real OS. Until then, it's a cheap keyboard.

Infographics are still a thing with a lot of companies, if my inbox is any indication. Easel.ly, a service that recently debuted in beta, is making it easy to create infographics online. Whether it should is another question.

Easel.ly is a Web-based tool for creating infographics. It's still in its early stages, so you'll find some rough edges, but it does live up to the "easy to use" promise. Select a theme, your objects and shapes, plop in some text, and you can have a passable-looking infographic in a very short amount of time.

Right now it seems to be missing a way to actually develop charts inside the tool - there's just a placeholder for charts that drops in one static chart image. The color palette is "coming soon," and the SVG export contains errors - at least as far as Chrome and Firefox are concerned. But, this is a beta product. Assuming the Easel.ly folks get the kinks worked out and fill out its features, it should be able to generate decent-looking infographics pretty soon.

Easel.ly doesn't seem to be the only game in town for quick-and-dirty infographics, either. There's visual.ly, which seems to have a few stock infographics you can create. I haven't tried that one, though, because it requires authorizing via Twitter or Facebook. (Sorry, kids, I am not willing to give you access to my social media accounts just to create a lame infographic.)

Does the World Need More Infographics?

Judging by the number of infographics that are pitched to ReadWriteWeb, there's a lot of demand for creating infographics. Unfortunately, there's a lot more pink slime in infographics than actual beef these days.

To put it another way, most infographics suck. It was true when we wrote that last November, and it hasn't gotten any better; if anything, it's gotten worse, as companies keep churning out infographics in the hopes of a "viral" campaign. When infographics started to become popular, many were just thinly disguised promotional vehicles with dodgy data and a lot of self-promotion. Lately, they've dropped the pretense and just gone whole-hog on the self-promotion.

Want an example? I'll pick on one of my former employers, who pitched me an infographic on 20 years of SUSE history (PDF). Now, there's nothing wrong with SUSE promoting its 20th anniversary. There's really nothing wrong with creating a nifty graphic that illustrates SUSE's achievements over the years. But calling this an "infographic" is stretching the term to near breaking. At best, it's a timeline with a few numbers thrown in. (Also, somebody needs to get the chameleon to the vet, pronto. It's not looking very good.)

There's this one from RewardLoop that is entirely self-promotional. Domo has one about "the incredible data explosion" that is as confusing as it is light on actual data. In the "Competitive Edge" section, it is entirely unclear whether individual companies are being compared, or industries as a whole.

The point isn't to pick on these companies, though, but to illustrate a point: Infographics are apparently not that difficult to create. The Web is littered with them. But good infographics are difficult to create, because it means having worthwhile information and putting it in context - not just slapping some pixels together in a semi-pleasing manner to help with your branding.

When there's a Web-based app that does that, I'll be very interested.

One beautiful site I came across today is Art.sy, an art social network currently in private beta. The colorful art works are visually stunning. The images contrast nicely with the white background and black navigation fonts of the site. The art works are displayed as high resolution images, which allows you to zoom in for a much closer look. Here are some screenshots showing how I was able to get an up-close-and-personal view of an art piece called 'Kaleidoscope' by Marcelo Silveira.

The photo sharing app is one of the most common types of apps on the Web. Flickr was the darling of the Web 2.0 era, Instagram became the mobile web photo tool of choice. Could 500px become the photo sharing app for the Visual Web?

Our own Jon Mitchell nailed it, when he compared 500px to Flickr: "...500px has a stylish interface and more attractive photo presentation, arguably the most important feature for a photo site. It has a great new uploader app for the Mac and a gorgeous new viewer on the iPad. Flickr's growth has slowed under Yahoo, and 500px is shipping worthy features for the 2012 Web at a prodigious rate."

Being beautiful is just part of the equation, of course. Johnny Depp may be an incredibly handsome man, but it was his intelligence, quirkiness and charm that made him a superstar. So the likes of Art.sy and 500px will need to do a lot more than just look pretty. They need network effects, which means there must be a compelling reason for people to come back and use these services every day.

Being beautiful isn't that reason, although it doesn't harm their prospects for success.

Let us know your favorite beautiful app or website, in the comments - or via Twitter, Facebook or Google+. We'll follow-up with another post after we compile your picks.

See also: 10 Beautiful Apps & Websites To Drool Over

Red Hat is planning such a move, as part of its ongoing beta of what’s now called Red Hat Storage 2.0 (RHS 2). The company’s Tom Trainer, a veteran of the storage industry, spoke with ReadWriteWeb about this latest unreported revolution.

Making Hadoop One Less Silo

“It’s more than compatibility; it’s a new and innovative way to access machine-generated data, where it’s been lumped and siloed away in multiple HDFS silos,” Trainer said. He’s referring to the Hadoop File System, the big data architecture’s fault-tolerant, distributed file system. “Now there’s a new door, a new way of looking in and shed light on those files, and move them around the enterprise as objects very quickly... As we see it, Storage 2.0 enables storing both HDFS files and now NFS and CIFS as well, and then also object storage capability.”

RHS 2, he continues, “will be able to take Hadoop files out as groups of files, [but] as objects, and export them to other environments to exploit the data within those files in new and creative ways. Information accessibility in the Hadoop environment is now broadened with Red Hat Storage 2.0.”

In the Hadoop architecture, the NameNode is the server responsible for managing the names, metadata and locations of all the Hadoop data clusters in the system, wherever they may reside. Its architecture is actually fairly simple, and from Trainer’s point of view, a little too fundamental. While it can map the identity of a cluster to multiple locations, thereby enabling very simple and even robust data duplication, the file system it’s based on is rather basic, borrowing perhaps too much from the older world of file storage, when names like Novell ruled.

In RHS 2.0, Red Hat’s engineers have come up with a way, Trainer explains, for the object storage mechanism (which he still calls GlusterFS) to either coexist with HDFS or replace it altogether. The latter, he says, may be preferable: “That completely eliminates the name node in the architecture of the file system... and thereby changes the overall performance characteristic of the Hadoop environment, and also changes the information accessibility characteristic of the Hadoop environment.”

The Competing View of Unified Storage

EMC also uses the phrase “unified storage” to refer to its architecture. In January 2011, that company unveiled its VNX system, with the intent of letting customers merge storage area networks and network-attached storage systems into one pool - all of it bearing the EMC brand, of course.  EMC probably didn’t expect to find itself competing, in about a year’s time, with a pure-play software company whose private cloud strategy is built around existing, prevalent, commodity hardware.

Trainer argues that in the EMC system, storage components may share the same pool, but they remain segregated. “We find many IT organizations have storage farms, if you will. Today, you have storage environments that may have been selected by upper management based on business relationships, business requirements, price or some unique feature that the storage hardware vendor had in the past. When they look at scale-out NAS requirements, and then look at what's available on the market, they primarily had a choice between specific storage hardware vendors - and there were pretty high costs associated with that. Today, they’re able to deploy lower-cost commodity storage and servers as scale-out, turnkey NAS, or they can redeploy some of their already-existing servers as storage assets - that’s a money-saver in itself.”

Red Hat is still accepting applications for companies interested in joining its managed RHS 2 beta program. As Trainer described it, these would be organizations that would be willing to set up a cache of existing hardware in a nonproduction environment. Although some customers are tempted to try the beta in a production environment - for instance, storing multiple unstructured files, such as videos - Red Hat advises against this.

“At Red Hat, we have a Storage Compatibility List, and that’s typically for production-level products. In our beta process, we have used it as a guide for our beta customers to indicate the kinds of server and storage environments we’re looking to beta test on,” Trainer said. While some beta testers agree, other customers have presented brands of equipment that fall outside the compatibility list, some of which meet Red Hat’s requirements for the test.

A New Security Risk?

In recent days, RWW has heard from analysts and experts around the idea that merging a new object storage model with a relatively new data model could create a potential hazard, the risks for which security companies have yet to fully fathom.

We put that notion to Red Hat’s Tom Trainer. “Having previously worked for a three-letter, monolithic storage company,” he responded, “it’s very easy to throw FUD out there and say, ‘Oh my gosh, this is new and untested and unproven, and there are security concerns and potential holes!’ That phrase holds true for every new and innovative technology that’s ever been released.”

If the fountain of all network security spouts forth from security companies reacting to exploits, then possibly every innovation is a security risk, at least for a period of time. This is one reason beta testing was invented in the first place. Red Hat has a good history with managed beta programs, and Trainer says his company is working with testers to redefine firewall boundaries and redirect workflows so that security may be innovated along with data access.

Today, Windows PC makers are trying to use price to grab market share from Apple. The target is Apple's MacBook Air, which today accounts for 89 percent of light-and-thin laptops - an emerging category Intel calls "ultrabooks" - according to International Strategy & Investment Group.

Ultrabooks entering the market today from vendors Acer, Asus, Toshiba, Lenovo, LG and Hewlett-Packard are going head-to-head against the basic Air, which costs $1,000 (fully tricked-out models cost almost $1,800). For Windows PC buyers used to spending less than $400 for a basic laptop, current ultrabook prices of between $900 and $1,000 are way too high.

That gap will narrow by the fourth quarter, when ultrabook pricing is expected to fall to $700. So, should Apple worry? Hardly.

As Jobs said in pooh-poohing netbooks, "There are some customers which we chose not to serve." And those customers are the ones looking for the most basic laptop at a rock-bottom price.

What You Get for $700

Which is exactly what they will get for $700, according research firm IHS iSuppli, which does tear-down analysis for consumer electronics. First, those discount ultrabooks will rely on older microprocessors. Higher-end systems will get Intel's Ivy Bridge processor, a 22-nanometer chip that could ship as early as this month. People who can afford only $700 will have to wait until next year for an Ivy Bridge system, after Intel releases the chip's successor, codenamed Haswell.

More compromises will come in display, storage and memory. Cheap ultrabook screens will stay stuck at 1366 x 768, compared to the 13-inch MacBook Air's 1440 x 900. Perhaps most significantly, storage will likely be handled by a conventional 2.5-inch hard drive instead of the pricier solid-state drives that make using a high-end ultrabook such a fast, seamless experience. Memory capacity will also be less: 2 GB versus 4 GB in higher-end systems.

Also, by the end of the year, high-end ultrabooks (including the Air) are expected to begin using touchscreens. You won't see that in a $700 ultrabook. In addition, entry-level ultrabooks will likely have standard Wi-Fi with 4G wireless connections saved for the more expensive models.

Apple's unibody chassis, which is cut from a single piece of aluminum, is also expected to be a differentiator - at least until the fourth quarter. That's because Apple currently consumes most of the global manufacturing capacity for these kinds of cases, and it's going to take time for case manufacturers to be able to accommodate other computer makers. In the meantime, competitors will have to settle for a plastic case that won't be as sturdy or look as elegant.

To turn a profit on a $700 ultrabook, computer makers will need to get the cost of materials down to $500, said Kevin Keller, senior principal analyst for iSuppli. "In a low-end ultrabook, you will have the same features as a low-end conventional laptop." For many consumers and businesses, that may be enough. A basic ultrabook will certainly be capable of running Microsoft Office and standard video, and accessing most Web services, albeit a bit more slowly. "It always depends on what people are looking for," Keller said.

Not the Same Thing As a MacBook Air

But no matter how you cut it, plastic ultrabooks with poky processors and conventional hard drives will have a hard time competing directly with the MacBook Air. "An ultrabook in a plastic enclosure just looks like a thin laptop, as opposed to an entirely new product," Keller said.

But that doesn't mean some people won't buy them, so even though MacBook Air sales are expected to continue to grow, Apple's share of the overall ultrabook market is expected to shrink to 32% by 2013, according to International Strategy & Investment Group.

The real question, perhaps, is not whether PC makers can come up with $700 ultrabooks to appeal to cheapskates, but how much they'll have to charge for upcoming high-end Windows 8 ultrabooks that really can take on the MacBook Air.

By Antone Gonsalves

Check Point - the producer of security appliances and software that came to prominence after its acquisition of ZoneAlarm - takes a key step toward building a collective detour system for malicious agents, with something it calls ThreatCloud.

Technically, it's an easy thing to shut off browsers' access to sites whose IP addresses come up on a blacklist; but in practice, it's harder to convince users to pay attention to these warnings than it is to tell them they've won a free iPad and to click this link to claim it.

So what if the security industry could essentially say, if we know this site isn't a good one, let's build technology that makes it inaccessible? Well, we've seen what happens when Congress tries to enact this concept through legislation: We get SOPA. But when you take the lobbyists out of the picture, perhaps suddenly it's a good idea. At least, that's the idea behind ThreatCloud.

"We've had monthly, then weekly updates. But now you almost need up-to-the-minute updates with threat intelligence," says Fred Kost, Check Point's head of product marketing, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "It's not just one single piece of intelligence; you really need that multilayered, multiperspective view. So with ThreatCloud, we can collect information from our Check Point security gateways and bring it up into the cloud. The second way we get that information is through Check Point sensors, which are deployed through publicly facing places, strategic locations where we can get a view of traffic and things that are going on. These are dedicated sensors that we've managed to get placed in the network around the world."

Through this new system, Kost says, Check Point was able to scan 250 billion IP addresses, combining various sources of behavioral intelligence to isolate specific ranges of some 300,000 addresses. Some of the intelligence the company receives is machine-readable; other parts require human analysis. But the product, for now, includes some 4.5 million malware signatures - a number which can now grow daily.

Check Point calls its endpoint software components "blades," which can be a bit confusing for folks who expect a blade to be a server or even an appliance. Competitors call similar classes of components "virtual appliances." The idea, Kost explains, is that his company provides security products and services through a platform, and a blade is an attachment to that platform. Depending on how the data center is set up, that blade may manifest itself as a physical or virtual appliance.

The company's anti-bot software blade, announced last October and released this week, will enable the new ThreatCloud to amass information about botnet-driven infections. "We have multi-tier discovery, so we look at the command and control behavior of the bots - we look at the IT address that it's trying to connect up to URLs it may be using... and sometimes it's the communication pattern," says Kost. "We may see weird DNS or weird HTTP communications, so there may be behavioral things in the way the bot is communicating. So we may not know exactly the destination IPs of its control network, but we may know the behavior and we might see that bot launching spam from an endpoint.

"The important part is, once we've discovered it, we can actually shut off that connection to that command and control network." Severing communication to the suspicious IP address, he asserts, renders the botnet ineffective. The behavioral data then remains in an auditable form in the cloud, enabling Check Point to assist in forensic investigations.

Could this level of intelligence be used to cut off access to suspicious IP addresses at the network level? "Absolutely," responds Kost, "and you can see where our service provider customers might be very interested in this.

"There's been the notion of 'clean pipes.' If you're a service provider moving traffic around, your ability to make sure your community of customers isn't part of a botnet is a value-add to them, as well as to the network operator. You could envision a case where a service provider might use this to have a cleaner network and stop bots."

The enablement of ThreatCloud comes by way of a rollout this week of a new operating system for that platform (most platforms do have something that qualifies as an operating system, and here Check Point opts not to use a euphemism). The rollout - which goes by the unromantic title R75.40 - contains a newly merged OS architecture called GAiA, which has been in testing with enterprise customers for about two years.

One of the potential benefits of this operating system to the IT department is a GAiA feature within Check Point's management blades called SmartLog, which is essentially a simplification of how logs are presented. Since a log is a database, its reports should be rendered and sortable like a live database.

"SmartLog's focused on taking very large log files, with billions of records, and making them 1) very fast to search, and 2) very easy. So you get split-second, Google-like search capabilities," Kost explains. In prior versions of the product you might have actually had to write a query, run it against the log, and retrieve a report full of pages of results. "Now there's a Google-like search bar, and you can give it contextual words - like 'Scott remote access' - and it'll bring back anything that is remotely related to Scott that spans these billions of log records very, very quickly... It makes it much easier for customers to parse through these billions and billions of log files."

As it turns out, MokaFive for iOS is not a Windows or Mac virtualization platform for iPad, as many had expected. From the IT department's perspective, it may actually be better: a secure storage platform that enables corporate data saved from the corporate PC at work and the notebook PC at home, to be viewable and manageable on an iPad.

As company COO Purnima Padmanabhan explained to ReadWriteWeb, MokaFive for iOS makes an iPad or iPhone into a bridge between the two clients - work PC and home PC, especially when that work PC contains a MokaFive virtual "Live PC" environment. But that bridge will be manageable by corporate policy.

"If you have the entire MokaFive solution, MokaFive Live PC contains your entire corporate desktop," explained Padmanabhan. "So you will have user data files on your corporate desktop, which will be backed up to your data center. And the data center will contain the golden copy of all your data, which is then synced down to the iPad for viewing purposes."

It's the cloud... kind of. In fact, Padmanabhan uses the metaphor "bubble" to describe it instead, and it's a word she's chosen carefully. You can pop a bubble; and there are circumstances where either you or IT may need to pop this one.

"Let's say I drop my iPad into a pond, or completely lose it. My data is still recovered and intact. I can just go get a new iPad, the corporation will restore the data for me, and I'm up and running... [Now] let's say I join the company, I've got my MacBook Air, and my iPad. When I walk in, [IT] will provision a MokaFive Live PC with a full virtual desktop onto my MacBook Air, and then they will deploy MokaFive for iPad. Now, I can have both environments completely in sync. But they are always controlled centrally, from the management console. And the policies that they establish for me from the central management console apply to both environments. So three months later when I leave, they can just find my username in Active Directory, and say, 'Wipe all instances of the corporate environment.'"

It's provisioning and deprovisioning of resources accessible from the user's choice of equipment (in this case, clients that carry big, bright Apple logos) without the IT department having to touch those clients.

The problem IT departments have had recently with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies and cloud-based storage is that sensitive corporate documents persist when people leave the company (which, as Padmanabhan implied, happens disturbingly often these days). The COO tells me that the complete MokaFive environment, which now includes both the Live PC hypervisor for Macs and the new iOS document management tools, are designed to leave zero traces of corporate data, in case the proverbial bubble has to be popped.

"We wrote our own encryption, and we do not even save the encryption keys in the PC," said Padmanabhan, citing the number of times Apple ID has found itself subject to breaches. "We presume that the device that you have could be your personal device or a corporate-issued device. We have to assume fundamentally that it's untrusted. And if you're presuming the device is untrusted, then you have to make sure the encryption is actually saved in a way that won't depend on any device locks. The application itself has a built-in passcode and password locking, you can authenticate with Active Directory and, if needed, you can also tie in with two-factor authentication. You can also have application-level passcodes."

If a new contractor comes into a company and is issued the same Mac that a previous employee had, then IT can provision a new MokaFive "bubble" on that system without the new employee potentially encountering traces of data from the old employee. "The big advantage is you do not depend any more on trying to manage the whole device in order to actually manage the records," she continued.

"Our value proposition to the CIOs is, manage what matters. Devices are immaterial," she asserted. "What matters is your intellectual property...

The MokaFive solution also tries to take user needs into account. "The most popular solutions for iPads and tablets in the market are mobile device management (MDM) solutions," Padmanabhan said. "And the fundamental problem with MDM is, they take over the management of the entire device. Now, as an iPad user, I can tell you, I don't like it if IT is seeing what books I read or videos I see or applications I'm using. I just want them to manage what is relevant to the company. So this way, there is true separation of the personal and corporate world. Really, we are able to bring those two worlds on a single device, yet keep it safe, secure and, most importantly, private."

Last September, a cloud-based customer-service session manager built on the Salesforce platform called Assistly made a big splash at the Dreamforce '11 convention. Within weeks, Assistly found itself acquired by Salesforce, with the intention of making it the engine behind its Desk.com domain.

Now Assistly has become Desk.com, and in an interview with ReadWriteWeb, its former CEO-turned-Salesforce-VP, Alex Bard, shows off the results of their integration: a jaw-dropping communications nexus that resembles SharePoint for the call center the way an iPad resembles a Palm Pilot.

"The help desk needs to be social. What that means is being able to capture all these customer interactions that are happening in the social scene - through Facebook, through Twitter," Bard says, "and bring them into the same place where you're capturing the interactions through traditional channels, such as cell phone, email and Web."

The hub of the new Desk.com is a multichannel message center, shown above, where phone, SMS, social and email messages are all treated as a single category. It follows multiple cases - threads on a related topic pertaining to a specific customer or customer group. This is what unified communications is supposed to look like.

Bard's example company is a travel services provider. Desk.com's new Business Insights dashboard (pictured up top) features live analytical charts indicating how long it's typically taking to respond to customers - whatever method they're using to communicate, including Twitter - and how long an interval is typically required from first contact to resolution, among other factors.

"First contact resolution, case reopen rate, average handle times - all these things, we've brought together on one dashboard," explains Bard, "to help them at a glance to understand, 'These are the things I should be tracking, and these are the things I should understand historically inside my company.'"

Clicking on the Case Volume Overview chart pulls up this detailed breakdown, which can help a case manager determine the nature of service spikes such as the one simulated here. Because cases are tagged with categorical context, the drill-down shown below can display the relevant topics associated with cases - in this example, the launch of the company's summer catalog.

In this example drill-down (click the screenshot for a larger view), a huge percentage of customers' questions concern travel in Greece, which in Bard's example is the site of an earthquake. To handle the 151 customer inquiries about Greece in due course, Desk.com lets users create a macro for customer responses, and then distribute that macro to team members who may be delivering the response.

The list above shows Bard's example macro for responding to Greek earthquake inquiries. This isn't a programmed macro like something you'd find in Excel, but rather a set of automatic triggered conditions. In this case, the Greece macro 1) adds a label to incoming messages, flagging both the summer catalog and poor travel conditions for future reporting; 2) sets the case priority; 3) sets the case status to Resolved once the customer is adequately contacted; 4) provides a response template that includes most or all of an email response to the customer, using the customer's name and tailored, if necessary, to other customer characteristics.

The screenshot above (click to enlarge) shows one of the 151 incoming customer messages. That message tripped the two relevant tags - "bad weather" and "summer catalog launch" - and Greece as the relevant location (see the list at left), which in turn enabled the macro. Once this macro is published to all agents handling Greece, the templated text with customer name already added appears in the reply screen. Clicking on Update, Send & Resolve (lower right) processes the personalized customer response, while resetting the case priority lower. "So what normally might have taken a few minutes now literally takes 10 seconds and just a few clicks."

"We perceive companies on one of two sides of this pendulum. On one side, a lot of small businesses don't even know the data that they need to be tracking," explains Bard. "They don't understand what the most important indicators are for their support environment. So by looking at this tool, at the very least we're giving them the education to see, 'What are the things that are important to me?'... On the other end of the scale, you've got companies that are sophisticated, and know the data that they want to see, but traditional reporting systems make it really hard to get to it. You have to go through multiple clicks for multiple reports, and correlate that data. So the first thing you're seeing from Business Insights [in Desk.com] is gathering all the data from all the companies we've talked to, and showing it in a way that's very digestible, very understandable, at a quick glance. The first thing that starts with education."

But then, how does a company go beyond just automated responses? Doesn't it run the risk of appearing automated to the customer? Bard says that Desk.com's macros are "iterative," which he explains to mean something that requires some human interaction. "Through that process, they can continue improving their overall operations. In a social enterprise, this isn't about a standalone department. This is part of the overall social enterprise story, and we're trying to complete that whole social enterprise vision."

Ideally, you should only have to log in once: when you begin your session with your PC, tablet or smartphone. The single sign-on (SSO) ideal is not just about user convenience. Implemented correctly, it could prevent a user's session from being remotely hijacked by a malicious user. Microsoft will be assembling the tools for services to enable some kind of SSO with its upcoming Windows 8. But the viability of those tools will depend not only upon, once again, how well services implement them, but also whether users will trust Facebook, Yahoo, or Microsoft itself to vouch for their identities. Today, there are a multitude of alternative architectures put forth by services opting to be your one source for identity, and ReadWriteWeb has chosen to spotlight three of them.

Radiant Logic RadiantOne

My friend and colleague David Strom introduced you to Radiant Logic last July. As you may recall, it offers what it describes as "identity-as-a-service," and its customers are enterprises looking to federate their employees' identity across multiple applications, both in the cloud and on-premise.

The "as-a-service" phrase is a surprising choice of words from a company that came to be known, and still is known, for providing on-premise identity management tools. How does Radiant Logic manage to provide a service it depicts as inside the firewall, from a cloud-based location that's most definitively outside?

"It's a tough thing to do, but if you look at most enterprises today, they have 80%, 90% of their infrastructure inside the firewall, on-premise," responds Dieter Schuller, the company's VP for business development. "You can't just flip a switch and move everything off-site into the cloud and still have what you have running today."

Michel Prompt, Radiant Logic's CEO, demonstrates for us his company's concept of virtualized identity - providing each enterprise application, both in and outside the cloud, with a token in the format it expects and accepts. His example depicts four classes of prominent Web applications, all of which handle authentication internally, and all of which manage identity criteria for themselves. On paper, they all support some form of identity federation, but in the end they each expect your identity to be "consumable" in a different format, often with varying degrees of content. The challenge for any federation service, Prompt explains, becomes keeping up with the ability to translate identity into the formats all these apps expect, as your business's apps repertoire grows and more identity formats are added to the mix.

The second challenge, Prompt continues, is for the federation service to maintain links between all the different formats, and tie those links to maybe more than one directory service. Microsoft utilizes Active Directory (AD) for Windows, and all of Windows Server's per-user policies regarding permissions and restrictions are tied to each user's AD entry, as well as her Windows password. Oracle Directory Services and Google Apps Directory add their own variations on the theme, even though all are (on paper) implementations of LDAP.

So Radiant Logic's RadiantOne platform, while marketed "as a service," is actually implemented as an "identity hub" whose communication with both cloud apps and on-premise apps takes place with a traditional service (by the Windows Server definition), one that truly does reside on-premise. And while RL gets your attention by marketing its identity service with the hyphens still attached, the actual job of servicing takes place between its virtual directory service component VDS and the applications, wherever they reside. VDS presents a picture of AD to whatever identity system knows how to translate its preferred format for AD.

It's still a federation service, maintains Prompt, because it performs the functions that any other federation service provides. But it does not have to be "architected" by the IT department; it provides this service dynamically. He admits that his company is moving away from the "as-a-service" distinction for RadiantOne's on-premise hub, in favor of the phrase "federation identity service for the cloud." But it's not purchasable as a service, or on a subscription basis. Today, he says, it's not practical to place the hub outside the firewall because of all the synchronization that's involved in maintaining identity (the clock is indeed one factor), "and it could even be quite dangerous. It's not that we don't like the idea of hosting it on the cloud." Reality, he says, mandates that the hub be deployed internally.

OneID

At the RSA security conference in San Francisco last month, a startup company named OneID introduced itself to the community, as well as to several interested journalists. Its concept is not identity federation, which is typically something that is managed on the client side. It's an effort to enable Web sites and Web apps to resolve the multiple identities problem themselves, not by continuing their (futile) discussions on creating (more) standards. Instead, OneID compels service providers to attach JavaScript code to their logins that exchanges their users' passwords with a centralized repository.

Because the exchange process is encrypted, OneID CEO Steve Kirsch explains to us, the repository itself doesn't actually have access to its own contents. So unlike some certain social networks or search engines, OneID itself has no intentions to leverage users' identities as a database unto itself. But the decryption process takes place on the client side.

"When I need to get an attribute and give it to a site, I go get the encrypted stuff from the repository, I decrypt it here, and then I send it to the site," explains Kirsch. "So the site never interacts directly with my repository. The site's always interacting with me, and I'm always interacting with my repository. That's why it's called user-centric, because I'm always in the middle of any transaction."

One of the compelling aspects of OneID's take on identity is that it applies to people. You'd think that would be obvious, but in practice, typical identity federation associates passwords with users' accounts. Although in Windows, accounts are portable across computers, there's still a concept of a "desktop," a virtual device, associated with each user. By contrast, OneID assumes accounts are associated with people. So attributes stored in the repository that may be used to automatically fill in forms (which OneID calls AccuFill), are associated with people who may logically be associated with more than one device at a time. That makes sense in the real world, where people have PCs, tablets and smartphones, and where new classes of apps are transferrable between them.

One upshot of this architecture, Kirsch shows us, is that it enables a cross-device audit trail - a way for anyone, from anywhere, to see who has logged in as him from which device. Kirsch demonstrated for us a situation where a user can remotely disassociate a device that has been utilized to log onto services with OneID. Alternately, a device can be remotely registered into OneID by way of a pairing process that resembles logging in a Bluetooth device. This way, only permitted devices may be allowed to log in as particular people.

Ping Identity PingOne

We've covered PingFederate, Ping Identity's federation system, previously in ReadWriteWeb. Since then, the company has inaugurated its new cloud-based identity platform, PingOne, which may or may not be federation by the traditional definition.

PingOne is a cloud-based implementation of the company's adaptive federation scheme, and it challenges the notion put forth earlier that the component that communicates identity must exist inside the firewall. The new service truly is a service by the new, cloud-oriented standard - literally a RESTful API. Enterprises that already utilize a SAML security infrastructure can simply assert their existing identities to PingOne; otherwise, as Jonathan Buckley, Ping's VP for on-demand business, tells us, Ping provides alternate tools through which existing apps are effectively rerouted to PingOne for identity.

"You don't even need hardware, software - you don't even need to know what SAML stands for," says Buckley. "However you connect to it, PingOne multiplexes that assertion such that you can connect once and be able to reach many customers or applications. This is where the cost and complexity of federation held back standards-based federation from penetrating meaningfully into the mid-market in the past couple of years."

While very large organizations have already supported the SAML standard, and continue to, Buckley says that in cases where 100 or more connections are made simultaneously, on-premise federation can be too tasking. "In the end, we found our biggest customers said, 'I would like to make these ten directly, but is there a way I can get out of doing the one-to-one-to-one-to-one networking for all these departmental applications, or for my customer applications?' And that's where PingOne comes in.

The upshot of this new scheme is a feature called CloudDesktop, which effectively extends identities for multiple popular cloud apps onto a control panel that can be accessed from iPads. Here, the desktop provides the single sign-on system. But as Ping's director of product management, Sateesh Narahari, tells us, it's up to the administrator to enable each user's paths to enterprise apps, putting IT back in control.

"The way PingOne solves the problem of one-to-one connections is through multiplexing by using SAML," says Narahari. "The task of multiplexing and managing connections is something that the administrator does." When the admin does set up connections to 100 different SaaS vendors, each one requests a different set of attributes. The admin can use the PingOne console, he explains, to define each attribute set. The end result is "an easily consumable cloud desktop that's built for the cloud generation," that the admin can designate for specific employees. "End users do not need to know that those connections are multiplexed connections."

"With PingOne," remarks Buckley, "we said, 'How is it that we can drive towards a sort of Fisher-Price simplicity?' In IT, everybody attempts that... But with our 49 beta customers, it seems that we've dramatically driven down the time to implement and the sophistication required to grok what is going on and then implement it for the company. You can stick with standards, stick with best practices, and leverage technology to make things simpler, versus putting time into developing a password vaulting solution - which we've always been tempted to do, because sometimes things are hard. And then we found a way to have... better security, better convenience, without so much of the hassle for that mid-market company."

The print server is about the size of an iPhone, and has two connectors: an RJ-45 for your Ethernet network and a power plug. Plug it in and, in a few moments, you are good to go.

If your app has a print dialog icon, you can now start printing from your iThing. The print server will auto-discover any network printer that is on the same network subnet. If you want to print to another subnet, you will have to go through some manual configuration, using the printer's built-in Web server.

If you have iPhones, you will of course need to turn on their Wi-Fi radios and connect to the same subnet to see the print server. Lantronix has this funny short video with the loveable IT guy featured here. As he says, "Try it now."

The box costs $150 and is available from numerous online electronics retailers.

Easily the largest contributors to ReadWriteWeb's overall traffic on any given day include technology news aggregation services, one of them being Techmeme. It's a service that pulls interesting headlines from amid the ever-flowing sea of content, and compiles them into an amalgamated front page of what's happening; it's directed toward a specific audience, which Techmeme hopes includes you. It's done largely by humans, as opposed to automated services that glean articles' potential relative interest level through semantic analysis.

The CEO of a company called Flow has demonstrated to ReadWriteWeb what he describes as a tool that conceivably enables anyone to do for their businesses or even for a mass audience what Techmeme does for its audience, and with relative ease. Eric Alterman (not the noted professor) showed ReadWriteWeb a tool created for his Flow Platform that essentially enables any user to navigate selected streams of digested Web information on any number of filtered topics, and effectively generate a cultivated, "curated" stream of related content. Imagine a Techmeme that pertains only to what you do and who you are.

One of Flow's clients, Alterman tells us, is a Fortune 15 company. (No, there's not a missing digit.) It has a customer base of 75,000, and currently the complaints system made available to them is a form on a Web page. The complaints are amassed every 72 hours or so, and a report is generated and sent to a representative via email.

For this company, Flow Platform enables the engineering of a kind of automated information stream called, easily enough, a flow. A content item may be directly attached to this flow by way of what's called a drop. Or, content from Web pages (including, for instance, the complaints data form) may be made to stream into the flow. Rules may be generated where specific fields (customer's name, location, product serial number, etc.) are translated into the flow. Filters may be employed to determine whether the complaint is on account of a damaged shipment, a faulty shipment or a bad experience with the salesperson. "You can actually ask questions," Alterman says. "Compare that to a product like Yammer or Chatter, where you really don't have any structure in the stream."

A notice from a customer for a damaged shipment can be routed to a stream directed immediately to the fulfillment department and the salesperson assigned to that customer, who then views that stream the same way they would anyone's Twitter stream. A rule may be created where orders over a particular dollar amount may be directed in a stream to the CFO. Another rule could have the marketing team's stream be updated whenever there's a request for materials.

"So the idea of thinking of the flow in the enterprise as real-time routing of information, begins to give you an idea of how the workflow of a company can be improved in a highly contextual way," Flow's CEO explains.

What's more, Flow Platform can be leveraged by that same Fortune 15 company to cultivate a content channel for its customers, including those who've posted complaints - "a flow that gets routed to your customers based on what they care about." Up until now, Flow's Fortune 15 client had been communicating with all its customers as a mass, by means of a handmade newsletter. "Once you set this up," he says, "you have a publishing system that allows you to contextually reach all your customers with new information, new products, new regulations, best practices... Whether your customers are talking to you or you're talking to your customers, [you have] information flow, and some intelligence to the way that information flows, instead of manually creating spreadsheets and documents and emails that have no way of routing intelligently, and that in no way scales when you don't have the staff to do it."

The tool Alterman demonstrated for us is not the Flow Platform itself, but rather a tool for using resources that is made available to all levels of users of the Flow Platform. "Even if I'm not a person who wants to curate or do anything fancy, every employee wants to tune into the flow that matters to them, my customer flow. I'm on a product team; we have a new product initiative. Show me the flow of all the different ideas, or maybe the roadmap, or maybe some other collection of information about what we're working on."

The Platform upon which this Flow tool is deployed is a kind of IaaS service, through which information from multiple sources may be channeled, directed and filtered. It's through this streaming, like the creative hydromodification of a river, that the Flow company generates the power for its business model.

The output from this filtering tool may be directed to users like a cultivated stream. Here, using an example set of flow production rules on Alterman's own account, is a stream of categorized information reconstituted into a simple Web page, in a format that may be published to an individual user. Alternately, the Platform may produce an RSS stream or simple HTML that may be laid out with a CSS stylesheet.

The tools Flow's customers use are like this one, though modifiable by developers using the Platform's Sandbox, depicted above. Here, developers may craft specific queries of the source data and try them out live in a safe, sterile environment.

But the cultivation process need not look so much like software development. Alterman took us through the process of making a new flow by way of his customized tool (which, by the way, is one he uses personally every day). It's a wizard-like process that guides the user through the selection of known sources (including a personal favorite of mine). Later, if the tool detects the presence of a real database instead of just a Web page - a resource that contains records, usually as indicated by the presence of a form - you can select which fields are to be filtered and added to the flow.

The final step in the process is to set policies for authenticated users. It's this part that determines whether the publication of the flow is public or private, and if it's the latter, who has control over the flow's content. "As I create these different streams, I'll provision only the right people to see them," Alterman explains. He perceives the role of flow controller - of curator of the data that flows to and through an organization - as attaining executive status.

"I'd call that person the 'Chief Content Officer,'" he says. "We believe that's the next most important position in the enterprise."

PLM is like PDM on steroids, extending the concept to cover "the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal," as Wikipedia puts it. If you haven't heard of PLM, don't feel bad. The category hasn't exactly set the world on fire. But Autodesk thinks cloud computing can change all that.

At yesterday's Autodesk Media Summit in San Francisco, the awesomely named Robert "Buzz" Kross, senior VP of design, lifecycle and simulation, acknowledged that "PLM does not have a great history." The 10-year-old market, he acknowledged, "is still fundamentally immature." But he claimed that Autodesk PLM 360, which launched late last month, leverages the cloud to finally help PLM fulfill its promise to the enterprise.

I'm no engineer, and maybe that's why the pitch impressed me. Kross said PLM 360 is specifically designed to go beyond PDM's engineering focus and bring together all aspects of a product lifecycle, including supply chains, quality management, facilities and so on - and on all platforms. Kross added that it works with existing enterprise business models and practices, and installations take days, not months. And unlike traditional PLM, he said, the cloud makes it relatively simple to set up trial installations.

But as is often the case, the cloud's biggest impact comes in rewriting the cost-benefit equation. According to Kross, a typical PLM installation can approach $5 million in the first year. PLM 360 clocks in under $300,000. Even if the product can't match traditional functionality, cutting costs by an order of magnitude can open up the category to many more potential customers and use cases.

PLM may never be sexy, but as with other business applications from CRM to ERP, moving to the cloud can help make it dramatically easier and more affordable. I can't judge how PLM 360 compares with traditional PLM solutions from vendors like Siemens PLM, Oracle, Dassault Systèmes, SAP and others. But assuming Kross' price comparison is valid, even "good enough" and much cheaper can be a game changer.

Today, that concept got simpler in a way that's both compelling and scary: One of the charter iOS apps for Box.net's new OneCloud platform lets you effectively open up PowerPoint preso files in Box, in a way that uploads them to SlideShark and displays them in front of you.

It's the latest demonstration of Brainshark's free functionality, which up until now was only available through the Apple App Store. Through SlideShark for Box, you create a kind of conduit for opening presentations that are already uploaded to Box, in SlideShark without you having to download the presentation locally first.

This is important for folks who have been considering subscribing to Brainshark's Team Edition. As we've covered here, Team Edition provides an environment for multiple users on a team to collect their presos together in a centralized "office." Once a presentation is published, Team Edition gathers analytics about who's viewing it, including members of the general public. So the presentation becomes a kind of website in itself, and the publishers become collaborators.

Up to now, the Team Edition has been the only way to achieve collaboration with these presos. But Box's OneCloud also promises collaboration capabilities around all the files uploaded to Box, which may include items you display with SlideShark. Now, with SlideShark for Box, your preso is being published through SlideShark, not Box - so Box cannot gather analytics on nonpublic files. So if analytics is not important or necessary to you, but collaboration might be, Brainshark has opened up some new possibilities for free users and impromptu teams.

On the day that Windows 7 was generally released in October 2009, Microsoft announced that it was "simplifying" the PC. It was a long awaited, much appreciated response to nearly three years of wrestling with the sea of sloth that was Windows Vista.

My review of Windows 7 was both notorious and, even in hindsight, correct. I called it "Vista without the crap." For that review, I ran a scientific test which produced this real-world calculation: Windows 7 expedited the Web browsing process for folks who use Web apps and browsers for their full-time work (like myself) by three-and-one-half minutes per hour. That's 385 hours of productivity regained per year, which is enough time for my company Ingenus to produce one book and rake in a nice heap of cash. I suggested to Microsoft that it use the following slogan: "Use Windows 7, Get Six Weeks of Your Life Back."

I look at the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 and I fear I may lose those six weeks again.

All through the Windows 7 promotional tour, Microsoft demonstrated the many ways that the new operating system simplified the PC. Product managers and executives gave the following explanation: They watched the way people work in the real world. They realized these people want to take fewer steps to accomplish the things they do most often. Users don't like to be told what to do, or led into one way of doing things that the designer of the software may prefer. People feel better about their computers when they're not thinking about them as computers - when they can concentrate either on their work or whatever they may be having fun with. The operating system should say hello, welcome, and then get out of the way.

If these things were all true as recently as 2009, what manner of cataclysm upset the balance of the universe so horrifically as to have made black white, and to replaced Windows 7's design philosophy with that of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview? As I run through these examples with you, as an exercise, imagine explaining them to your mother.

The Search for Start

Dividing a smartphone's small screen into eight or nine tiled blocks, makes sense and makes the phone easier to control. Using the same logic to divide a larger PC screen into dozens of mosaic blocks, does not do either. Does any Web site you've ever used, work like this? Or to be more specific, any Web site since 1998?

What makes the Windows 7 Start Menu work well (which I said at the time of its release) was its simple, two-column division: things you typically use on the left, things you typically do on the right. I typically open a Network window to see which computers in my office are functional. I open up documents I've been working on recently. And to search for stuff, what could be simpler than simply typing what it is you're searching for?

One aspect of Windows 8 design - which was literally explained to me in a positive light using these words - is that you'll learn how to do something once you've discovered it for yourself. It is not obvious from the Windows 8 Start screen that you can still just type something and Windows will search for it. There's no search control that says that. However, this is still how Start works - you type a character, and search begins.

But in everyday work, you shouldn't have to go searching through the entire file system for stuff you did just yesterday. Not everything in life requires search, contrary to whatever Google design philosophy Microsoft has commandeered.

Zones Instead of Buttons

When the Start Button premiered in Windows 95 (to the Rolling Stones singing backup, you may recall), it was with the idea of giving the user one obvious place at all times for beginning any task. The most sensible place to put something that will most always be on the screen, at that time, was the lower left corner of the Desktop.

As you may already know by now, in Windows 8, the Desktop is one of two staging grounds for applications, the other one being the "Metro-style" world where the easier, device-like apps will run. So there is no longer any one single place on the screen that will always, or most always, be visible. How does one get to "Start" if she can't always see it? Microsoft suggests that you might try looking at the keyboard - and indeed, on most PCs made in the last decade, there's a Windows logo button. (Of course, the Windows logo has changed with Windows 8, but that's not too confusing - just uninspired.)

With the Consumer Preview, Microsoft addressed this for the first time by adding a zone in the lower left corner that brings up a kind of Start button when you hover the mouse pointer toward that corner (assuming you're one of those old-fashioned folks who still use a mouse).

In the Developer Preview, it was difficult to control the Metro-style apps, the new class that uses the WinRT library. When I asked why Metro apps couldn't share the Taskbar with the other Desktop apps, the response I got was that the Taskbar would not always be on-screen. Why wouldn't it be on-screen all the time? Because sometimes you'd be running a Metro-style app.

Well, so much for that explanation. If you hover the mouse over the Start zone button, or if you hover it in the upper left corner of the Desktop, you'll get what amounts to the taskbar for Metro-style apps. Yes, friends, you are now looking (above) at a Desktop with two Taskbars (which calls to mind the lyrical phrase, "And now for something completely different"). Typically, bringing up a Metro app replaces the entire Desktop with the app, in which case, the Desktop gets miniaturized and changes places with the app you just clicked on.

Why is any of this important? Imagine the following situation: You want to play a song. Sounds simple enough, right? Assume you've made it through to the Desktop, you've opened an Explorer window, and you have a list of your MP3s in front of you. When you double-click on any of these, your Desktop goes away.

Within 20 seconds, the Desktop is replaced by this thing (right). It's not a list of the music you own - it's a piece of wallpaper containing some random album covers from music published in the last century. Granted, you'll be listening to your song now, but you'll want to return to your work. This is something the former designers at Microsoft (whom I guess were all sacked) used to know: Sometimes you do other things while you work, and sometimes you do more than one thing at a time.

Getting back to your work is a matter of rearranging the screen. First, you click on this wallpaper in order to get the music player controls back. (Ask yourself, on what class of device whose screen is larger than a postage stamp is it absolutely necessary for the music player to consume all the real estate?)

Then you grab the top of the wallpaper as though you were about to rip it off of your screen (above), and drag it to one side or the other of your screen. You'd think the Desktop would come back now, but no. Although you've zoned your music player, you now have about 84% completely blank screen. How many of your co-workers do you know who would be freaked out by even a partially blank screen - doesn't that mean something's gone wrong? The next step is for you to fill the remainder of the space with the Desktop.

So you point to the upper left corner to bring up the Desktop miniature (above), and click on that. This restores the Desktop to the scary blank space, and now you can continue about your work (below). Now, this is not Windows Media Player we're looking at - although it's offered in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, it's as a kind of fallback alternative. This Music app, which replaces Media Player as the default, takes up either the rightmost or leftmost 16% (roughly) of the screen. Although the border between the Metro and the Desktop world looks like it includes a handle, in practice, you can only change the app's relative size to 84%, 100%, or zero.

When you size a Metro app to 84%, it reduces the Desktop space to 16%. For the moment, there is no functional reason to do this. Like in the screenshot above, the Desktop doesn't shrink or partition itself; it just makes itself a big taskbar. In Windows 8, there are quite a few surprisingly detailed procedures for doing things that accomplish nothing whatsoever, this being one of them.

(This just in: If you happen to own a mouse with one of these programmable page up/page down buttons, pressing it when you're listening to a song in the Music app will bring up this little box in the left corner for about five seconds, whether or not you have the app showing along either side. You won't know this fact unless and until a) you discover it accidentally for yourself, therefore "learning;" or, b) I tell you about it.)

Share What with Whom?

One of the earliest design philosophies in graphical computing is not to offer someone a choice to do something that can't be done. Either take it off the screen, or "grey" it to demonstrate that you can't do this thing right now.

One of the design points Microsoft touts for Windows 8 are the "Charms," which are the five Android-like icons that appear along the right border of the screen when you point to the upper right or lower right corner. Hiding a menu until it needs to be seen, is not a bad thing at all. In principle, I actually like this approach. It was explained to me that Charms would respond with information that was in context with the function the user is performing or the app that she's currently using.

"Share" is among these five charms, and you might think its purpose is to make the document you're working on or the item highlighted in your Metro app become sharable through some Internet conduit with one of your contacts. Maybe. The only way to determine when and where Share has no purpose whatsoever is to choose it, and be punished for doing so. (Charming.) With respect to the entire Desktop, although Share remains a selectable charm, it appears intentionally designed to serve no purpose in this context whatsoever.

So let's move to the Metro world of the Start screen. Share is available here too, but when you choose it, you're greeted with this message: "Start can't share." You must launch an app first. Now, the app that most folks would consider a candidate for sharing something with someone, would be an app named People. When you launch People, and then you select Share, you're given the prophecy shown below: perhaps the single most fitting tribute to the ethos of Windows 8: "People can't share."

The Difference Between Settings, "Settings," "More PC Settings," and Control Panel

The whack-a-mole game continues as you try to locate the one place where the operating system settings are stored. Since using Windows 8 truly does feel like using two operating systems - perhaps one from Venus and the other from Mars - a reasonable person may guess that there are two places to locate system settings.

Almost right. "Share's" charming cousin "Settings" is also always available. It's where one will eventually locate Shut Down, which confirms "off" as one of Windows 8's various settings. When you pull up the Settings menu from Start, the first menu choice is "Settings." You read this correctly.

With this much redundancy, you'd think you'd be on the right track. Not really, unless you're looking for settings pertaining to the Start Menu specifically, of which there are two. To get to where you think you want to go, you have to take a kind of backdoor exit from this menu. It's at the bottom, it's not as charming as the Settings charm itself, and it's marked "More PC Settings."

Here, common sense tells you this screen will give you the Metro-style settings, and the Desktop-style settings will appear elsewhere. For the most part, that's right. But how would you then divide, in your mind, the settings that pertain to your PC as a whole, whether it's in one world or the other? As it turns out, you'll find some of them here (above) and some of them in the Control Panel that's familiar to users since Windows 95.

Amazingly, you can locate the Control Panel from the Settings menu for the Desktop, but you do have to go to the Desktop to get there. (In the Technical Preview last September, a tile for Control Panel did appear on the Start screen; in the later Consumer Preview, it does not.) Some settings appear in both the Metro screen and the Control Panel - for example, the option to join a homegroup network. But other very important settings - for example, setting the date and time - appear only in the Control Panel.

There are two franchises about which most folks who have known me for any duration of time will conclude I am a loyal fan, despite all the headaches and the miserable episodes. But between Windows 8 and the 2009 Star Trek movie, it is the latter which displays the greatest continuity with its predecessors. And that is saying something.

There is a new, vast, and potentially loyal group of users who are just now being introduced to a higher plane of technology by way of tablets and multitouch PCs. If Microsoft seriously intends to meet these new users with a schizophrenic, disjointed, loose assembly of dead ends that is anywhere near the state of the current Windows 8 Consumer Preview, then it will lose those users and it will never get them back. This is where the future of Windows either finally comes together or completely falls apart.

The presumed "elasticity" of cloud technology tends to fall apart whenever the bindings change. That is, when a virtual machine or virtualized application relies upon the specific configuration of the hardware providing its infrastructure, it isn't exactly cloud-like when you have to migrate that element to a new host. You often find yourself rewriting some configuration file or maybe even engineering some one-time script. You don't have to write an instruction manual every time you stretch a rubber band.

In rethinking its approach to making it easier for you to rewrite and reconfigure components that are said to be elastic, VMware has decided to engineer an administrative system that dispenses with the notion altogether. Call it a "zero-step process." In its place, the company's vFabric Application Director, which VMware We introduced you to vFabric App Directorannounced last October and is generally releasing this morning, substitutes this process for application deployment with a procedure that's reminiscent of drawing an org chart in Visio.

It's called blueprinting. You draw a chart of the components that your cloud-based application will rely upon, wherever it happens to migrate to within your cloud infrastructure. It's a map of the virtual app. When the component migrates, the vFabric system takes over the process of marrying the map to the new configuration of its supporting hardware.

Modern business applications don't really run on the operating system's infrastructure anymore - the platform has become completely virtual. So the paradigm of using the OS to figure the app is now broken, states VMware group product manager Shahar Erez in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "Ten years ago, when you developed an application, you went to the procurement team and asked for a huge server to be provisioned for you. Today, you either use a credit card or provision a VM with a click of a button. You start working on that, config that application and move it around, without caring if that physical component runs, breaks, if it's an HP or a Dell server - all that is irrelevant for me in building that application."

Erez demonstrated the entire blueprinting process for me over the course of 15 minutes. For someone who manages cloud infrastructure day-to-day, it might not take any longer. The basic building blocks - the grey chrome squares in the diagram - represent individual virtual machines. You drag them into the canvas from the Logical Templates bin, which contains a list of VMs organized by their OS configuration. As you create more VM classes for your enterprise, you configure new templates for them, which will appear here. Like drawing a relationships diagram of database tables, you double-click on the top of each virtual component to place your cursor there and rename it. Placement of the components in the diagram is completely arbitrary; you arrange them as though you were composing a presentation.

The green boxes dragged into each of these grey blocks come from the Services bin. They represent the servers and middleware components that provide the service layer through the operating system. In this example, Apache Web Server, JBoss, and MySQL all qualify.

"When we finish building the blueprint, this is a logical representation. We still don't describe where it's running, how it's running - all these things are only going to be in the late binding," explains Erez. "So when we finish building the blueprint, we can save it, provide it in a catalog to your builders, your building release team, they can pick it up where they want and place it anywhere they want. So it can support any vCloud instantiation; but we have to go broader than that, to pretty much any cloud that you want it to run on."

VFabric accomplishes this by means of VMware's patent-pending cloud abstraction layer, Erez goes on. "We don't touch the infrastructure. We work with the cloud API, [which] uses whatever APIs we need to instantiate a machine - it doesn't matter whether it's a vSphere machine or [Amazon Machine Image] or maybe Hyper-V one day, because we don't deal with the actual machine. We interact with the cloud API... At no point in time does the user dealing with App Director need to worry [about] what is the underlying infrastructure or who is the underlying cloud."

The application relationships are represented by the dashed arrows. In this example, the AppTier component running JBoss relies on the Apache server to be running, and the DBTier component running MySQL relies on JBoss. The predecessors need to be running ahead of them, so the dependencies denote the start order. "Each of the elements that we just placed on the topology map comes with a best practices provisioning script," explains Erez. This way, the IT guru will be able to review these default settings prior to any of these components ever being deployed, and specify at the blueprint stage which settings may be overridden at deployment time.

Any business logic which needs to be run by a service (for instance, a JBoss WAR file) can be loaded into the service during deployment by adding its orange box from the Application Components bin. Enabling a class of component to become clustered is as simple as clicking on its associated component's cluster icon (in the upper right corner), and choosing the number of units in the cluster.

Once the blueprint is complete, the designer has the option to publish it for anyone in the organization to use for later deployment, or to deploy the system immediately. During the deployment phase, App Director previews how the execution will take place with a NASA-style diagram - this isn't the one you drew yourself as a blueprint, but rather an extrapolation of that blueprint into a workflow, where the X-axis represents time consumed.

Then when VM systems are deployed, you can monitor their status and progress through this All Deployments screen. Of course, the entire App Director service may be run through a modern Web browser, which does mean it can run in a tablet - Erez' demonstration was using Safari on Mac, though it could very easily have been Safari on iPad.

"The reality is, provisioning a new application in enterprise IT takes anywhere between four days for a very small application, to eight weeks," states VMware's Shahar Erez. "Which really doesn't make sense. When you talk about the problems of the cloud, and the cloud getting infrastructure up and running very fast, you're really alleviating a portion of that wait time. On the other hand, we accelerating the development cycle, and then we're stuck in the middle with getting the code to run on that available infrastructure. And that problem is what's delaying getting your business value out to the market sooner. This is the gap that we're trying to bridge."

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.

This is a question that a company called Rypple first started tackling three years ago. Identifying what Rypple was, was evidently hard enough - in 2009, ReadWriteWeb called it an enterprise solution for garnering feedback; two years later, we re-introduced it as a tool for rewarding employees for good performance. Both were partly right. Fortunately for Rypple, Salesforce perceived it as something substantially greater, and today Rypple is being re-reintroduced as the latest cloud-based component in the Force.com arsenal.

What is it now? It frankly hasn't changed all that much from its original mission - to be a feedback and motivational tool for a digital workforce. Salesforce is unusual among software companies for perceiving motivation as a principal component of IT. Then again, it's already unusual for eschewing the use of the word "software" to describe its line of work.

"The way we started Rypple was, we thought the world would change. It was more social, more collaborative, less hierarchical, more real-time," says Daniel Debow, Rypple's former CEO, now the vice president for Rypple at its new parent company, Salesforce. Debow tells RWW, "Everybody's expectations of both the tools and the way that they work was changing. The problem was, the things that were being given to them by the HR organization to help improve performance were designed for fifty years ago. None of these apps are truly social; they're certainly not delightful. They're basically automating forms, and they're driven by the compliance requirements of an HR organization. We took a totally different approach to build Rypple, and it was very similar to a company like Zynga: a consumer-first approach."

Debow demonstrated the new Rypple running on the Force.com platform. Its newsfeed provides a platform for ongoing conversation about the business. There, the manager can set variable-term goals for the workgroup sharing this feed as well as for one or more individuals within the group. These goals are represented by icons that appear within the "Key Objectives" column along the right side. Employees may use these icons to gauge their progress toward achieving these objectives. "It starts envisioning the world as a graph of objectives that companies do," he remarks.

While the Rypple system is designed to cultivate verbal feedback, its principal tools are metrics and symbols. Employees need to see how well they are performing, and from time to time, to have some tangible proof that anybody in charge is truly paying attention to them, truly appreciating them. Annual evaluations are failing in the modern workforce, Debow explains, compared to real-time metrics.

"Instead of process automation, it's behavior amplification," he says, "Take the things that great managers do and make it easier for them to do it. At a high level, those are the things around goal setting and alignment, recognition in real-time, feedback that's open and easy to give and get, and coaching."

While on the surface this may sound ominous - an automated coaching algorithm, like something out of "The Martian Chronicles" - Rypple's Debow believes that it actually takes digital tools like his to get managers more personally involved in the process. "One of the common misconceptions about usage of social applications is that it's replacing face-to-face, or real interaction, with online virtual interactions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Great social apps encourage people to meet more often face-to-face - you see this with Twitter with meetups, and on Facebook with events."

Debow imagines Rypple being used as a kind of background app for a manager and employee actually communicating - not just with IM, but face-to-face. The objective setting process can take place in an office, with the employee looking at the manager's screen while he assigns them to her. "This is what I mean by encouraging more real-life, face-to-face conversations," he says.

The part of Rypple that generated all the buzz last year was the use of badges - literally, on-screen graphics that look like sewn-on Scout patches - to reward workers for various accomplishments. At the time they were introduced, the badges took some heat. As software developer Frank Caron wrote for his personal blog, "The problem here is that these 'status' symbols are awarded by non-quantitative and subsequently arbitrary means. The only guideline for 'earning' a badge, in this context, is the small text description that accompanies the badge during the selection process. The onus is on the nominator, the person awarding the badge, and not the product itself to use the appropriate badge at the appropriate time."

As Dan Debow describes Rypple's badge system, the fact that the awards process is not based on some automated score is what ensures direct, personal involvement on the part of the manager in the awards process. Contrary to Caron's description, badges in the new Force.com version are attributable to core competencies defined by the company ("leadership," "taking charge," "ethical behavior") - tags for personal behavior that work like tags for articles on a blog. So employees can discern why they've earned a badge, not just that they've earned it.

"What's amazing is, you can build these badges - they're not top-down, they're bottom-up," says Debow, "so that badges reflect culture. They reflect the words and the means that people use with each other, rather than top-down, HR-speak. You describe the great things that others do in a language that they already use. It can be as formal or informal as the company's culture requires."

In the world of public social networks, individuals have become notorious for "gaming the system" - triggering avalanches of usually negative commentary that unduly influences the community's ability to contribute to a ratings or voting process. What controls does Rypple provide for preventing employees from doing the same with its "social enterprise" network, with results that are more likely quantifiable in dollars?

"You can actually create rules around badging that can stop that kind of gaming, to create value and currency," answers Debow. For example, individuals' use of feedback or voting may be capped at the manager's discretion, or only certain individuals may be empowered to bestow particular badges.

But it's here that Debow risks breaking with his new boss, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, by pointing out that behaviors in enterprise networks will tend to differ psychologically from those on public networks, where users tend to be anonymous and are not necessarily held accountable. "You cannot give an anonymous public comment in Rypple," states Debow. "Your identity is there; people know what you say." And just as how it's hard to imagine two co-workers monopolizing a company meeting by behaving like social networks users - for instance, ping-ponging kudos with each other to build up their value and consume valuable time - it's just as hard, he says, to picture these same people behaving in the digital social enterprise in a similarly contrived fashion.

"This is a big difference from traditional HR system design," Dan Debow tells RWW. Where the old design tried to bake the rules into the system, therefore requiring an enormous amount of time and energy to set up - you have to deal with the hierarchy, rules, permissions, who's visible, who's invisible, what's visible to whom, which always results in extremely expensive consulting - a socially designed applications relies heavily upon social norms inside of a company, and the fact that the systems are transparent."

Rypple is available for existing Salesforce customers for an additional charge of $5 per user per month. Though the Rypple service is accessible now, its integration with Salesforce.com (pictured above) will be made available in April.