/ Internet

Who is Not Afraid of the SaaS Wolf?

Recently we noted that some large enterprise software companies were calling SaaS a fad that would soon pass away. We theorized that they were doing this not because they actually believed it, but because SaaS is a fundamental threat to the old way of doing business that they dominate. In this post we look at some of the traditional enterprise vendors who are taking a different approach - embracing SaaS and competing in that market.

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Warm And Comfortable Frogs

If you run a traditional enterprise software company, you have plenty of reasons to feel warm and comfortable:

1. Your conservative customers agree with you that change is bad and new technology is a terrible risk. (The people among your clients who don't agree with this won't be talking to you, they will be busy innovating - so you won't hear an opposing view).

2. Your Annual Maintenance Revenues continue to grow, as clients cannot risk a problem with software that is mission critical and complex. As your product is now quite stable, the profit margin is wonderful. (You don't notice that the SaaS barbarians are scaling your castle walls using these fat margins as ladders, saying: "Our SaaS monthly cost is less than your current AMC".)

3. Your Professional Services business continues to grow. Conservative clients prefer to go to the company that built the software, rather than a third party, so you can eat into your ecosystem whenever you have a revenue short-fall. (The fact that the software needs this much implementation hasn't gone unnoticed by the SaaS proponents).

In this benign financial environment, you look at a downturn as a good time to emphasize words like "tried and tested, stable, enterprise, integrated, customized, safety" and so on. You can assume that any drop in License Fee revenue is simply a cyclical problem, that good times will return automatically.

The frog in the slowly boiling water also feels warm and comfortable for a while...

It Is Hard For Old Timers To Get SaaSy

Repeating old mantras in the face of fundamental change is natural, because making that change is really, really hard:

1. Putting SaaS financing on an old product is simply the ASP model and that is terrible economics. You will report horrible results to investors for a long time before it turns positive.

2. However carefully you position your SaaS offering versus your traditional product, you will legitimize SaaS to your conservative clients and hasten the decline of your traditional business.

3. Your current client base is not much help. You need to position the new SaaS offering for a new market, where you will be competing on a level playing field with the start-ups.

Lou Gerstner observed in his famous book on IBM's turnaround in the early 1990s, "Teaching The Elephant To Dance", that culture is everything. Big companies need to learn to act like start-ups again.

IBM: Still Dancing

Lou Gerstner's culture shake-up must have been more than temporary, for once again we see IBM, as big and as old as it gets in IT, leading from the front. Just like they embraced the PC as it threatened the Mainframe and then embraced Linux and open source, so now they are embracing SaaS. This is despite facing all the risks described above.

IBM can be bold primarily because the most critical culture that Gerstner brought back was talking to the client to find out what they want. You can always find some people in a big client who support the old way. But if you have a conversation at senior management levels and contrast SaaS with the old model, you will find tremendous enthusiasm for SaaS.

IBM's move into SaaS is complex, as they are a big company with many moving parts. They are also experts at extending the life of really, really old technology with a tweak here, an image make-over there. AS/400 anyone? IBM is also very good at packaging up all the pieces in a way that clients find attractive, with a few little bits of high value "special sauce" added to all the free and commodity bits in the package. In other words, IBM knows how to make money whichever way the wind blows.

Vignette: Rejuvenating Their Enterprise CMS Brand

Anybody remember when CMS (Content Management System) was the hot technology? If so, maybe you bought stock in Vignette when they did their IPO in February 1999. If you sold before March 2000 you did pretty well. Since then of course, the VIGN stock price has suffered the Dot Com bubble burst and nuclear winter.

For a while Vignette used their IPO cash hoard to buy up smaller cash-strapped enterprise vendors for bargain prices. That seemed like a street smart thing to do, but then SaaS came along to take away some of the fun. Then in April 2008, Vignette changed tack and acquired Vidavee, a SaaS player in video content.

Vignette is well-placed to do more. They have cash in the bank, positive cash flow, they have always understood what enterprises want from the Net and now they can make more aggressive moves in SaaS.

How Is The SaaS Pioneer Doing?

Next week I am at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce 2008 event in San Francisco. Salesforce.com has done more to build the SaaS market than anybody. They are in an interesting position. If we view this as a battle of Romans (big, established enterprise vendors) versus Barbarians (pure play SaaS start-ups), Salesforce.com has the scale of the Romans and the positioning of the Barbarians. It should be an interesting week.

Discuss

Blogger And Podcaster Media Network Looks To Turn Long Tail Blogging Into A Full-Time Job

For all of the millions of blogs on the web, only an incredibly small fraction generate enough revenue to serve as full time jobs. Most people are happy enough with just sharing their thoughts with the public, even if they only see a few hundred hits a months with the very occasional comment. But what if there was a way for even these small-timers to generate enough money to put food on the table?

Larry Genkin, the founder and editor of Blogger and Podcaster Magazine, is looking to help the long tail of bloggers turn their hobby into a lucrative job. He has started the Blogger and Podcaster Media Network, a consortium of bloggers and related companies looking to help bloggers of all sizes effectively monetize their sites without having to worry about having a relatively small audience. The site is currently open for signups, but won’t go live until early next year.

At launch the BPMN is a rollup of companies including Genkin’s magazine, Fuel My Blog (A bloggers’ social network based in the UK), Podcast Pickle (a podcasters’ social network), and SocialRank, a company similar to Sphere that monitors blogs for related and popular content.

Each of these companies will help promote the new network, and will also offer technology to help bloggers build out their site (for example, they’ll be able to use SocialRank’s technology). The BPMN will also try to partner with large media companies to help give blogs more exposure. To help each blog get started, the company has partnered with PR NewsWire, which will offer each blogger a promotion package Genkin says is worth $2000.

The BPMN will also have a dedicated sales team for advertising. Genkin says that large ad networks like Federated Media cater to large blogs, leaving most of the long tail bloggers to fend for themselves. Because BPMN will be representing a large number of blogs at once, Genkin says it will be able to secure more favorable deals. The network will have a rev-share agreement with bloggers, giving 70% of ad revenues to members.

Beyond advertising, The BPMN is also employing an affiliate scheme to help bloggers generate revenue. Genkin says that for every blogger a member brings into the network, they’ll earn around $500-1000 a year. It sounds like this is the primary way the BPMN expects to help small time bloggers earn full-time salaries (just recruit 50 bloggers and you’re set!), but recruiting bloggers is more difficult than it sounds, which is where I think the BPMN might fall short. To further entice bloggers, The BPMN is offering a (presumably small) equity stake in the company to early adopters on the network who sign up by the end of the year. And the last selling point: bloggers will have healthcare coverage, though the details for this have yet to be worked out.

The Blogger and Podcast Media Network is going to have a long struggle ahead. Even if advertisers are enticed by the ability to make large ad buys across the network that are more favorable than AdSense, most individual bloggers still won’t be seeing much income from their ads. And the affiliate scheme sounds too good to be true - I doubt many people will be able to recruit enough bloggers to earn a sizable income. If Genkin can pull off some partnerships with large media corporations (his magazine already scored a deal with USA Today), these bloggers may be able to increase their traffic and generate some revenue, but I have a hard time picturing small time bloggers earning full time wages.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Netviewer Scores $9 Million From T-Online Venture And The Samwer Brothers

T-Online Venture and the European Founders Fund (the investment vehicle of the infamous Samwer brothers who recently invested in Facebook) have invested a total of €7 million or nearly $9 million in Netviewer, a provider of web-based collaboration and communication software.

Netviewer has been developing solutions for internet-based collaboration since 2001. The company already has subsidiaries in Switzerland, France, Great Britain, the US, the Netherlands, Austria, Spain, Italy, and Sweden, but the press release cites further international expansion as the main driver for the additional fundraising. Netviewer is also moving into the area of interactive Web TV, combining real-time desktop sharing with video.

Netviewer has raised €9 million (which equals about $11.5 million based on current exchange rates) in September 2007 from Invision Private Equity and TVM Capital. Invision’s director Marco Martelli is quoted for having invested in the company in 2005 and 2006, but we’ve been unable to find detailed information about the amount of funding the company has raised in total.

There’s a slew of companies in this space, including Cisco-owned WebEx, Huddle.net, Central Desktop and Ximdesk.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The FeedRoom Updates Enterprise Video Platform

Fresh on the heels of being dropped as the premier video platform for The NYTimes.com in favor of Brightcove, The FeedRoom has unveiled the latest iteration of its enterprise video platform.

The release of FeedRoom 4.0 Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) was announced at the 2008 Forrester Consumer Forum. The platform is built on two key components: FeedRoom ContentCore, which acts as a central content repository, and FeedRoom Studio, an Adobe Flex-powered dashboard for managing online videos. FeedRoom 4.0 EVP supports all previous FeedRoom solutions, allowing existing customers to migrate to the new platform easily over time.

The FeedRoom’s SaaS offerings are deployed in a bunch of large organizations, including General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Barnes & Noble and ESPN. The company is one of the oldest players in the game (founded in 1999) and competes against Brightcove, KIT digital and Magnify.net and many others.

The NY-based company recently announced it raised $12 million in a round led by NewSpring Capital and including previous investors BEV Capital and Velocity Equity Partners. That last round brought its total funding to a whopping $66 million in venture and debt (at least).

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Meebo Community IM to Launch on Flixster; Looks Just Like Facebook Chat

Flixster will be deploying Meebo Community IM later this evening. The product, which has been in the works since early this year, allows Flixster users to chat with one another using Meebo from inside of the Flixster interface, with a service that looks remarkably similar to Facebook Chat.

Users get a buddy list showing which of their Flixster friends are currently signed on, their statuses, and notifications of their recent activities, such as rating movies. The instant messaging conversations take place within a taskbar that will reside at the bottom of the Flixster UI – just like on Facebook. Here’s a demo of how it works:

While the Flixster experience is completely private labeled, conversations can be popped out and carried over into the Meebo UI. Likewise, your Flixster friends will be part of the buddy list you see when logged in on Meebo.com.

Flixster is the first site to launch Community IM, but Meebo recently announced several other major partners, including MyYearbook, Tagged, and Piczo. On Meebo’s Vimeo page, there is also a demo for a Flickr integration, though it’s not clear if and when this will launch.

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Simply Hired Looks For Jobs Overseas

Job search engine Simply Hired is expanding its operations into Canada, UK, Australia and India. The venture-backed startup was once an acquisition target for Google, and was recently called outfor showing enormous jumps in traffic numbers that may have had something to do with shady tactics.

Simply Hired has always made it clear its ambition is to grow into the largest online database of jobs on the planet. To get there, Simply Hired aggregates and indexes data on millions of job listings worldwide from a variety of sources, including large and small job boards, newspaper and classified listings, and directly from company websites. Job seekers simply type in a keyword and location, and Simply Hired returns relevant job postings from all of these sources so users avoid conducting multiple searches on various sites.

Simply Hired currently powers the international job channel for MySpace UK, and supplements LinkedIn’s job board with millions of job listings from Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, France, Germany and Spain. Depending on where you look, the company says their database contains in between four and seven million jobs, and claims that 1.5 million will be added thanks to the international expansion.

Yet most local job search engines and recruitment portals have long fought their battles country by country, and market shares don’t move all that much. It will be hard for Simply Hired to get its foot in the door, let alone challenge the leaders.

Simply Hired has raised a total of $17.7 million in three rounds of investment, part of it from well-known angel investors like Guy Kawasaki, Ron Conway and Dave McClure. Its last funding round, which was provided by Fox and Foundation Capital, amounted to $13.5 million two years and a half ago.

Competitors include Indeed, HotJobs, Monster and Vast to some degree.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Flixster Launching Meebo Community IM Tonight

We just received word that tonight at 9pm PT Flixster will roll out its integration of Meebo Community IM, which adds instant messaging-like chat functionality to any website.

Out of 19 total launch partners, a couple more will push their implementations live over the next two weeks, then a large batch of partners will launch theirs in early 2009. We don’t have any word yet on which partners will be next and exactly when they plan to launch.

Watch a demo video of Flixster’s integration below:

Meebo Community IM on Flixster from Meebo on Vimeo.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Ballmer Email: Microsoft Is Really Sticking To “Software Plus Services” Message

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent an email to customers today (reprinted below) summarizing some of the big news coming out of the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. He talks about both the Azure cloud services platform (a comprehensive set of storage, computing, and networking infrastructure services) as well as Office in the browser.

The email reiterates Microsoft’s core messaging that the Internet is fine, but it needs a little desktop software to really make it hum: “the key to delivering value today and in the future lies in combining the best aspects of software running on PCs, servers, and devices with the best aspects of services running on the Web-an approach we call “software plus services.”"

Client software is needed, he argues, to take full advantage of the hardware on devices. Multicore processors and new programming languages will expand computing capabilities, he says, and “the interactive experiences that people expect on their PC, mobile phone, and media player depend on sophisticated software running on powerful processors”:

In other words, software does the heavy lifting, and the browser makes access and communication easy: “For the Web, it’s the ability to bring together people, information, and services so we can connect, communicate, share, and transact with anyone, anywhere, at any time.”

The full email is below. What Ballmer says makes sense. But Microsoft also has a huge stake in software, since it powers more than 100% of their profits. If he’s betting correctly, Microsoft can dominate another generation of computing. If not, Google eats their lunch.

Or maybe Google is thinking the same way…as they expand the functionality of Gears ever further, Google is also saying they need a direct tie to the hardware on a PC to really make their services sing.

—–Original Message—–
From: Steve Ballmer
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 2:37 PM
To:
Subject: A Platform for the Next Technology Revolution

During the past decade, a dramatic transformation in the world of information technology has been taking shape. It’s a transformation that will change the way we experience the world and share our experiences with others. It’s a transformation in which the barriers between technologies will fall away so we can connect to people and information no matter where we are. It’s a transformation where new innovations will shorten the path from inspiration to accomplishment.

Many of the components of this transformation are already in place. Some have received a great deal of attention. “Cloud computing” that connects people to vast amounts of storage and computing power in massive datacenters is one example. Social networking sites that have changed the way people connect with family and friends is another.

Other components are so much a part of the inevitable march of progress that we take them for granted as soon as we start to use them: cell phones that double as digital cameras, large flat-screen PC monitors and HD TV screens, and hands-free digital car entertainment and navigation systems, to name just a few.

What’s missing is the ability to connect these components in a seamless continuum of information, communication, and computing that isn’t bounded by device or location. Today, some things that our intuition says should be simple still remain difficult, if not impossible. Why can’t we easily access the documents we create at work on our home PCs? Why isn’t all of the information that customers share with us available instantly in a single application? Why can’t we create calendars that automatically merge our schedules at work and home?

This week at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, we shared news with software developers about a new set of platform technologies that will help transcend these limits. Because you are a subscriber to Executive Emails from Microsoft, I wanted to share my thoughts about the impact that these technologies will have as developers begin to use them to create a new generation of experiences that extend uninterrupted from the desktop to the mobile phone, media player, car, and beyond-to places where we never thought information and communications would be available to us.

A NEW PLATFORM FOR CLOUD COMPUTING

At PDC, we announced the availability of an early preview release of a new technology called Windows Azure. Windows Azure will enable developers to build applications that extend from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and span the PC, the Web, and the mobile phone. For the first time, we shared pre-beta code for Windows 7 and for Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows 7, which is the next version of the Windows desktop operating system, will take advantage of software and hardware advances to help eliminate the boundaries between information, people, and devices.

We also previewed Office Web applications, which are light-weight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that are designed to be accessed through a browser. Office Web applications will be part of the next version of Office and will enable people to view, edit, and share information and collaborate on documents on the desktop, the phone, and in a Web browser in a way that is consistent and familiar.

Windows Azure is part of the Azure Services Platform, a comprehensive set of storage, computing, and networking infrastructure services that reside in Microsoft’s network of datacenters. Using the Azure Services Platform, developers will be able to build applications that run in the cloud and extend existing applications to take advantage of cloud-based capabilities. The Azure Services Platform provides the foundation for business and consumer applications that deliver a consistent way for people to store and share information easily and securely in the cloud, and access it on any device from any location.

Windows Azure is not software that companies will run on their own servers. It’s something new: a service that runs in Microsoft’s growing network of datacenters and provides the platform that helps companies respond to the realities of today’s business environment, and tomorrow’s. Windows Azure technologies are already finding their way into products such as Windows Server 2008 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, enabling organizations and Microsoft partners to create their own cloud infrastructure.

Windows Azure will enable organizations to respond to realities such as the need to use the Web to provide customers with comprehensive information and to interact with an audience that has the potential to expand exponentially overnight; to integrate operations with partners-and sometimes even competitors-to meet customer needs; to add new capabilities quickly to respond to new opportunities; and to enable employees to work efficiently and effectively no matter where they are. These realities apply not just to businesses, but to organizations of all kinds: schools, governments, community groups, and more.

Traditional approaches to building technology infrastructure and delivering computing capabilities make it difficult and expensive to adjust to these realities. You need systems with enough capacity to meet the highest possible demand-capacity that includes servers and buildings to house them, the power to run them, and the people to manage them. You have to spread that capacity across locations so there’s a backup if one part fails. You have to solve issues like access for different types of users and compliance with tax regulations in all countries where your customers reside.

Designed specifically to meet the global scale that today’s organizations require, the Azure Services Platform will provide fundamentally new ways to deploy services and capabilities. It gives businesses the option to take advantage of the capacity available in the cloud as it is needed, reducing the need to make large upfront investments in infrastructure simply to be ready when demand spikes. It will enable developers to create applications that run in the cloud and provide the features, information, and interactivity that employees, partners, and customers expect-no matter how many of them there are, where they are in the world, or what device they have at hand.

SOFTWARE PLUS SERVICES AND THE POWER OF CHOICE

The Azure Services Platform reflects our belief that choice is critical for developers, companies, and consumers. It is also based on our belief that the key to delivering value today and in the future lies in combining the best aspects of software running on PCs, servers, and devices with the best aspects of services running on the Web-an approach we call “software plus services.”

Our software plus services approach lets people take full advantage of the incredible power of today’s devices. While there are undeniable benefits to being able to tap into the wealth of information and services that can be accessed over the Web through a browser, the interactive experiences that people expect on their PC, mobile phone, and media player depend on sophisticated software running on powerful processors.

The richness of these experiences will only increase as multicore processors expand the computing capabilities of our devices and new programming languages open the door to a new generation of applications that let us use more natural ways to interact with digital technology such as voice, touch, and gestures.

Software plus services also recognizes that for most companies, the ideal way to build IT infrastructure is to find the right balance of applications that are run and managed within the organization and applications that are run and managed in the cloud.

This balance varies by company. A financial services company may choose to maintain customer records within its own datacenter to provide the extra layers of protection that it feels are needed to safeguard the privacy of personal information. It may outsource IT systems that provide basic capabilities such as email.

This balance will change over time within an organization, as well. A company may run its own online transaction system most of the year, but outsource for added capacity to meet extra demand during the holiday season. With software plus services, an organization can move applications back and forth between its own servers and the cloud quickly and smoothly.

Today, companies around the world are implementing Microsoft technologies to take advantage of the best combination of on-premise software and cloud-based services. Using Microsoft Online Services, businesses including Coca-Cola Enterprises, Blockbuster, and Energizer access and manage Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, and Live Meeting over the Web through a single, secure infrastructure. In addition, 1 million people rely on Office Live Workspace for sharing and collaborating with friends, family, and colleagues.

EXPANDING THE DEFINITION OF PERSONAL COMPUTING

Ultimately, the reason to create a cloud services platform is to continue to enhance the value that computing delivers, whether it’s by improving productivity, making it easier to communicate with colleagues, or simplifying the way we access information and respond to changing business conditions.

In the world of software plus services and cloud computing, this means extending the definition of personal computing beyond the PC to include the Web and an ever-growing array of devices. Our goal is to make the combination of PCs, mobile devices, and the Web something that is significantly than more the sum of its parts.

The starting point is to recognize the unique value of each part. The value of the PC lies in its computing power, its storage capacity, and its ability to help us be more productive and create and consume rich and complex documents and content.

For the Web, it’s the ability to bring together people, information, and services so we can connect, communicate, share, and transact with anyone, anywhere, at any time.

With the mobile phone and other devices, it’s the ability to take action spontaneously-to make a call, take a picture, or send a text message in the flow of our activities.

Through Live Mesh-a service from Microsoft that we announced earlier this year and about which we shared new information week-we’re beginning to bridge the PC, phone, and Web and create this next generation of connected experiences. Built on the Azure Services Platform, Live Mesh enables you to use programs and information stored on your work computer from your home PC, and vice versa. With Live Mesh, you can share folders and ensure that the information is automatically synchronized across your devices.

Live Mesh hints at how our lives will be transformed as the barriers between devices disappear and the option to connect instantly to people, devices, programs, and information becomes a reality.

We’re not quite there yet. Today, the Azure Services Platform is available only as a limited technology preview release. But as developers begin to combine the capabilities of this new platform with the amazing ongoing hardware and software innovations that we are seeing from companies across the industry, it will bring us significantly closer to the time when information, communication, and computing flows along with us seamlessly as we move through our day-to-day activities.

You can learn more about these technologies and the progress we are making by visiting the Microsoft Software Services Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices/.

I look forward to sharing more information with you about these new technologies in the near future.

Steve Ballmer

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

More Data About Feeds in Google Reader

Google Reader shows more information about your subscriptions. Click on a feed from the navigation sidebar (or type g, then u, followed by the first letters of the title) and you should see the most recent posts from that feed. If you click on "show details", Google Reader has a lot of interesting data: the number of posts per week, the number of subscribers and a histogram of the feed's activity in the past 30 days.

The most interesting thing is that you can see how many posts you've read and when do you usually read the posts from a feed.



{ via FlowingData }

Google Announces Labs for Google Apps

Lately, Google has rolled out new features for its experimental Google Labs functionality in Gmail at a rapid pace. Today, Google announced a similar product that will bring experimental features to enterprise and small business customers: Labs for Google Apps. These apps are built on top of the Google App Engine, which launched in April, and include Google Moderator, Google Code Reviews, and Google Short Links.

Sponsor

If you are using Google Apps for your Domain, you can head over to the Google Solutions Marketplace and start adding these features to your account now, though you will have to change some of your DNS settings before they can become functional.

Google Code Reviews

Google Code Reviews is, as the name implies, aimed at developers. It allows developers to share code for review and propose changes.

Google Moderator

Google Moderator is an application that Google first released for the App Engine just about a month ago. Moderator is basically a forum for group discussions and Q&A sessions, with the ability to vote questions and answers up and down.

Google Short Links

Short Links is a URL shortener like TinyURL or snurl, but works with your own domain name. This allows you to turn complicated and long URLs into short, more memorable ones.

More to Come

According to Google, these are just the first three in a long list of products that will make their debut in Labs for Google Apps. Google also intends to open this platform up to all App Engine developers, but it hasn't provided a timetable for this yet.

Discuss

10 Resources to Learn More About California Proposition 8

As the majority of the country and the world focuses on the election of the 43rd President of the United States, there is an issue in California attracting almost as much attention: Proposition 8, an initiative measure on the 2008 California General Election ballot that if passed, will change the California Constitution, eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry in California.

While we are sure our readers in California have heard from both sides, people outside of the state may not be as familiar with it.  With these sites you can see who has been donating funds to both efforts, find resources to help you promote your side of the issue, and more.

General Information on Proposition 8

Ballotpedia.org - Ballotpedia brings you detailed information about the various ballot initiatives around the country.  In the case of Proposition 8, they provide highlights on who has donated money, resources for both sides of the argument, and more.

California Official Voter Information Guide on Proposition 8 - Official voter information site for the upcoming election with details for each proposition on the ballot in California. For Proposition 8 you can see detailed analysis, the arguments for both sides, and the actual text of the proposed law as it stands.

California Secretary of State’s Campaign Finance Tracking - See who is donating to each of the different committees.

ElectionTrack.com - Election Track gives you a very quick snapshot of the biggest parties receiving contributions surrounding this issue.

Opposed to Proposition 8

EQCA.org - Equality California was founded in 1998 to attempt to get more rights for same sex couples in the state. Their efforts are now solely focused on making sure Proposition 8 does not pass.

LetCaliforniaRing.org - Offers stories of how same sex marriage has had a positive effect on families, and offers tools to help you spread the word about why they believe Proposition 8 should be defeated.

NoOnProp8.com - No On Prop 8 is a leading organization attempting to fight the passage of proposition 8.

Support for Proposition 8

NOMCalifornia.org - Part of the Nation for Marriage network, NOMCalifornia focuses on the efforts to pass Proposition 8 by bringing you the latest press clippings, telling you how to get involved, and more.

ProtectMarriage.com - Protect Marriage is the key group behind the proposition to define marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

WhatIsProp8.com - Brings together viewpoints from different sectors of society, and provides resources to educate others on why they believe Proposition 8 is good for California.

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Can Google and Yahoo! Respect Human Rights Internationally?

We've long been critical of concessions that the big web companies make to authoritarian governments around the world, but today Google, Yahoo and others announced that they're going to do something about it. Some time tomorrow a new website will launch at www.globalnetworkinitiative.org where we'll be able to see the fruits of two years of labor preparing a strategy for supporting human rights and operating in troubled markets, at the same time.

Will this be of any consequence? We like former CNN journalist turned human rights campaigning blogger Rebecca MacKinnon's take on it: maybe.

Sponsor

A Brief History of Human Rights Violations

What kinds of things have these companies done that are being frowned up?

• "In April 2004, the Chinese journalist Shi Tao used his Yahoo! email account to send a message to a U.S.-based pro-democracy website. In his email, he summarized a government order directing media organizations in China to downplay the upcoming 15th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists. Police arrested him in November 2004, charging him with 'illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities.' Authorities used email account holder information supplied by Yahoo! to convict Shi Tao in April 2005 and sentence him to 10 years in prison." - Amnesty International


• Google censors images and other information in China when the government deems the content unacceptable.
  
  Image from Search Engine Watch


• YouTube shut down, then reinstated but erased, an Egyptian activist's YouTube account filled with videos documenting police brutality. It appears that after some time YouTube has since reposted the man's videos after continued international pressure.
  

Is This Going to Change?

These are a few examples of the kinds of issues the new Global Network Initiative will likely engage with. Will the Initiative have any teeth? We're skeptical, this isn't the first time these companies have promised to do better by their users. It's hard because their fundamental drive is to monetize these huge markets. We have a lot of respect for Rebecca MacKinnon's take on it, which we excerpt at length below.

Organizations like Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in China, Human Rights First, and the Committee to Protect Journalists would not be putting their reputations behind this thing if they didn't think it was meaningful.

That said, the initiative must prove its value in the next couple of years by implementing a meaningful and sufficiently tough process by which companies' adherence to the principles will be evaluated and benchmarked. If there is a rigorous process that rates the companies' behavior, then investors who care about social responsibility, and users who want to know how trustworthy a given company is compared to others, can make more informed choices.

The initiative is based on the reality that there is pretty much no country on earth - including the United States - where governments aren't pressuring telecoms and Internet companies to do things that potentially violate users' rights to privacy and free expression. Companies must consider the right to free expression and privacy of users in all markets to be part and parcel of what it means to be socially responsible. Part of the problem is that many telecoms and Internet companies just have not been thinking through
these issues as they roll out products and services around the globe, resulting in all kinds of unintended consequences - the TOM-Skype fiasco in which Skype's Chinese business partner was found to have allowed a huge security breach being the latest example. The Initiative is about getting companies to think ahead and incorporate human rights assessments into new product plans or plans to enter new markets. It's also about being more transparent and honest with your users about what's being censored, why and how, and informing them about how and with whom their personal data is being stored and shared. That way, users can make informed choices about how and when it is safe or reliable to use these services - or not.

Discuss

Feeds for Google Alerts

Google Alerts has a new option: you can now subscribe to feeds instead of receiving periodic email messages. Google Alerts notifies you if there are new pages in the list of top results for a certain query. You can subscribe to alerts for web search, Google News, blog search, Google Groups and Google Video.

Google Groups and Google Web Search are the only search engines from the ones mentioned above that don't provide feeds for the results. In fact, Google is the only major search engine that doesn't offer feeds for search results.

The new feature from Google Alerts is useful, but Google should've provided an option to subscribe to feeds for each search result. Right now, the feeds from Google Alerts have cryptic addresses like:

http://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/LONG_NUMBER/ANOTHER_LONG_NUMBER

and you can only generate feeds from Google Alerts.





Note that you have to log in to a Google account if you want to get feeds for your alerts.

Yahoo Opens Up Big Time

Six months after first announcing its open strategy, Yahoo has released a slew of development tools (as we told you it would) under the Y!OS 1.0 platform. It’s kind of like a Web OS, but Y!OS officially stands for Yahoo Open Strategy.

As part of its strategy to remain one of the most popular starting points on the Web, Yahoo is making it much easier for data, content, and applications to flow in and out of Yahoo. It is also adding a layer of social awareness to everything it does. Yahoo’s Jay Rossiter explains in a blog post some of the things that the Y!OS will let people do. These include:

1. Access to your and your friends’ activity streams both on Yahoo and elsewhere on the Web.
2. A single, universal Yahoo profile.
3. A portable address book that you can take to other sites.
4. More customization features that let you bring content from other sites more easily into Yahoo.
5. Social networking features that help you connect to more people on Yahoo.

Specifically, the Y!OS consists of several developer components, which you can read more about on Yahoo’s developer blog or its developer network site. The components are Yahoo Social Platform (YSP), Yahoo Query Language (YQL), Yahoo Application Platform (YAP), and OAuth.

Let’s take these one at a time. The Yahoo Social Platform is a set of RESTful APIs for Profiles, Connections, Updates, Contacts and Status. These APIs enable developers to pull out information about users, their activity, and their contacts from Yahoo and use it elsewhere on the web.

The Yahoo Query Language is a web service that functions much like SQL and creates a common interface for accessing data from both Yahoo and across the Web. It’s described as “a command line version of Pipes” since it simplifies the process of mashing up data from Yahoo and elsewhere.

The Yahoo Application Platform allows Open Social-based apps to be built and distributed across Yahoo’s own pages (MyYahoo, Yahoo Mail, category pages, etc). For now, apps on this platform can only be created in a restricted sandbox. But in the coming months, Yahoo will begin opening up its various properties for the integration of applications.

Finally, OAuth is the authentication and authorization standard Yahoo has decided to use when giving third parties access to Yahoo user data.

In addition to providing more tools for developers, the company continues to add social features throughout its existing products. Yahoo Mail users, for example, will soon be able to filter their inbound mail based on their most valuable contacts. Activity feeds that show your friends’ recent behavior will be added to places like Yahoo’s homepage and My Yahoo. And Yahoo will begin to distribute hooks into its updates system across its various properties, letting you indicate to your friends when you’ve undertaken an action on, say, Yahoo Buzz or News.

Learn more about Yahoo’s open strategy from our notes that we took at a briefing last week.

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Google Launches Google Apps Labs, Third Party Developers Welcome

Google is launching Google Apps Labs today, a new platform for experimental apps (Google Moderator is one of the first to be added).

These are third party applications that can be added by businesses and schools using Google Apps. In addition to Google Moderator, two other apps are available now: Google Code Reviews (peer review of software code) and Google Short Links (change URLs to something shorter and more descriptive).

What’s most interesting about the announcement is that Google will be opening up the platform to third party developers who want their apps to be available to the “million-plus businesses” using Google Apps today. Salesforce’s AppStore developers will certainly take notice.

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