collaborate

Open-Xchange announced Monday it landed a $9 million second round of funding, with the proceeds earmarked for furthering its software development and expansion of its U.S., European, and emerging markets.

eCapital led the round, with BayBG and existing investor BayTech Venture Capital contributing to the round. The company has raised a total of $17.8 million to date.

Open-Xchange, which last year named a new chief executive and a new chief technology officer, develops software aimed at taking share from Microsoft's Exchange offerings.

The open source start-up develops software designed to provide e-mail, document sharing, shared calendars, and … Read more

If you're in need of a quick and simple way to share a document with a few other people at the same time, worth checking out is ShowDocument. It works with most major file types including PDFs, Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, and text files, and displays them in a simple Flash-based viewer and editor.

Once you've uploaded any file up to 2MB in size, you can mark it up with a pen and highlighter tool, along with a text box tool and eraser. There's also a small chat box to discuss changes, and everyone's cursor is … Read more

TechCrunch is reporting that Jive Software, an emerging collaboration leader, has cut one-third of its headcount. Sam Lawrence, Jive's chief marketing officer, has confirmed the news. Normally this wouldn't be inspiring news for Jive customers and prospects, but in this case I think it's actually a reason to be optimistic if you fall into one of these camps.

Jive is backed by Sequoia, the same firm that recently warned its portfolio companies to manage cash prudently through the downturn. Jive grew at a frenetic pace over the past year--this move is a way to return to prudent, … Read more

Finetuna is a dead simple collaborative image annotation tool. Meant mostly for casual designers, it lets you make a few short notes on an image and send it off to someone else. As soon as they get it, they can view your edits, make their own, then send it back. This keeps the paper trail out of your e-mail in-box, and in a single place.

Finetuna's key appeal is that it does several simple things with ease. You can highlight, underline, and cross out text. There are also simple tools to insert text and make comments, which are essentially … Read more

Productivity application start-up Zoho is in a tough position: it has to compete with Google Apps. That hasn't stopped the company from pushing forward and trying new stuff.

Case in point: Zoho's Marketplace, which launched Tuesday. Through the Marketplace, Zoho users can make a buck or two off of applications that they built with Zoho Creator, the company's drag-and-drop application development tool.

If you've made an application in Creator, you can list it for sale in the Marketplace and charge a fee, if you want. Zoho doesn't take a commission from the sale of applications, … Read more

I was fortunate to catch up Thursday with Stuart Cohen, CEO and founder of the Collaborative Software Initiative. Stuart used to run OSDL where he got to talk with people at large enterprises that have adopted open source, and learned quite a bit about enterprise interest in not only consuming open source, but also creating open source.

To help foster both interests Stuart founded CSI in 2007. I asked him how things have progressed since CSI's founding:

Asay: Collaborative Software Initiative is going on 18 months now. How has the company evolved since you founded it in April 2007?

Cohen: I'm really proud to say that our original concept has been validated in multiple verticals with very different projects. Based on my early conversations with customers during my time as CEO of Open Source Development Labs, I saw an untapped opportunity to build communities in vertical markets to develop software at a fraction of the cost of traditional software models.

We believe, and again this has been validated over the last year, that communities lower cost, provide a "network effect" for companies adopting these applications and build sustainability for future growth of an application.… Read more

As Wall Street struggles to redefine itself, Cisco is busy this week introducing its latest wave of collaboration products to compete with Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.

"It's a major launch for us, including a comprehensive update to our Unified Communications platform, a new collaboration client for WebEx and Telepresence Expert on Demand," said Rick McConnell, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Unified Communications division.

Cisco's Unified Communications release 7.0 adds support for Windows Mobile, in addition to Symbian and Blackberry. iPhone support is in the works, McConnell said, but Android support is not … Read more

Cisco Systems is bolstering its unified communications and collaboration portfolio with the purchase of a corporate instant-messaging company.

On Friday, the networking giant announced it will purchase Jabber, which uses an open-source IM and presence protocol used by Google Talk and Gizmo. The company didn't disclose financial details.

In essence, Jabber's technology allows multiple IM platforms to "talk" to each other. This means that it allows people using tools such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, and Google to send messages to each and get presence information about one another.

Jabber's technology … Read more

Liverpool-based screen sharing and collaboration app Yuuguu this week put out an important update that solves one of the service's biggest hurdles--the need for software. The new model requires only the host to have the special Yuuguu software on his or her machine while the other 29 users can watch and interact using nothing more than Adobe Flash.

The news comes just a week and a half after the launch of a Linux version of the product, which runs just like it does on Windows and Mac machines. In either case the system sets up a special chat room … Read more