Rafe's Radar

IT pros will often tell you that a lot of consumer technology isn't ready for the enterprise. It's not secure, it's not priced correctly, it can't be administered, yada yada. That doesn't stop businesspeople from using consumer tools in their jobs, though. It just stops the people who make the tools from profiting from their use.

Where there are IT administrators, there are budgets, and where there are budgets, there's market opportunity. And I'm not surprised that two very solid personal productivity tools are getting business versions this week and business models to match.

Xobni provides a heads-up display for e-mail.

(Credit: Xobni)

The Outlook add-on maker Xobni on Monday released Xobni Enterprise, a new version of the product with links into traditional business data sources. While the free and Plus levels of Xobni will search Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to give users more information about the people who are e-mailing them, the enterprise version will also tap into Salesforce.com, Sharepoint, and corporate directory services. It can also be extended to work with proprietary business apps. This could be pretty cool: users will be able to see latest internal database info from people they're communicating with them, automatically when they're doing the communicating.

And to help IT teams keep their users in line with whatever (ridiculous and restrictive) policies their companies have on employee access to outside data, Enterprise Xobni admins can also turn off access to the app's Twitter features and other parts of the product.

Admins, of course, can provision employees' computers for access to Xobni data from a central console.

Xobni Enterprise starts at $30 a user a year, with prices going down with volume or up for access to enterprise data sources.

The Business edition of SugarSync lets admins pool storage and control access.

(Credit: SugarSync)

On Tuesday, the cloud file synchronization product SugarSync gets a business version design for teams. The Business version of the product features pooled storage and central IT control. Customers pay for each user ($10 a month) and for the storage they want, in 100GB increments. Admins have access to all this storage, too. If an employee leaves the company, they can disable access, and then sign on as that person, and recover data. There's no "remote wipe" feature to remove company data from an employee's computer, but CEO Laura Yecies told me she's thinking about it.

A useful feature lets users send files to other people via the SugarSync service, instead of through e-mail. This could compete with the useful, but single-purpose and somewhat expensive product, YouSendIt, except that SugarSync's single-file transfer function can't password-protect files.

In the cloud sync category, SugarSync lagged its major competitor Dropbox in releasing of a free, limited version of the service. There's one now, and Yecies says, "We're finding that free is a good business." She bases this on "conversion" to the paid product, which she says is 5 percent to 10 percent, depending on the offers presented to users.

I use and pay for my own SugarSync account and highly recommend the service. Compared with geek favorite service Dropbox, it's got more flexible configuration options and better mobile device support. The business version freaks me out, personally--I don't want any IT manager getting access to files my hard drive--but this sounds like a good product for the security-conscious IT exec who wants to provide a team file-sharing product along with off-site backup to users.

Sure, Google Voice is cool, but it's not necessarily the best Web-meets-phone service one can imagine, is it? The field is still open, and switchboard-in-the-cloud company Ribbit (a division of BT) will stir things up when users get their hands on Ribbit Mobile, a new telephony service for consumers.

Like Google Voice as of last week, Ribbit Mobile adds services to your existing mobile phone number, using a standard telephone company service called Conditional Call Forwarding. You set up your phone service to route to the service when you don't pick up the phone, and it gives you all its features on the calls it then grabs: voicemail, forwarding, routing, and so on.

Ribbit Mobile isn't purely a mobile app, name notwithstanding. Rather, the "Mobile" means that your phone number becomes nomadic, moving to and temporarily setting up residence on whatever voice platform you want to use at any moment, be it a mobile number, a landline, or a VoIP system. Users set up their Ribbit Mobile features on a Flash-based Web site. Smartphone apps are coming, as is, most likely, another Apple app store approval drama.

Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs doesn't seem to want Ribbit compared directly to Google Voice, since Ribbit is a telephony platform company with ambitions well beyond the consumer app. Ribbit's revenues to date have come from its platform business. But Ribbit Mobile will be compared with Google Voice, and it's a fair and interesting battle.

Ribbit Mobile does a lot, but the Flash app is a little busy.

(Credit: Ribbit)

Ribbit Mobile bests Google Voice in a few key ways. Its voicemail transcription feature will be better, although users won't get that feature for nothing. Free users will get machine speech-to-text, with likely the same quality of amusing and borderline-useless transcriptions as in Google Voice. But paid users will also have the option of using human-assisted transcription so their voicemail-to-text messages are actually sensible and useful.

Ribbit can also connect to VoIP services like Skype or SIP phones (Google works with phone-company phones and SIP, but not directly with Skype), as well as voice-chat features in some IM services, and you can transfer calls between phones while you're talking.

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This week: Books, future of. With the success of the Kindle and its store, and the announced upcoming release of the Barnes & Noble Nook, there are very interesting question for consumers and publishers: What is the future of the book? To discuss this on the Roundtable I have two experts on digital media. First, from CNET, executive editor David Carnoy, who has reviewed the latest e-book readers and who's an e-published author -- see "Knife Music" on Amazon, a 5-star rated book. And joining us from O'Reilly Media - Andrew Savikas, VP of Digital Media Initiatives and a well-known thinker on the print-to-digital transition.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

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I love upgrades. But I hate upgrade discs and upgrade pricing. Let's find a way to do away with both, or at least make the upgrade transaction a bit cleaner.

Operating system upgrades
The reason I'm writing this column won't be a surprise to anyone one who follows technology: Windows 7. I bought the upgrade disc (on the pre-order special price). When it arrived, I started the upgrade process for my Vista desktop. Knowing that the disc was licensed only to upgrade an existing Windows installation, I pressed the big button for a "Custom" installation and the disc set up my computer more-or-less cleanly with Windows 7. What I really wanted to do was re-format my hard drive and start from a blank slate on my computer, but I was afraid to do that since I thought the disc would see that as a non-upgrade install and not work.

Eventually, I did it anyway, thanks in part to the confidence I got from other users who had found ways to install an upgrade disc to fresh PC. I re-installed Windows 7 on the computer and asked the installer to format the disc first. It did, it installed Windows 7, and two days later I nervously entered my license key for Windows to authorize itself. Which it did, no problems. I didn't have to resort to any hacks. Hats off to Microsoft for doing what it should have. But my fear about the upgrade did cause me some nerves, and is also the reason I did the "custom" or semi-clean upgrade in the first place, which turned out to be a waste of valuable time.

I'm also peeved that I had to pay for this for this upgrade. Wasn't running Vista for two years payment enough? That OS was patched and upgraded numerous times while I was running it, at no cost to me. Windows 7, while a better experience, is still clearly Vista with problems fixed and an improved interface. I don't feel I should have to pay for again.

Then there's OS X Snow Leopard, another upgrade I paid for. Sure, it was only $29, but what did I get? Nothing that's made a tangible difference in my Mac experience. My Macbook runs very well now. It ran very well before I did the upgrade, too. There are nice new features, but they're incremental.

How many times can operating system vendors charge users for offering the same fundamental benefit on the hardware that they already own?

Here's what I propose: no more OS upgrade pricing. Vendors, make your money for each new machine that runs your OS, either up front when the OS is installed on the machine (easy for Apple, which makes 99.99 percent of the machines that run the Apple OS), or by letting customers subscribe to operating system upgrades as an ongoing service. The OS subscription model is probably a better bet for business customers on the Windows side. On OS X, it could be part of Apple Care. When users retire a machine, they can end the subscription and get a pro-rated portion of their money back.

So much of what you pay for with an OS is ongoing maintenance and security updates anyway, I don't see how a reasonable subscription fee would be a stopper for reasonable users, assuming the total cost for the subscription was about the same as the cost for buying the operating system license outright.

It's time to recognize that the Webware, or software-as-a-service model, can work for installed software, especially now that we've become accustomed to paying subscription fees for almost every digital asset we use (examples: Web apps, mobile phones, cable TV boxes, multiplayer games). We need ongoing vendor support for an OS anyway, so why not level out the expense?

Sure, OS makers don't get the big revenue spike when they ship a major new version. But they do get a predictable revenue stream, and as machines age and people replace them, and as new machines are built and bought, they can still make enough money. And market forces would, I would hope, keep prices competitive. (If we end up paying more for our OSes, I will be first in line to tar and feather myself.)

Application upgrades
There's another form of upgrade that I find vexing: the major app upgrade. I'm looking at Microsoft again here, with its Office upgrades, but also at Adobe and many other software vendors that offer upgrades at retail for existing users of their products.

These upgrade prices are often so low in comparison to new-user prices that they encourage users to find workarounds, legal and not, to get the deals. One co-worker, for example, once acquired Photoshop by buying an upgrade version online, and a leftover, older version at a local computer store, just so he could install the older version and upgrade it. Legal? Sure. Ridiculous? That, too. With new-user pricing for major apps being so high, it's no wonder that people will go to lengths to get the cheaper upgrade path... and then be stuck with having to install two apps to do the job of one.

Here's a better idea: Sell software at a reasonable price. And take the upgrades off the shelves. Instead, offer upgrades to apps exclusively from within the apps themselves, to current users of the apps, and deliver the code over the Net. Users might pay the same for major software upgrades, but the upgrade discs won't be floating around telling new users that they're being taking for a ride when they want to buy the app for the first time. Hopefully this could help vendors actually lower prices and get their apps in the hands of more customers.

I was surprised to hear from a Microsoft exec that the issue with in-place full version upgrades is more technical than economic. Chris Bryant, director of Office Product Management, told me that building an upgrade path into an app requires a clear vision of the future of the app so the upgrade framework will work (which doesn't quite explain how major service pack upgrades are possible). The reason I expected to hear--that retailers wouldn't benefit from the upgrades--he said didn't necessarily hold, since Microsoft has methods to track who sold an installation of the software first, and can credit that seller for revenues from in-place upgrades.

These are just a few ideas, and I'm aware they're far from perfect solutions. But upgrade discs cause consumers confusion. There are ways to give users and companies the same benefits in cleaner packages.

Stalqer locates even friends who don't use the service.

(Credit: Stalqer)

The developers of the iPhone app GasBag, which helps iPhone users find the cheapest gas for their cars, are working on a new mobile friend locator service, Stalqer. This clever and aptly named service has two technologies that are unique, as far as I know, to help it get around two of the big problems found in other friend locators like Foursquare, Loopt, and Google's Latitude.

Problem 1: On the mobile platform that matters, the iPhone, there's no way to do real-time location reporting without running an app all the time, and the iPhone doesn't allow background processes. And even if it did, it would draw down the battery. The Stalqer solution is to create a dummy e-mail account that pings the Stalqer servers whenever the phone polls for mail, which is, by default, every 15 minutes.

When the phone hits the Stalqer e-mail servers, it sends along Internet gateway data, which can be used to locate the phone. It only works when the phone is connected via Wi-Fi, not GSM. It also doesn't get data from the phone's GPS sensor, but it's a clever hack on the way to the creation of more robust location reporting features.

Competing mobile social apps require the app (Foursquare, Loopt) or site (Latitude) to be open for the user's location to be reported. Or they require a phone that supports background processing, like an Android device.

CEO Mick Johnson told me there is another company that has this idea, but nobody has yet released a product based on it.

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The American Association of Retired Persons, or AARP, an organization with the stated mission of helping "people 50 and over improve the quality of their lives as they age," has launched a Web site for whippersnappers, people not old enough to be members, called LifeTuner. The consumer pitch is noble: It helps people set good financial habits early, while there's still time. The site and the advice and tools on it are free. AARP membership, of course, is not free. Hence the obvious business case for the service: It can help people retire so they can afford the dues. Everybody wins.

In a roundabout way, LifeTuner is also a benefit to existing AARP members, as the organization's research shows that 69 percent of them, "provide financial support to their adult-age children." This site could knock that number down a notch, a clear bonus for all involved.

The service itself is made up of a community system (forums, blogs, scheduled chats), expert advice articles and interactive features, various handy calculators, and a Flash-based app, My Financial Tuner, that will tell you how far ahead of, or behind, the curve you are on having the appropriate budget for your particular financial situation.

The My financial Tuner app will tell you how behind the eight ball you are.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The Financial Tuner app reminds me of a feature on Mint, which can check your spending against demographically similar groups. Mint, though, checks your actual spending. The Tuner requires you input your major financial figures -- salaries, mortgage, average utility bills, and so forth. I'd argue that Mint, like other personal finance Web sites, is more useful, since it shows you where your actual expenses are out of whack, at a level granular enough that a simple change will be reflected in your "score" the next month. The Tuner feedback is more at the avuncular level: It will tell you how much you're spending on a category, like mortgage, and compare it to people in your income bracket, your age group, etc. But what are you going to do with that data? Move if the app says you're spending too much?

There's no real social angle on the site other than the forums. No groups you're automatically placed in based on financial situation, no buying clubs. That's too bad, because that is something people could really use, and the AARP could add market power to any financial groups its members belonged to.

There are a lot of community rooms on LifeTuner, but not yet a ton of activity.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

People over 50: If you're looking for a site to recommend to your kids or grandkids that has good financial advice, LifeTuner isn't a bad site at all to point them to. But it is a bit old-school. To really get a bead on finances, people young, old, and middle would be better-served by a more dynamic financial system like Mint, possibly coupled with an up-to-date investing site like KaChing.

This week we are covering the dangers of cloud computing. Get it? With the major loss of consumer data for the Sidekick smartphone users--the Sidekick is made by Danger, a Microsoft company--the whole idea of "cloud" safety has been brought front and center for consumers.

Businesses, likewise, are wondering if they are exposed to similar risks when they put their apps and data in the cloud.

Can we trust the cloud?

Our guests to discuss this topic are CNET senior writer Stephen Shankland and Christofer Hoff, author of the Rational Survivability blog, which is about this very topic. Hoff is director of cloud and emerging solutions at Cisco System and thus has a vested interest in keeping the cloud safe and profitable.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Reporters' Roundtable #7: The dangers of the cloud ... Read more

Tim Berners-Lee at the Web 2.0 Summit.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--When Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, entered the room for the final interview at the Web 2.0 Summit, the audience stood up for him.

Appropriately so, since most of those present here Thursday owe their livelihoods to his invention. In an on-stage interview with Tim O'Reilly, the audience was listening to Berners-Lee not just for his perspective but his guidance. While not explicitly called out in the discussion, there was good advice in what he had to say. Here's what I heard:

Don't build your laws into the Web. "Technology shouldn't tell you what's right and what's wrong," Berners-Lee said. "The rule of law applies on the Web. It's a platform for humanity." He does not appear believe that it is appropriate to code local laws onto the global platform, preferring to leave enforcement to existing means--police and courts.

Fault-tolerance is vital. Responding to question from O'Reilly about the "404" page being one of the critical inventions on the Web, Berners-Lee said, "It was a trade-off and a design choice." But, he added, "The great thing is you can write a bunch of links and you don't have to wait" for them all to work. Building a tight system where everything is guaranteed to work is possible in smaller configurations but not on a global scale.

If you want it everywhere, give it away. The Twitter founders must have heard this message before they built their product. When asked why Berners-Lee never thought about charging for the Web, the answer was practical and capitalistic. "Because we wanted it everywhere," He said. "We wanted an URL for every page." And he got it. Ubiquity would not have been possible with competing, paid hypertext systems.

Large companies are the enemy. I'm interpreting here, from this statement: "I'm worried about anything large coming in to take control, whether it's large companies or government." For example, he said that large social networks like Facebook end up with undue control over communications because they are not open to other systems. As he said, in the old days of e-mail, you could e-mail anyone, anywhere, from any system. They all interconnected. With large, closed systems, users cede control to the owners.

Small open companies can topple big closed ones. Berners-Lee believes that if you have small companies that connect to each other in an open way (for example, small social networks using a standard to connect their networks), then it's possible that the lone, closed system, no matter how large, can fail.

Separate design from device. The growth of mobile devices is one example of how thinking about Web design for one size screen--a PC or laptop--can cut a product off from growth. Another: not considering the increase in the number of users with "huge screens" on which a design created for, say, and 800x600 Flash window, will appear tiny and weak.

Consider content as app. Thanks to HTML 5, which Berners-Lee calls a competing platform more than a content standard, Web pages can turn into widgets, and some apps won't be distinguishable from Web pages.

Forge trust. Berners-Lee says, "One of the whole gating factors of getting the whole world of Web apps to take off is trust." He says that when Web apps get data from different services and those services similarly reach out to others, how do users, customers, and companies ever learn to trust a single site? What's the solution? He doesn't know, but believes it's an opportunity: "If we get a really good solution to the problem, then Web apps will be amazing."

Make the Web work for more people. As Berners-Lee says, only 20 percent to 25 percent of humans uses the Web even though 80 percent "have signal," that is, they could get on the Web where they are if they had the tools or desire to do so. He believes that one of the reasons use of the Web is lower than its availability is that much of the Web isn't designed for all cultures. The World Wide Web Foundation is Berners-Lee's platform for pushing for more Web access for the world. He puts the challenge this way: "It's about figuring out what is the little thing we can tweak so that people can get online, 15 years before they would otherwise?" More people connected means more empowered people. Which, by the way, means more of a market for Web inventors.

There have been dozens, maybe hundreds, of companies that have tried to create useful Web browser start pages and content aggregation sites. Popular themes include RSS readers, widget collection pages, and user-filtered news hubs. I've seen and tried a lot of them but rarely use them after a quick look. A new project, iCurrent, has potential to break out of that swamp for me and other users.

iCurrent contains no magical thinking or head-slappy reconceptualizations of news. It's just an aggregation service done well, with useful and clear features for users, and a straightforward sharing mechanism.

You tell iCurrent what you're interested in (examples: Windows 7, Formula 1, the Public Option), and the system will find stories on that topic from its solid lineup of sources, and create a "channel" for you that exists in one of its mainstream categories (in my examples: Technology, Sports, Health).

I found that the system picked good stories in my channels, and from good sources, and that it categorized them mostly correctly. It's easy enough to recategorize topics and add or remove news items. For example, I wanted news on "San Francisco Muni," but iCurrent originally put it in "Business." I moved it to "News." I also added CNET News to the "Sources" list for the topic, just in case we ever cover it.

The iCurrent main screen blends your custom content with news categories you haven't yet flagged (orange box).

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

On the front page of iCurrent, you get stories from your designated topics in the middle column of the page, and general and trending news on the right. The blend is important -- it keeps you informed on topics you might not be looking for. And it's how you build up your channels at first, by adding topics from the general stories you see.

If there's a channel you like, you can invite other users to it, and invite them to join iCurrent in the process. If you invite someone outright, you can also pre-populate their channel lineup with your channels. This is an important method to spread the love on iCurrent, as it's going to be hard, otherwise, for people to hear about this product. And, as CEO Ramana Rao told me, "Google will probably whack it," meaning that iCurrent stories won't show up in the Google index.

Not that they should. The service doesn't repackage stories, it just links to them. When you want to read a story, you get it from the original source, with a frame at the top (which can be disabled) that leads you back to iCurrent.

iCurrent rewards the engaged reader, but it doesn't require much work at all to make it a compelling experience. As I said at the top of this story, there's nothing really amazing here, just a good understanding of how today's users consume news, and enough technology to put that news in front of them.

It's fast and easy to add sources to the default list for any category.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

There are some improvements that I'd like to see: The interface is just a little busy when it comes to adding and removing sources and channels, although it's not unclear. More importantly, coverage of local news is not that good, which is a shame in a news reader that can be highly personalized. I'd also like to see a mobile version.

The product is in private beta now and should be available shortly. You can sign up to be alerted when it goes public. I recommend that.

Rao says iCurrent will make money from advertising. It might. It's more likely it'll make money when Yahoo or Microsoft buys it.

See also: Meehive, YourVersion.