Webware

If recent research is any indication, Amazon.com and Google are winning the cloud game.

Evans Data on Tuesday released a report (registration required) on how developers perceive cloud service providers related to cloud services offerings, including their completeness and the companies' ability to execute on the vision.

Janel Garvin, the founder of Evans Data and the author of the report, provides excellent insight into the current state of the market and how quickly things could change, if certain large vendors (notably AT&T and Microsoft) got their acts together more quickly.

Given their robust services, it isn't surprising that Amazon and Google top the list. And although IBM, VMware, and Microsoft trail, each offers important components of cloud infrastructure.

In the 1990s, Lotus Notes gained notoriety, in part, for the nifty collaboration features it brought to corporate e-mail. IBM's CEO at the time, Lou Gerstner, was so impressed that he paid a premium to consummate what began as a hostile tender to buy Lotus in 1995.

Notes went on to become an unqualified commercial success with some 145 million users around the world who use the product. Still, Lotus hasn't quite secured for itself the reputation of offering the must-have enterprise collaboration technology in the age of the Internet.

What with the proliferation of competing Web-based technologies targeting that market, it will be tough for any one company to claim that moniker for itself. But Big Blue will stake its claim with its upcoming entry--courtesy of its Lotus division in Cambridge, Mass.--with a cloud computing angle.

The work comes out of a project that got under way at Lotus last fall to develop an Internet-based collaboration and social-networking service. In Web 2.0 parlance, the idea was to meld social networking with business-collaboration tools in a way to make it easier for corporate users to use and share information. The project was to culminate in finding a way for users to tap the Web to access applications such as instant messaging or document sharing.

So it is that IBM on Wednesday will announce a service called LotusLive Engage, what it bills as an integrated social networking and collaboration cloud service. You can go up on the Web site today and take a tour, but this is a teaser test run. Although the official announcement will take place at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference, which opens in San Francisco, LotusLive Engage becomes commercially available on April 7.

Brendan Crotty, program manager of LotusLive said the project, initially geared at the small to mid-size business market, benefited from often frank feedback by beta testers who told IBM what they liked and disliked about the interface. In the hour-long demo I had Tuesday afternoon, it appeared that IBM's designers had taken those comments to heart. The console layout was lapidary and intuitive. Enterprise users who previously worked with products like Notes or Microsoft Exchange shouldn't have any trouble figuring out what does what.

LotusLive Engage's communications and collaboration tools work both within and beyond the corporate firewall so that employees can interact with clients, partners, or suppliers. IBM's phrase to describe what's going on is "extranet collaboration." The short list of the features include profile and contact management, online meetings, file sharing, instant messaging, and project management capabilities.

Any information warehoused on LotusLive services will live in a cloud managed by IBM. Pricing will range from $10 to $45 per user.

I don't think the question is so much whether the product's bells and whistles will spark the same keen interest evinced by the corporate world when Lotus Notes debuted. Cloud computing may be the buzzword du jour, but let's take a breath. Fact is that enterprise customers are still in the tire-kicking phase. There remain myriad questions within IT about security and the guarantee of up time for companies which rely upon the cloud.

But the fact that this is coming out of IBM helps account for the approximately 30,000 businesses that were involved in the pilot program leading up to Wednesday's announcement. Let's make no mistake about it: here's one case where size really does matter.

It's going to get easier for Google to keep tabs on your health.

The ubiquitous tech conglomerate has signed on to a new software product created by IBM with help from the Continua Health Alliance, an organization that promotes interoperability of medical devices. It'll take data from personal health monitoring devices, like blood sugar meters for diabetics, and share that directly with the patient in question's Google Health file (and the patient's physician, if he or she uses Google Health as well).

Other personal health record (PHR) services will also be able to use the IBM software, which was built partially on open-source standards.

"Our partnership with IBM will help both providers and users gain access to their device data in a highly simplified and automated fashion," Google Health director Sameer Samat said in a release. "IBM has taken an important step in providing software that enables device manufacturers and hospitals to easily upload recorded data into a PHR platform, such as Google Health."

Google Health, dedicated to the digitization of health records, launched in May. Microsoft has also planned a medical records service called HealthVault. President Barack Obama, meanwhile, has made it clear that he plans to make digital health records part of his health care reform agenda.

Amber Ettinger, better known as "Obama Girl," has teamed up with Stickam for coverage of the presidential inauguration. Live coverage will be streamed live Monday at 8 p.m. EST from InauguralFest, and viewers will be able to see what she is doing all day at the inauguration starting at 10 a.m. EST Tuesday.

Integrated Media Measurement, an online research firm, found (PDF) that women between the ages of 15 and 48 tend to watch a television show and surf the Web an average of 17.5 minutes per day, while men do the same for just 15.7 minutes each day. Women between 30 and 39 average 23.3 minutes of simultaneous Web and TV usage each day. More importantly for marketers, women tend to multitask more as they get older, while men multitask less often. According to Amanda Welsh, head of research for IMMI, "women are more inclined to multitask than men" while using the Web.

Professional social network LinkedIn announced Monday that it has partnered with IBM to bring social-network functionality to Lotus Notes, an enterprise client that provides e-mail and instant-messaging services to users. The social-network plug-in will provide Lotus Notes users with contact and networking information about those they're contacting (as long as they are using LinkedIn) and browse LinkedIn's news feeds. The companies plan to unveil the new plug-in at Lotusphere later this year and hope to release it to Lotus Notes users by June.

Juniper Research released a report Monday saying event-based sales should increase the value and monetization of mobile dating and chat room sites. The report said that although subscription revenue will still contribute the most revenue to online dating sites over the next five years, charging customers to contact one another or providing virtual gifts will become increasingly important in their business models going forward. Juniper also found that free services that charge for contact are becoming more popular and could become the standard sometime during the next 10 years.

Navitell, a Belgium-based start-up that develops software that adds location-specific multimedia content to mobile phones, announced Monday that it has raised approximately $2.6 million in a round of funding that was led by FPIM. According to the company's executives, they plan to use the funding to expand their set of personalization services.

LiveWorld, a social media marketing agency that's trying to expand its business into social networking, announced Thursday that it will offer a new edition of its Community Center 2.0 software, which is intended to provide businesses with a lower-cost social networking option for creating an online community around a company's brand.

Dubbed Community Center 2.0 ProEdition, LiveWorld's software includes moderation tools, widgets, community segmentation features for a more robust social network, and community-optimized search engine optimization. Most importantly, the ProEdition also includes LiveWorld's API to let companies create a unique social network that runs over the LiveWorld platform. According to the company, the average social network can be deployed in a few weeks.

"Brands realize that creating a loyal, active online community to engage their customers is critical to marketing in the 21st century, and all the more so in a tough economic climate," Peter Friedman, LiveWorld's Chairman and CEO, said in a statement. "That's why we've created ProEdition. It lets businesses deploy social networks based on LiveWorld's...platform, but at a lower entry and ongoing price than previously available."

But just how affordable is Community Center 2.0? You'll need to call the company to find out -- it doesn't divulge pricing information to the public due to the unique nature of each company's needs. Regardless, LiveWorld is operating in an extremely competitive market. And with major companies like IBM and its Lotus Connections solution offering outstanding opportunities for the enterprise to "go social," LiveWorld may not be able to easily take the leadership role in the space.

NEW YORK--In an announcement sure to raise eyebrows among the companies gathered at the Web 2.0 Expo here, IBM said Wednesday it is opening the IBM Center for Social Software.

So is IBM intent on becoming another social media company? Hardly. Most likely Big Blue intends the new center to be a focal point for developing software tailored to help companies build social networking tools onto the sites. More importantly, the center could help IBM tailor consulting packages from IBM Global Services.

With that in mind, IBM's decision to open the center in Cambridge, Mass., (where the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University are based) rather than in Silicon Valley (where most social media companies are based ) makes more sense. In a press release, IBM describes the facility as an incubation center where it can collaborate with both customers and people in academia.

So why's this interesting? Many companies here on the exhibit floor at the Jacob Javits Center aren't social media companies. Instead, they're trying to sell software, hosting, and consulting services to social media companies and to traditional technology buyers like auto makers that are trying to add communities and other "social" tools to their Web sites.

IBM became a dominant supplier of software for Web 1.0 sites (both e-commerce and publishing) by following a similar model: It started into the market with rudimentary e-commerce and application server software packaged with IBM Global Services consulting contracts.

Smaller competitors such as the long-since-departed software maker Open Market scoffed at the IBM offering, noting that is was little more than a developer's tool kit that IBM used as a come-on to sell its consulting. They had a point, but IBM won that competition anyway.

Can IBM do the same to the nascent market for social-networking software? Few of the companies here at the Web 2.0 can afford to ignore that possibility.

Click here for full coverage of Web 2.0 Expo

If the OpenID Foundation were a liquor cabinet, it just got stocked with some Grey Goose, Rhum Clement, and Gran Patron.

The foundation, which is pushing for a universal Internet login standard, announced on Thursday that representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, and VeriSign have become its first corporate board members. They join existing board members Scott Kveton (Vidoop), David Recordon (Six Apart), Dick Hardt (Sxip Identity), Martin Atkins (independent), Artur Bergman (Wikia), Johannes Ernst (NetMesh), Drummond Reed (Parity Communications), and executive director Bill Washburn.

Several major technology companies, including Yahoo, had already voiced support for the standard.

OpenID started as a grassroots initiative to handle an increasingly complex Internet rife with user accounts, logins, and passwords galore, and some skeptics thought that it couldn't possibly earn the approval of tech's biggest players. But its creators have gone on to build serious Web credibility, which has undoubtedly helped the standard move from an experimental geek project toward industrywide adoption.

Founder Brad Fitzpatrick, who developed the standard in 2005 while working at Six Apart, is now an engineer at Google and has been a key component of its OpenSocial developer initiative.

"Google shares the OpenID Foundation's vision of a Web that's easy to use and built on open standards available to everyone," Fitzpatrick said in a statement from the OpenID Foundation. "OpenID was always intended to be a decentralized sign-on system, so it's fantastic (for Google) to join a foundation committed to keeping it free and unencumbered by proprietary extensions."

The representatives from the OpenID Foundation's new corporate board members are Dewitt Clinton (Google), Tony Nadalin (IBM), Michael B. Jones (Microsoft), Gary Krall (VeriSign), and Shreyas Doshi (Yahoo).

IBM released on Tuesday a tool that it says will let businesspeople, rather than professional programmers, build their own Web applications.

Called the the Mashup Starter Kit, it is an updated version of QEDWiki tool. The starter kit lets people view and access Web information and company databases in order to build mash-ups--applications that combine information from different sources in a single screen.

IBM, which sells to corporate customers, sees a lot of potential in giving businesspeople the ability to build their own applications via tapping into various information sources.

Example: a mash-up application that tracks relevant news and plots Avian flu data using a mapping Web service.

(Credit: IBM )

The Mashup Starter Kit includes a server component called the Mashup Hub, which is designed to make it easier to view data stored in corporate databases. The QEDWiki tool is the visual front-end for accessing that information and combining it.

When working with customers, IBM found that access to content was at least as important as the front-end assembly tool, said Rod Smith, first president of emerging technology at IBM.

"The idea is that the Hub is like a Web 2.0 Web site where people can register feeds, rate feeds--the things are inside the catalog," Smith said. "Business people not only wanted to do mash-ups, they want to have more control of information, like a freshness of it for instance."

Companies can customize the feeds that users can access using PHP, a scripting language that the application is written in.

The product is still in preview mode and available for download at IBM's Alphaworks emerging technology site. It will be generally available in the first quarter of next year, Smith said.

The idea of allowing untrained users to build their own applications has been around for a long time, with little success.

But Web services, such as mapping applications, and more powerful front-end development languages let people build powerful programs without enlisting professional developers.

In May, Microsoft released an early version of Popfly, a hosted application-construction tool aimed at consumers. People customize Web sites by combining information from popular Web services like MySpace and Flickr.

Adobe last week showed off a product in development called Thermo, which is aimed at designers. With the tool, designers can lay out a Web application's look and program the interactivity without having to write code.