What's happening in meetings I've been in here is likely similar to what's happening in other corporations: People are gathering to figure out how to use, exploit, or simply not get their companies embarrassed on Twitter. But no matter what we agree to in these rooms (which, in my experience, isn't much), one thing is sure: You can't manage a major corporate Twitter presence on Twitter.com itself. Nor, for that matter, can you in one of the popular client apps like Tweetdeck or the current Seesmic Desktop. You need something built for customer service or brand management. New tools are emerging for just that.
The two I recommend are Invoke's HootSuite, which is in open beta right now (version 2.0 is in private beta), and CoTweet, which is still closed. I've tried them both.
Common features
The products have much in common. Both allow you to control and monitor multiple Twitter accounts, and give other people access to those accounts as you see fit. In both, you can maintain password control of your Twitter accounts -- users need only know their HootSuite or CoTweet login to see their assigned accounts and reply on your company's behalf. You can add or take people off accounts without having to get into the weeds in Twitter itself.
Both products let you post from any of your configured Twitter accounts, or all of them together if you like. And the both support the automatic addition of "cotags," like the short, signed bylines (example: "^RN" for Rafe Needleman) you're beginning to see in multi-person corporate Twitter accounts. You can also set up posts to go out at future times in both products, nice for running rudimentary marketing campaigns.
Both give you stats on links you share from the service. HootSuite uses its own shortener, ow.ly, and its stats are very deep. CoTweet uses the capable Bit.ly but displays only the most rudimentary stats from that service, unfortunately.
HootSuite: Power tool with torque
HootSuite is the geekier tool, and it's more powerful than CoTweet in some ways. The 2.0 version (due out by July) supports multiple columns, like Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop. Its statistics, as I said, are deep. It can show you things like the most influential re-tweeters of your links.
HootSuite will also monitor RSS feeds and send headlines out in your Twitter feeds automatically. That's a pretty slick feature. I've used Twitterfeed to do that in the past (that's how the @Webware feed works), but like the idea of integrating the RSS harvester into a more comprehensive tool.
In the user management category, HootSuite lets you follow or unfollow people from within the client, as well as report spammers to Twitter HQ with one button click.
With HootSuite, you can have multiple people manage multiple Twitter accounts.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)... Read more
NetSuite on Thursday unveiled its SuiteCloud Ecosystem, expanding its on-demand enterprise software service to include cloud computing.
The company, which hosts enterprise software on demand, is branching out to allow customers the ability to push their core operations into the clouds.
As part of its SuiteCloud Ecosystem, NetSuite is launching a developer program, SuiteCloud Developer Network, and an online cloud-computing application marketplace, SuiteApp.com.
The SuiteCloud platform will be built on core NetSuite enterprise resource management (ERP) software, as well as its customer relationship management (CRM) and e-commerce offerings.
NetSuite is delving into cloud computing at a time when this relatively new industry is coming to grips with its own definition and purpose.
Adobe released details Monday about Creative Suite 4, its first update to more than a dozen design and editing tools since Adobe CS3 some 17 months ago.
The costs of the applications, set to reach consumers in October, haven't changed since CS3, but remain hefty. Should longtime users upgrade?
Click on this image for more details about the Adobe CS4 suites.
(Credit: Adobe)Of course that depends on the specific tools you need. However, we suspect that only the most well-heeled will jump at the chance, as CS4 shares the majority of tools with its predecessor. Perhaps more dramatic, life-changing alterations will come with the next Creative Suite. That said, time-saving tweaks to Illustrator and Flash in particular could lure professionals immersed in them to upgrade.
With CS4, Adobe aimed to unify the interfaces of more than a dozen applications, including Flash and other former properties of Macromedia. You'll see similar pull down menus for toggling among workspaces that you can customize, as well as Flash-based panels that nicely snap open and shut. Corporate design departments will find plenty of enhancements for their teams to share work more quickly.
Adobe continues to improve integration among the applications. After Effects, as only one example, can import Photoshop 3D layers and export content directly into Flash.
Options for working with high-definition video and mobile content expand too, with support for the latest formats as well as for making Adobe AIR applications. Among other highlights:
Photoshop CS4 will use your computer's graphics chip for the first time, while offering support for 64-bit Windows.
At long last, you can handle more than one project at a time in Illustrator, thanks to the new multiple Artboards feature.
Flash CS4 has a rebuilt animation model, so you can make objects move on the stage in two quick steps. And Flash introduces a new, XML-based file format.
Dreamweaver provides plenty of shortcuts to CSS coding, including within the Properties panel.
We've been toying with the beta code of CS4 for several weeks. Check out our first take reviews and videos of the six suites and their individual applications for more details. We'll report back with rated reviews after working with the final code.
Google Chrome will work with NetSuite's online accounting and customer-relations software, the company said Friday.
Elements of the company's online tools, including editing text and drag-and-drop operations, benefit from Chrome's fast JavaScript, NetSuite said. However, Google's assertions of compatibility with Apple Safari notwithstanding, NetSuite said it will gradually extend support to its customers, finishing by mid-October.
The company boasted it's the first online business application to support Chrome, just as it was the first with native support for the iPhone's version of Safari and the new Firefox 3.0.
But that sort of support seems more like a reasonably clever attempt to capitalize on the Chrome buzz than anything customers truly are clamoring for.
After all, NetSuite is geared toward businesses that typically are the kinds of conservative and technologically unadventurous customers who aren't first in line to try the latest beta version of a Web browser. One of the reasons Microsoft won't frog-march us all to Internet Explorer 7, much less IE 8, is that many businesses have set up operations using IE 6, even though it was introduced in 2001.
Two on-demand business software firms reported accelerating adoption of their suites today.
NetSuite reported second-quarter 2008 revenue of $36.6 million, up 43 percent from the same period in 2007. Net loss per GAAP was down to $3.1 million in the quarter, compared with $9.6 million in Q2 2007.
Sign-ups for Zoho.
(Credit: Zoho)The company also announced new midmarket and enterprise customers for its ERP and CRM suites, which are delivered as Web applications. Surgical robotics company Intuitive Surgical adopted NetSuite CRM; Nestle UK used services from NetSuite to launch an online store; and sports market firm Wasserman Media Group adopted NetSuite for accounting functions, replacing an installation of Microsoft Dynamics-Great Plains, NetSuite announced.
Meanwhile, Zoho, a provider of business software-as-a-service to small and midmarket companies, prepared to announce that it has reached the milestone of 1 million sign-ups for its services. Zoho's Raju Vegesna says that of those, roughly 300,000 to 350,000 still log on to the service each month. He also believes that Zoho is tracking at about one-third of Google Apps adoption. (Google Apps is Google's business-focused app suite; Vegesna did not consider individual or business use of Google Docs, which offers some of the same services.)
These success stories, in addition to the continued strong performance by Salesforce.com, put continued pressure on the distribution models and market that Microsoft and other traditional software houses rely on.
Adobe.com's online CS3 tutorials have received 5 million plays over the first year.
(Credit: Adobe Systems, Inc.)So you got yourself some Adobe CS3 products, but you're still trying to get your workspace organized or iron out your cross-product workflow or how to use the Puppet tool in After Effects? Apparently lots of other people are in the same position according to a case study from EffectiveUI, developers of Adobe's online Video Workshop application built using Adobe Flex. The tutorials have seen more than 5 million plays over its first year.
The video tutorials cover 22 of Adobe's products including all the CS3 components and span 47 topics. The information comes from product experts across the Adobe community and the videos are produced by Lynda.com. And aside from viewing them online, a number of the tutorials can be downloaded for viewing offline.
Oh and in related news, You Suck at Photoshop is back on, fresh from a Webby win.
Adobe Systems is offering two-day trials of three beta applications from its next Creative Suite package.
The previews of Dreamweaver for Web design, Fireworks for image editing, and Soundbooth for audio editing became available Monday.
Trials expire after 48 hours for most people, but registered CS3 users get to keep using the CS4 betas until the final applications replace them.
Adobe hasn't publicly confirmed its planned shipping date or the name for the next Creative Suite, which we're nicknaming CS4. Adobe Creative Suite 3 was released in March 2007.
We took a quick test drive of the Dreamweaver trial and liked some of the changes. Among the touted enhancements are a Related Files Toolbar and Code Navigator. The Properties panel integrates HTML and CSS coding, which could save time for those who edit dynamic sites. A new Live View Mode, driven by Webkit open-source rendering, previews pages within Dreamweaver, eliminating the need to open a browser. Adobe intends for this feature to make it easier to debug JavaScript as well as to work with Flash animation.
The interface of Fireworks, originally from Macromedia, finally resembles those of other applications in the Creative Suite. Fireworks features compatibility with Adobe's AIR, Flash, and Flex Builder as well as HTML. And users can export design mockups as high fidelity, interactive, and secure Adobe PDF files.
Soundbooth adds support for multiple track editing as well as volume matching across audio files. Users can preview the compression settings before saving MP3s. Speech recognition is supposed to enable quick, searchable transcripts of dialog content.
There's no word yet on whether the next rough draft of Photoshop will be available for a free trial. However, Photoshop's next iteration may become available in widgets, enabling users to mix and mash up some features with third-party content, according to a blog post last week by Photoshop product manager John Nash. We suspect that there will be more opportunities to blur the lines between the desktop, the Web, and mobile platforms within the next Creative Suite.
System requirements for the Windows trials demand a machine running XP or Vista with at least 512MB of RAM, 1 gigabyte of disk space, and a Pentium 4 processor. Mac users must have OS X version 10.4.11 or later on a PowerPC G5 or Intel-based system. Soundbooth, however, won't run on a PowerPC Mac.
Users of the next Adobe Creative Suite may be able to mix and mash up the applications with online content and third-party tools.
In a bid to make workspaces more nimble, Adobe Systems is considering making parts of Photoshop and other Creative Suite applications available for users to manipulate within Flash widgets, according to a blog post Monday by John Nack, product manager of Photoshop.
The capability to bring tools from the Creative Suite to the desktop or the Web with Flash or Flex could lead to novel ways of exploring Adobe's expensive, hulking software. Users have mashed up Google Maps, for instance, to display apartment listings, ecological pollution, and even UFO sightings.
"The appeal of extending one's app with lightweight, cross-platform, network-aware widgets is so obvious that we were busy building support in my first app some eight years ago--and we had to build our own Flash Player clone to do it!" Nack wrote.
Developers would ideally be able to write one bunch of code rather than six separate chunks to create widgets for panels from Photoshop, Illustrator vector illustration, and InDesign page layout software, Nack added.
Adobe made its flagship photo-editing software available online with the March release of Photoshop Express.
The company aims to tell the public more about the next iteration of its Creative Suite on May 27.
A prerelease, beta edition of Flash Player 10 became available Tuesday via Adobe Labs. New features include effects for 3D-rendering effects and text-rendering enhancements.
Bungee Labs is extending the hosting options for its Web application development environment, Bungee Connect. Today, developers using the Bungee Connect development environment can host their applications on Bungee's multitenant grid in the U.S. and Europe or on Amazon EC2. Beginning in July in public beta, organizations will be able to deploy Bungee Connect applications via the new Bungee Application Server on their own hosting infrastructure.
Bungee Labs, along with Coghead, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Joyent, Mosso, salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft and others, is paving the way to platforms-as-a-service--hosted infrastructure for developing and delivering Web applications.
Bungee Labs charges fees based on production deployment of Bungee-powered applications. The billing rate for Bungee Labs' Grid or Amazon EC2 is $0.06 per user-session-hour rounded to the nearest second-per-user-session. For the public beta, no fees will be charged. The Bungee Application Server (with a VMware-based software appliance for managing and deploying applications across servers) for self-hosting applications starts at $500 per server, per month.
The Bungee Application Server will also be available community source licenses, and the company is considering FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) licenses.
See also: Bungee Labs mashing up old-school CRM with new-school Web 2.0
NetSuite's IPO debut launched like a rocket Thursday morning--soaring skyward, only to plunge back to earth.
Shares of the highly anticipated IPO, which priced at $26 a share Wednesday, shot as high as $30 a share in early morning trading, only to fall below sea level to $23.86 a share. The shares have since stabilized a bit, trading slightly above its IPO price.
NetSuite and its investment bankers, which conducted an IPO auction in setting the price, won't be accused of leaving money on the table in raising as much capital as possible for the company.
NetSuite, an on-demand enterprise applications company backed by Oracle's Larry Ellison, happily started the day by opening the bell on the New York Stock Exchange, where the company trades under the ticker "N."
But NetSuite investors, however, may now be feeling a bit sober if they were expecting to ride the same continual bump up seen with the pricing range earlier in the week.
One report in MarketWatch cited an analyst who raised concerns that the enthusiasm investors exhibited during the IPO auction process may have taken steam away from the offering's debut.
For NetSuite's investors, they may be hoping the "N" in the ticker doesn't stand for nowhere.
