Search Til You Drop: Google Launches Hosted Commerce Search For Retailers

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.2] Searching retail sites can be frustrating at times. While many retailers try to present product search in a visually appealing way, search can often be slow or difficult to refine. Tonight, Google is making a huge play in retail space with the launch of Commerce Search, a hosted enterprise search product to power online retail stores and e-commerce websites. Google offers a general hosted search product that is used by organizations that want to add customized Google search functionality to their websites. Google is now entering the vertical space, by the first tailor-made enterprise product, with retail optimized space. There are four key components to thew new search offering for retailers:

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Indicee Raises $6 Million For Cloud-Based Business Intelligence Reporting Tool

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.2] Business intelligence is a service that is crucial to both big and small companies. Indicee is a startup that that helps users easily combine data from their business applications and generate reports using Indicee's cloud-based service. It essentially wants to bring bring reporting and analysis to the “masses” with a cost-effective solution to mashup business data. Indicee also just completed a $6 million Series A round from Granite Ventures and Yaletown Ventures. Indicee's technology taps into data from business applications and content from productivity software such as Excel, and others and automatically builds reports and analysis for this data in the cloud. Users can ask business questions in plain English, which Indicee then responds with reports and visualizations that are produced from on-demand from data uploaded to the cloud.

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ThoughtWorks Studios Rolls Out New Version Of Mingle, Integrates With Google Wave

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.1] ThoughtWorks Studios, a software development startup, is launching a new version of its project management tool, Mingle, and is rolling out integration with Google Wave. Mingle has been upgraded to feature a communications platform within the application, called “Murmurs.” A mix of an IM and Twitter-like microblogging format, Murmurs allows anyone involved in a software project to have online conversations that are associated with a specific Mingle project.

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Twitter Comes To The ADC Market

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Crescendo Networks, a maker of Application Delivery Controller (ADC) products built to improve server efficiency, will announce tomorrow the impending launch of their new add-on management appliance, the AppBeat SC Service Controller. The AppBeat SC Service Controller is designed to monitor multiple AppBeat application delivery controllers. This product will give users the option to be alerted via Twitter, as well as email or SNMP, if any degradation to their network is detected.

As web-based properties grow and traffic increases, the need for more servers becomes apparent, and with that, server efficiency becomes a priority. Crescendo Networks’ AppBeat DC is a plug-and-play piece of hardware which offloads many CPU intensive tasks which in turn adds more processing cycles available for multiple applications. By doing this, servers are able to handle more users without degrading their experience and the servers needed are reduced.

The AppBeat SC Service Controller monitors these AppBeat DC modules to make sure that they are running as efficiently as possible. This add-on is able to collect and store information from these modules for 18 months which can be used to create trending reports as well as deliver real-time alerts (via Twitter, email, and SNMP) on application delivery and networking. Admins are also available to leverage Crescendo’s support team to monitor the twitter stream to improve assistance.

AppBeat SC Service Controller comes with predefined alerts, but users are able to customize them as they see fit. Users are able to flag certain traffic volumes which exceed a pre-set threshold, thus avoiding premium charges from ISP’s. In addition, the Service Controller can alert the admin of a degradation in alert times to a particular server.

Crescendo was founded in 2002 and began shipping their products in 2006.

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The power of two

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I spent this week at John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Partly because MG SIegler was on fire, doing a hybrid live blogging/news analysis stream that let me mine the hallway conversation, and mostly because John Battelle poured a ton of research and preparation into a relentless pursuit of the “story” â€" namely Twitter. John asked the questions we all wanted asked, leaving plenty of time to relax and enjoy the moment when the Big Guys finally showed their cards.

We’ll soon see how well these cards are being played, but for now the one fundamental fact is that, as with Noah, there are two of everything. Twitter and Facebook. Google and Microsoft. Scoble and Scoble (the one at the top of the thread and the one at the bottom.) This is very important because it undercuts the rationale for throwing FUD at the BigCos by turning us all into Missouri. If there are two locked trunks (varying degrees perhaps or not, doesn’t matter) then we can make up our minds for ourselves. The result: a valid user contract.

The reason a valid user contract is important is that it shifts the argument from who’s doing what to whom to what are we agreeing to do with our data. We may have argued over the value of Track on an individual basis, but this week’s announcements underline its value in aggregate. The hostility over the embargo of realtime search eased when FriendFeed opened things back up with realtime conversation; now the Facebook acquisition is being used to restart the notion of exclusion. But it has much less force once we notice that, just as with the Fail Whale, FriendFeed will continue until it morphs into a Facebook hybrid. We will continue to have a choice, and will validate those, preferably two, who continue to scratch the aggregate itch.

Viewed through the lense of the power of two, big memes like scalability and market force take on a different hue. What does it matter to me how good Windows 7 is in the abstract, as a revenue splash for Microsoft or as a funding mechanism for whatever the company is trying to do in the WebOS era? Not a lot, but certainly much less than in the context of OS/X, WebKit, iPhone, Android, etc. In context, Windows 7 drives the motion of the two forward. It means that Google Voice drives Apple to drive AT&T to open the door, while driving the Android ecosystem to firm up its AppStore and bake out its alternate proposition. It’s like what Tim Berners-Lee is doing, playing the US and UK governments off each other in a race to document transparency.

This counter-surge disruption draws its power from the elasticity of the network and the cloud computing model. Next to this inexorable self-correcting dynamic, the politics of both FUD and silence fail miserably. If the sound sucks on a Startup School webcast from Berkeley, wait a half hour and the chorus of Fails prompts a fix. If you have to leave to drive to the event, get someone to patch the feed into Ustream so you can monitor from the car. If the car doesn’t play iPhone app audio, get a car that does it right. These micro-decisions in ones and twos make a small ripple; in a cascading social wave, you get Twitter and FriendFeed and Facebook and Google and Microsoft. And in that world, you get a new media model.

The mistake (if that’s what it is and not the fuel for progress) that’s made in identifying any one node as directly competitive with another is that the least important aspect becomes the defining metric of success. In fact, FriendFeed is wildly successful because it does not compare directly with Twitter or Facebook in scale or “user friendliness” but rather creates the ability to do things in the context of those successes. If Twitter lists make some of those FriendFeed processes possible in the larger platform, it only accelerates the value proposition of the aggregate tools. The barrier to entry is in finding complementary roles for new players beyond the first two or three.

Evean Williams’comment about there being room for both Twitter and Facebook may have been good politics, but it also reflects the larger reality of the power of two. Minus Twitter, Facebook remains trapped in its internal domain, without the escape route opened by Adsense to allow Google to achieve scale to create pressure on Microsoft. Without Facebook, Twitter has no vehicle for moving into the larger company’s private (and enterprise) market. FriendFeed is as much the structural backbone for Twitter as it is for Facebook, and Williams’ comments about not seeing two-way synchronization as particularly useful between the two clouds was the least perceptive comment he made at Web 2.0. In fact, the power of two will mandate full sync whether he likes it or not.

Forget the noise about FriendFeed and its founders being elites or two engineering-focused or whatever Silicon Valley spam you hear. If you’re looking for signals about where this thing is moving, look to the voices that are making the turbine spin. It says nothing about the various entities that make up the technology environment, negative or positive, to deride any one node. Commercial, social, open, pay-per-view, whatever. The most disruptive thing I saw on stage at Web 2.0 came from ComCast’s Brian Roberts, with the beta on-demand service that erases the boundary of the TV and the computer. This has gone wll beyond the politics of exclusion, the swiftboating of any individual, company, ideology, format, or layer of the stack. That won’t stop the sniping, but nobody really cares.

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Pew Study Reports That Internet Users Are Becoming More Status Update-Friendly

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.1] A new Pew Internet And American Life Project study is being released today which reports that internet users on a whole are becoming more likely to update their statuses online (on social media networks). The report says that 19% of internet users say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. When Pew surveyed the group in April of this year and in December 2008, 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service. Updating status online is a learned behavior for most internet users. It's not something users tend to do naturally but these statistics shows that people are increasingly looking to Twitter, Facebook and other sites to update their status, which is definitely noteworthy. The full report is embedded below.

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Buddy Media Launches Integrated Facebook And Twitter Client For Brand Management

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.2] As more brands look to Facebook and Twitter for a social media presence, the need for applications that make this presence simple grows. Buddy Media, a startup that develops applications for social networks, is hoping to attract the attention of brand marketers with its new all-in-one social media management system. Targeted towards advertisers and PR reps, the Buddy Media Platform helps create, manage and track social campaigns on Facebook and Twitter (the client will soon offer functionality for MySpace and other social networks). With regard to Facebook, the platform lets agencies create, manage and track Facebook Pages to drive and increase user and brand engagement. Users don't need to have any prior HTML knowledge to create pages on Facebook and can create sleek and interactive pages fairly easily. And the pages themselves aren't just advertisements; users can add a variety of apps to their pages such as polls, YouTube videos, coupons, slideshows and virtual gifts. The platform also lets you publish updates directly to a page's wall. And the Buddy Media Platform lets agencies implement Facebook Connect on a brand's site to tap into the social network's graph.

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