It's impossible for eBay to report quarterly earnings without the usual deliberations about what the company could, would or should do with Skype. So it comes as no surprise that media hounded eBay CEO John Donahoe about the VOIP unit, one of those anomalous acquisitions that people still scratch their heads about. For £1.8 billion, Skype was an overpriced, albeit trendy, technology play for eBay to make in 2005.
For the past few months, I've been using Twitter, the microblogging service that you may well be sick of hearing about. Right off the bat, I was attracted to Twitter because the 140 characters per entry that Twitter allows add up to about as much blog as I'm capable of mustering at most times.reader-twitter.png.
Google's long-awaited offline access for Gmail is here, bringing a sigh of relief to users of Google's messaging and collaboration software. Google Apps Standard Edition users will be able to access it immediately with a few steps, while consumers will see a more gradual rollout. The move should put Google on a more level playing field in cloud computing versus Microsoft, Yahoo Zimbra, Zoho and others with e-mail clients that already provide offline access.
Messaging and collaboration SAAS company Zoho updates its Firefox plug-in for Zoho Notebook to make it easy to import a Google Notebook to Zoho's cloud computing environment. The move is a shrewd one on the part of Zoho, which is looking to find favor with peeved Google users put off by Google Notebook's newly halted application development. Any content added to the new Zoho plug-in will be automatically synchronized with the online version of Zoho Notebook.
IBM sheds the Bluehouse moniker for its SAAS messaging and collaboration applications, which are hosted in the cloud or over the Web. LotusLive Engage is IBM's enterprise applications challenge to Microsoft Windows Live and Google Apps. LotusLive integrates with Salesforce.com, Skype and LinkedIn to reach potentially 400 million new users.
Updated offerings from Gordano and IBM Lotus prove compelling alternatives to Microsoft Exchange Server.
It's been almost a year since Google introduced the beta of its Google App Engine, and eWEEK Labs wants to see what applications have been built on the technology. While none have yet reached the size and power of Facebook or Twitter, some interesting tools have been built on Google App Engine, which shows promise as a viable platform for large Web-based applications.
Social networking tools such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others offer SMBs new ways to build communities and your brand. Here are the best ways to build both at the same time.