Clint Boulton

When I spoke to Brightcove Chairman and CEO Jeremy Allaire this past June about the third iteration of his company’s forthcoming platform, I was a tad frustrated because details on what was in the new software-as-a-service video platform were scant.Allaire told me there was a new player design and publishing capabilities to let video programmers […]

Microsoft released details about the next version of its Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Release 2, the company’s unified communications and collaboration platform that bundles e-mail, instant messaging, Web conferencing and voice over IP.Microsoft introduced the platform, which is in private beta now but will be available in February 2009, at the VoiceCon tradeshow in […]

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, last week shared his view on why search engine startups bother to compete with Google. The search engine has, by most accounts, 60 percent to 70 percent of the search market worldwide.Game over, right? Not necessarily, according to Wales, who told me the lack of a network effect […]

Bloomberg on Oct. 10 posted a fine feature about how a technology chief in Washington inked a $500,000 a year contract with Google to grant some 38,000 municipal employees access to Google Apps.This includes Gmail and the Google Docs spreadsheet and word processing software, which the article notes are alternatives to Microsoft’s Office productivity suite. […]

With Silicon Valley venture capitalists telling their portfolio companies to tighten their belts for the recession, it’s a funny time to introduce a new platform for advertising, which is likely to be hard hit as companies cut costs.Yet ad platforms are exactly what MySpace and visual search startup Eyealike launched Oct. 13. MySpace MyAds is […]

Aside from the college dorm-like aesthetics, on-campus meals and other perks Google’s 20,000 or so employees enjoy, Google is known for some other customs that differentiate it from the mass of other high-tech companies.One of those is the 20 percent time project rule, which allows programmers and other Google employees to spend one of their […]

Top 20 Percent Projects at Google By Clint Boulton No Title Released on April 1, 2004 (no joke), Gmail is Google’s free Web mail service. The application was originally invitation only but was opened to the public in February 2007. While Web mail apps from Yahoo and Microsoft have close to 1 billion users worldwide, […]

Financial analysts are taking a dim view of Google’s third-quarter earnings announcement for Oct. 16, a day that could set the tone for Internet stocks that are already taking a beating.Shares of Google spiraled to $345 and change Tuesday, but that lamentation proved premature: Google is trading at around $315 as I write this after […]

Zoho has taken an offline version of its Zoho Mail application out of beta, using Google Gears to do it before Google used the browser technology on its own popular Gmail application.Offline is table stakes for a Web app because we’re not always going to have an Internet connection, wireless or landline, available. Think about […]

Just a few weeks ago, the Enterprise 2.0 world was humming along smoothly, to all outward appearances. Vendors and analysts alike were bullish on growth prospects for modern collaboration and productivity platforms.The tide is turning, according to an analysis from Forrester Research analyst Oliver Young. He predicts that average deal sizes for most Web 2.0 […]

Oracle Oct. 8 agreed to buy project portfolio management specialist Primavera Software, adding another notch in the company’s steadily growing enterprise applications belt.Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed but Oracle expects the deal to close in the second half of 2008.PPM is one of those unfortunate acronyms we tend to bandy about in […]

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison roiled the waves recently when he mocked Web-based computing, but software as a service is doing just fine, as new moves from Google and Symantec testify.Symantec moved to buy MessageLabs on Oct. 8 for $695 million in the largest security SAAS deal to date, dwarfing Google’s $625 million purchase of Postini […]