Productivity and business

Companies are actively looking for Microsoft Office alternatives such as Google Apps, but so far their interest hasn't dented the productivity suite's dominance, a Forrester Research study released today said.

"Adoption of alternatives relative to Microsoft Office is paltry, but interest remains high, with more than a quarter of companies actively looking at or experimenting with Web-based alternatives," Forrester said in the study. "While the free versions of these programs make it easy for companies to try, concerns over user acceptance and compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats continue to hinder broader deployments."

Interest … Read more

The war of words between Microsoft and Google over the use of Google Apps in the enterprise continues.

Sharing his thoughts yesterday in a blog called "The Hidden Google Tax," Microsoft's director of online services, Tom Rizzo, took some swings at Google Apps, proclaiming that it's not a cost-effective solution for the enterprise.

Rizzo, who in the past has offered his no-holds-barred opinion of Google Apps, said that Microsoft interviewed almost 100 small and midsize businesses that use Google Apps.

Among the findings, Rizzo said that 90 percent of the companies use Google Apps in conjunction … Read more

Xobni, the popular and highly rated plugin for Microsoft Outlook has today announced the Xobni Gadget Platform and Store, which offers apps that add on to your add-on. With close to 20 big-name partners, including Dropbox, Evernote, Google Translate, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and so on, Xobni hopes to boost your productivity by souping up your Outlook inbox to yet another level.

To give you an idea of some of the platform's possibilities, the Evernote gadget puts the popular note-taking service's functionality into the Xobni sidebar. With it, you can view and take personal notes on a contact right from … Read more

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has bought Tungle, a start-up with a scheduling app that synchronizes across various calendar systems.

The deal was revealed yesterday in a Tungle blog post, in which company chief Marc Gingras said his team was "excited" about the takeover. The financial terms of the deal between the two Canadian companies have not been revealed.

"This is exciting for you too as we expect the Tungle service to only get better," Gingras wrote. "Our plan today is what it has always been--for Tungle to become integrated with your daily activities and … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--It looks like sentiment analysis is becoming an interesting business for start-ups. After talking with Jared Goralnick from AwayFind, at the 500 Startups event, I ran into Guy Hirsch, of Saygent, who's also launching a company to help businesses mine sentiments of their customers or potential customers.

The product will be a partly automated voice survey tool. Clients will create survey questions and come up with a list of desired respondents, and then a machine will poll these people (via phone, unfortunately) and collect their voice responses. It will take the answers it gets and farm them out, via Mechanical Turk, to a panel of humans who will determine the sentiment of the respondents, as well as other factors that can't easily be determined by transcripts of responses.

Why not just do surveys the old-fashioned way, and ask people what they think? Hirsch says that getting an excitement (or anger, or frustration, etc) level on responses is both more valuable in marketing surveys and less expensive. All the human listeners have to do for Saygent is determine tone, not spend time transcribing.

Saygent correlates sentiments with the demographics it has from its clients' target lists, to determine, for example, if women or men are more interested in particular products or ideas.

Hirsch says his tool will also be usable for recruiting, especially for hiring phone workers. For example, if you want to hire people with friendly voices, or accents that resonate with particular customer demographics, this tool can help you find them.

I can't see Saygent replacing traditional phone surveys, but it does sound like a good way to get additional data points from a survey process.

Other sentiment-based services: • E-mail anger meter gets sensitivity training • When Exaudios is in use, it pays to get angry… Read more

My favorite productivity app, Evernote (download), is getting an updated Web version. It's about time.

The previous version of the Web client for the note-taking and memory-keeping app was a workable fail-safe if you needed to get to your notes and didn't have access to a computer, tablet, or smartphone with the real client on it, but it was cumbersome and stylistically out of sync with the Evernote apps on other platforms.

The new app is less glitzy but far more usable. It's got a three-pane view so you can navigate a large library of notes quickly. … Read more

I thought the whole "Twitter for the enterprise" concept died out after Yammer launched at the TechCrunch conference in 2008. It's an interesting tool, as is competitor SocialCast, but while products like these are achieving some early successes, the real-time, social-networking-at-work thing has not taken the business world by storm. Remember Google Wave? It's likely because businesses that already get the concept are using Notes or Sharepoint, and those that don't need to be convinced by their employees--who are dealing with their own social-network overload thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The new Convofy, which … Read more

Once again there are reports that the long-rumored free version of MobileMe will arrive in April, some three years after the paid service became generally available and months ahead of initial estimates for when Apple planned to revamp its Web suite.

In a story this morning, blog iLounge cited a person it called a trusted source at a major educational institution as saying that the institution was unable to buy MobileMe subscriptions. Additionally, the source said Apple was planning to release a revamped version of the service as soon as next month. In the interim, Apple is said to be … Read more

Xobni is offering access to the first 100 CNET users who want to try out Xobni for Gmail. Sign up here, using the code XOBNI-CNET100. Once codes run out, you can still add your name for future access.

It's been a while since we've heard from Xobni, the company best known for its Outlook organizer and later, its BlackBerry e-mail add-on. Today, it pops into focus once more, with a new product: an e-mail extension for your Gmail account.

Called Xobni for Gmail, the free, limited private beta is an add-on for Firefox and Chrome that promises to go deeper than Google to bring context to the content of your Gmail account.

With Outlook and BlackBerry, Xobni's value proposition makes perfect sense--search was lacking, and Xobni's ability to pull together names, job titles, phone numbers, Facebook photos, attachments, and conversations surrounding any e-mail address to enter your inbox offers tangible benefits.

But Gmail already offers speedy search and threaded conversations. What does Xobni bring to the table?

More of the same with its organized sidebar capable of gathering supporting contact details taken from the contact's social networking profiles like Facebook and Linked In, as well as more-detailed contact information, and interesting stats about your social network--for instance, how often you speak electronically, and other people you speak with. Clicking a number can launch a Skype call, but Xobni doesn't currently connect with Google Voice.

Business users of corporate Google Accounts will also be able to use Xobni to aggregate contact details. In fact, you can link multiple Gmail accounts if you use Google's e-mail client for personal and work-related messaging.… Read more