We all know the story of Apple, and how Steve Jobs brought the company back from the brink of failure in the 90s to turn it into arguably one of most exciting 2.0 company of the new millenium. But what we didn't know until today was Steve Jobs personal brush with risks and how his pancreatic cancer in 2004 almost brought him, and everything around him, down.

Jobs likes to make his own rules, whether the topic is computers, stock options, or even pancreatic cancer. The same traits that make him a great CEO drive him to put his company, and his investors, at risk.

Posted by elizabeth in Enterprise and Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ebizQ's editorial producer and SaaS Week blogger Krissi Danielsson blogs today about the completely nutty antics of everyone having anything to do with Yahoo! these days. There is so much going on in the world of Web 2.0 that we can't even compile an email newsletter without fear that the news is going to become obsolete within the next five minutes!

However, starting today and continuing over the next eight weeks, ebizQ's Web 2.0 and the Enterprise newletter series is going to hit your inbox on Wednesdays, if you sign up for it (here, and the tick the last box on the page after adding your email address). Today the newsletter features blog entries, news items as well as key analysis on Web 2.0 concepts from RFG/Experture and the Microsoft/Yahoo deal by AMR Research. Email me if you sign up for the newsletter but were too late for today's, I'd be happy to forward it (editor at ebizq.net)

This is all leading up to ebizQ's Virtual Conference on Web 2 that is happening March 19. Check out the agenda and register for it, it's guaranteed to be quite exciting.

Posted by elizabeth in Enterprise and Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm kind of wondering here if we are entering another frightening dot com boom. This news last night was that the Corporate Executive Board has completed its purchase of ITtoolbox for $58.9 million. That's a lot of clams for a community of people who basically blog in order to interact professionally with others. Sort of like a Facebook for professionals, except with less security, less fun, and no transparency about other people's credentials or knowledge about whether they're being paid or not?

(James McGovern says that ITtoolbox is now worth all that was paid for it because of the strong community that was built on compensation for traffic. "...bloggers were rewarded for how much traffic they drove to the site. When I blogged on this platform, they use to reward me $200 to $400 a month. Maybe the compensation should have been a lot higher.")

This huge buy is followed by last week's purchase by Citrix of XenSource, an open source virtualization provider for half a billion dollars. You've got to be kidding me.

ebizQ's Dennis Byron had the following to say about Citrix/Xen:

$500 million? I fear the dot.com era is returning. The bet is on buzz, not reality. In betting on virtualization, investors are paying no attention to the effects of functional convergence that is always occuring in the IT market (e.g., web servers into app servers during the dot.com era, word processors into office suites before that, virtualization BACK into operating systems in the next few years), Developrs are going to be distracted by the buzz and some real good ideas are going to get left on the cutting room floor.

But I digress: ebizQ has its own little community of bloggers which is sort of like ITtoolbox, called ITGumbo, and now I'm wondering what THAT'S worth! That's where ebizQ found Open Source Unleashed blogger Alex Fletcher, an Open Source technology optimization analyst whose excellent posts are now syndicated on ebizQ. ITGumbo way more fun than ITtoolbox too, and it even has a weekly comic strip called Mumbo Gumbo, written by Leah Archibald.

Posted by elizabeth in Enterprise and Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Stuff just hasn't been right the last few days with my very favorite social networking tool, Facebook. The recent growth of Facebook's application tools combined with talk of either an IPO or takeover bid from one of the 800-pound Internet gorillas have put pressure on the Facebook team and there is a palpable air of unease. Not to mention that two of my applications, including Trakzor and Scrabulous, have not been displaying notifications properly! P.S. Hey, Facebook, I love what you've done with Scrabulous! It's, well... Scrabulous!

But I doubt my personal solipsistic concern with notifications has anything to do with the top Facebook issue this week, though, which is that, reportedly, portions of the site’s code were leaked via a blog, and it is unknown whether these exposed codes could have compromised personal user information. It has raised an alarm around the web-savvy world about the security of social networking sites.

Joshua Block, VP of North American Operations for Cyberoam, "the leading provider of identity-based UTM solutions," recently sent around some commentary addressing where additional security concerns may lie:

“The issues surrounding consumer privacy raise the need for education on safe practices when it comes to Web 2.0 and social networking applications. But what’s more is that cross-scripting attacks and cross-site request forgeries are raising new vulnerabilities. Since Web 2.0 enables users to upload content, these sites can be left open to malicious content upload, leaving innocent visitors vulnerable to targeted attacks.”

However, this may all be a tempest in a teapot. Brandee Barker from Facebook has left a comment on a TechCrunch article about this:

“A small fraction of the code that displays Facebook web pages was exposed to a small number of users due to a single misconfigured web server that was fixed immediately. It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. Because the code that was released only powers the Facebook user interface, it offers no useful insight into the inner workings of Facebook. The reprinting of this code violates several laws and we ask that people not distribute it further.”

Hopefully, all will be better soon. Facebook is not something anyone wants compromised, as almost everyone I know has become somewhat dependent on it to a certain extent.

Posted by elizabeth in Enterprise and Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lisa Damast, ebizQ's almost blisteringly cool Membership Manager, brought forward some new proof of how social networking firm Facebook is pushing the envelope and bringing some much needed 3.0 tinges to our ho-hum 2.0 world.

From Lisa:

This article discusses how Facebook messaging is replacing the need for sending traditional email in certain instances. It also mentions how the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is 35+. I did a search on Facebook, and noticed that companies like Google have created their own networks, do you think there might be a future for serious work collaboration and communication based in Facebook? Maybe Facebook should build a special platform for companies? Also, if Facebook does end up being bought by Microsoft (which is another one of the endless rumors) or partners with it, perhaps that would pose a serious threat to Google's efforts.

This also reminds me of a "future of email" podcast discussion I hosted on ebizQ a while back, around the time enterprise instant messaging firm Antepo got bought by Adobe in a hush-hush undisclosed sum deal.

Instant messaging, messaging inside social networks, email messsaging with approved senders only... All these topics are kind of converging (SPAM-free, that is the key) on Facebook, and it's exciting to see what's going to happen. A spam-free email world would be exciting indeed.

Posted by elizabeth in Enterprise and Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Leave it to our fantastic ebizQ team, who are constantly coming up with new and exciting ways to tell us how to do our jobs better (and I mean that in good, thankful way)! Our own Lisa Damast reports that our absolute favorite social networking tool, Facebook, is headed for an IPO. Really exciting stuff, because you know what, this is the most exciting IPO I've seen talked about in years. It's not just because Facebook is hotter than hot right now, it's because Facebook has a unique and somewhat beautiful approach toward application development.

Application development, like Web 2.0 and other SOA related trends that we write about here in ebizQ all the time, takes time and energy, but application development also requires buy-in from the users. For technology to be disruptively successful, it has to be either forced on people, its benefit must be extremely obvious, or it must be easy to use.

What Facebook does is make applications available to its users, and then the users can decide to install the application. I don't know how applications are introduced initially but I do know if a user in my network installs an application. I find out about it in my regular Facebook news feed, which is where I also find out what my friends are doing. Like if they're planning a blood drive in my neighborhood, or just got engaged, or whatever.

Why this is genius:

1. I have already "bought in" to my friends on Facebook. They are my friends, so there is some kind of non-Web-related buy-in that is assumed.

2. Because I am a social networker, I am interested in what my friends are doing, both on and offline.

3. Therefore, if my friends download an application and I see it and download it and start using it, then all of my friends see that I have downloaded something new and may download it for themselves to use. Then all their friends see it, then their friends' friends see it, etc.

Facebook is so 2.0 it's almost 3.0.

Posted by elizabeth in Enterprise and Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a really great meeting with former Sun-ite Joe Keller of Kapow Technologies at last week's Gartner Summit.

Kapow has recently rolled out new editions of its mashup server family, which basically extends its already impressive reach into the Enterprise 2.0 mashup space. Joe explained that basically what Kapow's mashup are able to do is nothing less that turning unstructured data into structured.

He's at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston this week, as is the mashup friendly Sandy Kemsley (which reminds me, I should put them in touch with each other!), but Joe and I are going to throw down a podcast together on this at our next opportunity.

More from the Gartner Conference as I process the 18 meetings I had over the course of two and a half days in Nashville, during which I spent only our hour in Nashville's music city listening to country music. And that's NOT counting other highlights of shooting the breeze with Peter Mollins from Relativity (the owner of the best Bass speaking voice in the Enterprise 2.0 space, and he's agreed to do some podcast intros for us!), the almost alarmingly smart David Linthicum, and up and coming data layer dude Bob Eve from Composite Software. You'll hear lots more on this soon.

Posted by elizabeth in Enterprise and Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)