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I spent some time checking out the competition to benchmark our messaging and functionality. I was struck by how thoroughly undifferentiated the pitches were. Everyone was giving essentially the same demo, talking about the same functionality and use cases.

For those early few, look to open source. It’s the best way to try for free, tweak to individual needs, and pay for actual value delivered.

Walking around the exhibition floor, it looked like everybody was offering
very similar stuff–big focus on “communities”–creating them, managing
them, etc.

Until the money steps in, I think we’re going to remain in a curious limbo where “shiny baubles” (a colleague’s favorite term) get rolled out widely but for which few pay because no one on the enterprise side has really connected the dots between community, user-generated content, and enterprise productivity/business value.

At present, all this “Build your own community!” and “Make your own companywide Facebook!” sound interesting but also a bit odd: Facebook remains a noisy, hustle-bustle of frantic friend-making followed by…tedious time-wasting. If that’s your aim, bravo! But if you have a job…it’s still not very effective at enabling you to do it better.

It would appear that the Enterprise 2.0 world is still recycling the same froth in an attempt to stand out. Here’s what Whatcott had to say:

Internally, I heard from Jean Barmash on the Alfresco consulting team who echoed Jeff’s comments:

I didn’t attend the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this year, but judging by Jeff Whatcott’s commentary, I’m not sure I missed much.

Over the next year we’re going to see the hype around Enterprise 2.0 reach a fever pitch, and many are going to be lost in disillusionment when it fails to turn to gold. However, in the mishmash there will be a few who finally figure it out, and the rest of the enterprise world will follow in due course.

Not that there isn’t promise in all this 2.0 hoopla. There is. We just haven’t figured out what, precisely, it is. This is why it’s particularly useful to have open-source social applications like those from Ringside Networks, Drupal, and increasingly Alfresco (where I work). Few can afford to fork over millions of dollars on a promise that “social” will turn into cash. Open source allows experimentation with minimal capital investment. This is as it should be.

commentary

It feels like we’re in the early stages of Enterprise 2.0. Let’s call it Enterprise 1.8 where everyone is showing the right slideware and demos, but few, if any, really know how to put it all to productive business use.

Reason 1: Complementary services

At this point, AOL looks far more attractive to Microsoft than some may believe. And although the chances of it acquiring the online firm are low, it wouldn’t be a bad idea and one that’s certainly worth considering.

That said, it’s still an attractive company from Microsoft’s standpoint and all of its properties account for a boatload of pageviews each day, which could easily translate to an advertising revenue stream that is not only controlled by Microsoft and thus blocked from Google, but highly lucrative.

There’s no debating the fact that Google will never acquire Yahoo and I’m of the opinion that Microsoft never will either. That said, Yahoo wants to be acquired by a company and although it has said numerous times that it actually feels quite opposite, I think it’s full of hot air.

And considering the fact that Microsoft would probably be willing to pay about half as much for AOL (about $22 billion), Yahoo would certainly worry that its time is up and it lost its chance to court a serious buyer.

As it stands, AOL now owns Weblogs, Inc.; TMZ.com; Bebo; Quigo, an advertising firm; Third Screen Media, a mobile advertising firm; and a slew of other advertising companies that could have a major impact on the business going forward.

All the while, Ballmer and company could scheme to find ways to continue its proxy fight and install a board that’s far more likely to accept a sweetheart deal from Microsoft. In the process, Microsoft could walk away with both companies. Just don’t expect it to happen overnight. In fact, I would guess that an AOL deal would put Yahoo on the back burner for about a year.

Now, I’m sure some would try to make the argument that Microsoft only wants Yahoo for search, but I’m not so quick to agree. If that’s true, is all of Yahoo’s “extras” just a bonus of acquiring the company? Microsoft has made a number of statements in the past saying that it wants to do more on the Internet and offer more compelling services and acquiring AOL is the first step in doing just that.

For the first time, Microsoft could be a major player in the social networking space with Bebo and have sound editorial content turning a profit. Aside from that, AIM, which is the most popular IM’ing tool in the US, will be a great tool for Microsoft, considering MSN holds that title pretty much everywhere else in the world.

Reason 3: AOL will come cheap

At face value, a deal between AOL and Microsoft may not look like the match made in Heaven some are calling the possible Yahoo deal. But when you take a slightly more comprehensive view of what’s really going on, your opinion might change.

Sound crazy? If so, consider the fact that AOL has quickly become one of the largest competitors to Microsoft in its attempt to acquire Yahoo and at the same time, it’s barely standing on the backs of sound editorial content from Weblogs, Inc. and now, social networking — two areas Microsoft currently has no influence in.

Let’s face it — even though the company has the kind of cash to acquire Bebo for $850 million, AOL is in rough shape. It’s in a transitional phase that it’s having a hard time breaking out of and it has made a number of poor decisions that have hindered its growth.

In essence, the deal for AOL would be a good one for Microsoft and could actually help it in its negotiations for Yahoo. Here’s why:

A Microsoft acquisition of AOL would throw Yahoo off its mark and send panic through the entire company. In just one day, Yahoo’s stock price would sink to an unprecedented low and Jerry Yang would be forced to come out for damage control.

The Microsoft-AOL deal would probably look quite similar to its pledge for Yahoo and an offer would be made where half of it is payable in cash and the other half would be offered up in Microsoft stock. And considering the fact that AOL is probably about half as valuable to Microsoft as Yahoo, there’s no reason to suggest it wouldn’t offer about half as much. Of course, that number would probably rise into the $30 billion to $35 billion after negotiations were complete. That said, that figure isn’t too bad of a deal for Microsoft and one that would conceivably bear fruit almost immediately given the fact all of AOL’s properties (aside from its advertising ventures) are running on all cylinders.

And although the company is operated by Time Warner, which has done all it can to make the merger worthwhile, the online firm is somewhat independent from its owners (Google also owns a small stake) and offers a wide array of services that have been neglected by Microsoft.

Reason 2: It makes Yahoo worry

After today’s announcement that AOL has acquired Bebo for $850 million in the hopes that it will be able to capitalize on the upswing in social networking, I had a thought. Knowing that AOL is trying to get a deal done with Yahoo and the company owns some solid properties, why doesn’t Microsoft forget about Yahoo for a while and acquire AOL?

BP is also researching energy storage for renewable energy and advanced photovoltaics, although Koonin predicted it would be decades before they would make a major impact on worldwide energy use.

“We’re trying (but) it’s not easy to change things…You can’t cut off the present,” he said. “Deployment of energy innovations (in the oil and gas industry overall) is very hard because of entrenched interests.”

Carbon storage is a technology that could be an important option for reducing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, but it also faces a number of technical challenges, such as safe storage, Koonin said.

Koonin spoke here on Monday to Massachusetts Institute of Technologies’ energy student fellows, part of a campuswide initiative to promote technology innovation in energy.

BP is perhaps the most high-profile oil and gas company to take alternative energy seriously.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–Everyone from politicians, investors, and consumers tout the potential of solar and wind technologies.

BP researchers are exploring under-ice drilling in the Arctic, building more robust drilling platforms, more environmentally benign methods to extract oil from tar sands, and hydrogen production.

He said that climate regulations that put a price on emitting carbon dioxide would incent energy companies to invest in low-carbon energy sources.

“Beyond Petroleum was once an advertising slogan when I came in (in 2004). We’re trying to do something about it now,” he said.

In his talk, Koonin listed a number of technologies that BP is exploring or funding research in, including biofuels, underground carbon storage, and various means of improved oil and gas exploration.

At the same time, BP is investing a billion dollars to establish a biofuels business and is pushing into wind power. It has also done a handful of tests in carbon capture and sequestration, where large amounts of carbon dioxide are stored underground.

“The only way you’re going to get a shift off of this is through a price on carbon,” Koonin said. A carbon tax or cap-and-trade system would act the same way that a rise in gasoline prices has prompted many people to conserve, he said.

“Technically, there are lots of opportunities in conventional fossil fuels,” he said.

He noted that Europe already has climate regulations in place, and the U.S. is likely to adopt its own. At the same time, he said “it was hard to imagine” the fast-growing economies of China and India having costly limits on carbon emissions.

But Koonin said that changing from BP’s core oil and gas exploration business is a slow process, given that demand for liquid fuels continues to go up.

One of the most promising research paths is the intersection of biology and energy. BP, for example, is looking at how enzymes in cows and other ruminants can sequester carbon, he said.

But even BP, a company that changed its tagline to “Beyond Petroleum,” sees renewable energy as a very small piece of the global energy picture–a situation that’s not likely to change in the coming decades, according to BP’s chief scientist, Steven Koonin.

“The question is whether it will be high enough…It needs to be high enough to hurt to get people to do something different,” Koonin said.

Apple experienced a bit of a setback in the U.S. smartphone market during the first quarter after coming out of nowhere last year to rank among the top companies.

According to data compiled by IDC, Apple’s still the second-leading smartphone maker in the U.S. behind Research in Motion and the BlackBerry franchise. But it lost market share going from the fourth quarter to the first at the expense of RIM and Palm, according to the figures provided by IDC analyst Ramon Llamas.

RIM’s market share went from 35.1 percent in the fourth quarter to 44.5 percent in the first, while Apple’s dropped from 26.7 percent in the fourth quarter to 19.2 percent in the first. Palm’s Centro lifted that company’s market share to 13.4 percent in the first quarter, up from 7.9 percent in the fourth. Samsung and HTC ranked fourth and fifth in the U.S. market with 8.6 percent and 4.1 percent of the market, respectively.

Given the iPhone shortages that have been going on for several weeks ahead of
iPhone 2.0’s expected debut next Monday, Apple might have also lost share this quarter. But the company has consistently reiterated its intention to ship 10 million units in 2008, the first full calendar year the iPhone has been on sale. RIM sold 14 million BlackBerrys during its 2008 fiscal year, which ended on March 1.

During its most recent earnings call, Apple revealed that it sold 1.7 million iPhones, which was down from the 2.3 million units it sold during the fourth-quarter holiday shopping season. Both RIM and Palm grew their shipments on a quarter-by-quarter basis over roughly the same time period, although the dates don’t match up precisely with Apple because RIM and Palm are on slightly different fiscal calendars.

It’s not exactly clear what might have led to the decline. Both RIM and Palm have intensified their pursuit of consumer smartphone users, RIM from the high end with devices like the Curve and Pearl and Palm from the low end with the $99 Centro.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

RIM and Palm's smartphones gained ground on Apple's iPhone in the first quarter, according to IDC.

“There’s too much money chasing too few good ventures, despite the size of this problem,” Doerr said.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–Famed venture capitalist John Doerr is conflicted. He says pace of innovation in green technologies, breathtaking in the past five years, is far from fast enough to address the scale of the world’s energy problems.

The theme of the conference is “scale,” as in finding the right technologies and policies to address burgeoning global energy demand without polluting the planet to the point of dangerous greenhouse gas levels.

The $5 million in federal research for geothermal power is “so low, it’s almost criminal,” he said.

“I think that we’re at the beginning of a green-tech boom. I can assure you we don’t have an overinvestment to deal with the scale of the problem.”

To underscore how little is being done at the federal level, he said government funding in U.S. research and development on renewable energy was less than $1 billion last year, while oil giant Exxon makes $1.1 billion in revenue a day.

Altogether, the company has invested more than a half million dollars in 30
green-tech ventures, many of which Doerr touted during his talk.

Doerr said the entire planet needs to “reindustrialize” to adopt less-polluting forms of energy.

Echoing the comments about a “global-warming bubble” made earlier this week by investor and tech luminary Bob Metcalfe, Doerr said “booms,” or large investment waves, are generally good for the economy.

Kleiner Perkins investor John Doerr sees a 'green tech' boom whose scale is falling short.

“So what’s happened in the couple of years since my daughter yelled at me? We’ve invested a lot, we’ve lobbied a lot, and I’ve learned a lot. Think about it: who would have thought that a designer of gas guzzler vehicles would make a 100-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrid?” he said in reference to Fisker Automotive.

Two years ago, Kleiner Perkins announced the creation of its first green-tech investment fund, and Doerr has become a high-profile investor and policy advocate in the field.

He predicted that the three leading presidential candidates will address climate change regulation far more aggressively than the current Bush administration, which has opposed mandates and sought to stay outside United Nations-led climate talks.

Doerr was the keynote speaker at the MIT Energy Conference here Saturday. He alternated between expressing wonder at the progress in addressing global warming and discouragement at the overall state of affairs.

Fisker Automotive, founded by a former Aston Martin and BMW sports
car designer, will have a four-door plug-in hybrid electric vehicle out next year. Another investment, Amyris Biotechnologies, is using synthetic-biology engineering to create low-cost malaria drugs and synthetic biofuels that mimic the characteristics of hydrocarbons.

But he predicted that returns for green-tech investments will be good, once more recently funded start-ups go public in 2009.

But despite all the accomplishments of these innovative companies, he struck a downbeat tone on both technology and policy. After listing some of the technologies being generated by Kleiner Perkins-backed companies, he said:

Thousands of people have seen a video of a talk Doerr gave at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference last year, in which he broke down crying, telling the story of how, after seeing the movie Inconvenient Truth, his teenage daughter angrily told him to fix the global-warming problem because his generation caused it.

In response to a question, he said the venture capital industry will not change to fund more capital-intensive energy projects. And he noted that returns in venture funds have been getting worse.

Doerr also successfully lobbied to pass the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020.

The energy market is $6 trillion. I like to say it’s the mother of all markets. Compared to that Internet, which is a big deal, this is much bigger, much more exciting. But the challenge is much larger. Going green–solving that problem will be largest transformation on the planet.”

Many people have called for the equivalent of an Apollo Project or Manhattan Project in the United States to solve the energy challenge. But Doerr said that those, which were multibillion-dollar, single-government agency projects, “fail miserably to convey the size of the challenge.”

Venture capitalists have poured billions of dollars into the sector, making it one of the fastest-growing areas of investment, though it still garners fewer venture capital investments than biotech and information technology. That rapid capital influx, along with the challenges of large capital demands and regulatory complexity in energy, have caused concern that investment has been too aggressive.

Doerr is a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital icon Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where he has invested in Google, Amazon.com, Sun Microsystems, and several other successful technology companies.

Despite Doerr’s concern for inadequate action on clean energy, he touched on the question of an investment bubble in green tech. Overall, he said there isn’t a bubble, but he does see some problems.

“To the point of scale, who would of thought that all of that is not going to be enough? To get solutions that scale, we are going to have to find answers that are economic for all people everywhere. We are going have to use policy to harness innovation to make sure the right thing to do is the profitable thing to do, so that it becomes the probable thing to happen. There’s more money that flows through markets in a day than all the word’s governments in a year…

Jerry Yang and Steve Ballmer last words.

Full coverage of Microhoo

If you were to put Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in the ring, you would expect the boistrous Ballmer to be left standing. With Microsoft taking its offer to Yahoo home, it’s hard to tell who the real winner is in the long run. Microsoft certainly coveted Yahoo. However, if Yahoo falls on its face in coming months, Microsoft could be back…with a lower offer. Consider this a chapter closing in a longer tale, whose ending we don’t precisely know.

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

The Wiesenthal Center, which says the first extremist Web site was identified in 1995, isn’t the only party concerned about social media’s ability to fuel terrorism. Earlier this week, Sen. Joseph Lieberman made public a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt asking the company to remove Islamic extremist content from its YouTube video-sharing property.

And last year, the Google Earth mapping software came under some scrutiny when reports spread that it had been used in planning a foiled terrorist plot.

According to a briefing detailed by The New York Times’ Brad Stone, the Wiesenthal Center flagged about 8,000 “problematic” sites on the Web pertaining to terrorism and hate, a 30 percent increase from last year.

No, we’re not talking about vile blog commenters. A Jewish human rights group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, released a report last week that says online terror and hate is on the rise, particularly on social-media sites.

In addition to religious terror groups, the sites identified also pertain to anti-Semitic, racist, xenophobic, and various anti-religion and anti-government sentiments. And social media is a particular concern, with games, Facebook groups, and Second Life having been identified as potential communication and event-planning tools for terrorist and hate groups.

Most social-media sites have terms of use and regulations against hate speech and defamation, but it’s often difficult for administrators to stay on top of the influx of content–especially when they have to keep an eye out for copyrighted content and porn, too.

“Every aspect of the Internet is being used by extremists of every ilk to repackage old hatred, demean the ‘Enemy,’ to raise funds, and since 9/11, recruit and train Jihadist terrorists,” the report detailed. “Of special concern is the use of the Internet by the Iranian regime to justify terrorism and spread its influence throughout South America.”

Google is evaluating its next move.

The companies had agreed to the terms of the $140 million acquisition in July, but Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service said “nyet.” According to Svetlana Gladkova’s translation of a Russian news report, the reason is that Google hadn’t submitted complete information on employees in Russia, so the FAS couldn’t evaluate the deal’s consequences.

(Via Google BLogoscoped.)

Google already is tangling with antitrust authorities in the United States, Canada, and Europe over a search-ad deal with Yahoo.

“We are very disappointed to hear that FAS has come to this decision. We strongly believe that this acquisition will enable us to significantly improve opportunities for Russian users, advertisers and publishers as well as the entire industry. At this time we are reviewing FAS’s decision. Once this process is complete, we will decide on our next steps,” the company said in a statement.

Russian antitrust regulators have blocked Google’s acquisition of ZAO Begun, an online advertising unit of Rambler Media.

I wrote yesterday that there will be more than one Cloud vendor and today AT&T announced that they are the latest. Gloating aside, this proves that the market is still being shaped and that it won’t necessarily be the domain of BigCo tech companies.

AT&T and Sprint have long offered hosting services including data center space, managed servers and services and of course network connectivity. Data centers are expensive and require ongoing maintenance. The expense of such build-outs will not be easily dealt with by an upstart provider.

In reality it makes perfect sense that major telcos would become Cloud providers. They own the bandwidth, network and have data centers all over the world.

This also suggests that the Cloud definition will be stretched further and that there will be more mutations of public and private Clouds depending on who the customer is.

Shareholders, of course, are free to enter the main auditorium and pose questions of Jobs and other executives. At the meeting, shareholders were required to register in one line, while press members who didn’t hold shares were directed to a different sign-in sheet, and escorted to the overflow room.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

Dilger did not respond to multiple e-mail requests for comment, but unless Apple’s security fell down on the job, he must have been a shareholder to enter the auditorium. The thing is, he does not disclose that he is an Apple shareholder anywhere on his site, which is notoriously pro-Apple. I’ve been on the receiving end of one of Dilger’s blasts on at least one occasion.

Daniel Eran Dilger was the first person to approach the microphone following the close of official business during the Apple meeting, where a nonbinding proposal to give shareholders more input into executive pay was approved. He identified himself by name, but failed to note that he is the author of Roughly Drafted, an Apple blog that covers the company and the media who follow it very extensively. He proceeded to ask Jobs perhaps a half dozen questions, returning to wait in line for the microphone several times.

I’m fully aware it’s a brave new world out there in the journalism industry, but holding stock in a company you cover is still a big no-no in many quarters. The standard among some of the other major bloggers seems to be disclosure, disclosure, disclosure: make readers aware of any potential conflicts of interest you may have and let them decide whether those conflicts are influencing what you write. It seems to me if you hold stock in a company that you passionately defend against any perceived attacks, and make money doing so, perhaps you should disclose that defense might just be influenced by your financial portfolio.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, flanked by Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller, takes questions at Thursday’s iPhone event in Cupertino.

Roughly Drafted runs ads on the site, and Dilger says he had 4.3 million page views over the first two quarters of 2007. He has posted extensive coverage of Apple’s iPhone event this week, although nothing from the six or so questions he asked of Jobs on Tuesday.

UPDATED 12:45pm - A commenter below kindly posts a link to a Roughly Drafted post from Wednesday, where Dilger mentions that he owns Apple stock. Prior to Wednesday, and prior to at least one e-mail inquiry sent by me to Dilger on Tuesday, that information had not been disclosed. As of this update, Dilger has still not responded to multiple requests for clarification on the issue.

Apple, like many companies, does not allow the press nonshareholders to ask direct questions of company executives during shareholder meetings. Some companies don’t even allow the press into the building, but Apple admits the press into an overflow room near its main Town Hall auditorium as observers.

Correction 11:45 a.m. PST: This blog initially misstated the day of the week Apple held its shareholder meeting. It was Tuesday. Updated at 12:45pm with link to Roughly Drafted.

A wide range of questioners, from grandparents to children, stepped up to the microphone to ask questions of Apple CEO Steve Jobs during Tuesday’s shareholder meeting. They included a prolific Apple blogger who, taking advantage of his apparent status as a shareholder, asked repeated questions of Jobs.