What is Toluu?
Toluu is a free service for sharing the feeds you read and discovering new ones.		 Get Invite

Enterprise 2.0 blog

Enterprise 2.0 Blog


Fonolo - Phone 2.0December 3

By way of Aswath Rao’s status update on Facebook I had the opportunity today to discover “Fonolo“, a rather intriguing application that merges the Web 2.0 and telephony worlds.

Fonolo translates IVR prompts into a web-based menu, classified by company. Need to call a company and don’t want to go through a series of prompts? Find the company’s listing on Fonolo, scan to the point in the IVR you want to reach, and click to call it directly. Fonolo places the call for you, navigates to the right spot, then rings your phone to connect the call.

This, like Google’s Grandcentral, is another fantastic idea that merges the voice and Web 2.0 worlds together. In addition, Fonolo allows you to take notes for each call, and assign them to a particular company’s listing. Fonolo uses voice recognition to detect IVR changes, and automatically update their database.

Of course there’s still that issue of a business model. Will people pay for this service? Probably not. Will an ad supported model work? (”stand by while Fonolo connects your call, and listen to a word from our sponsor”), again, probably not. Would this be a great feature for one VOIP vendor to use to differentiate itself from another? Perhaps.

After the Software WarsDecember 2

With 11 years at Microsoft under his belt, it’s surprising to learn that Keith Curtis is betting on open source software to triumph over proprietary software. In his recent book, ‘After the Software Wars’, Curtis pins his hopes on harnessing the wisdom of the crowds to achieve common goals with increased efficiency, speed and less resource consumption.

Microsoft has not looked fondly at open source over the years, even claiming that free and open source software (FOSS) violated over two hundred of Microsoft’s patents. Recalling this mudslinging makes ‘After the Software Wars’ all the more ironic, as the author’s biography flies directly in the face of his Microsoft heritage.

Curtis makes some excellent analogies, highlighting the importance of FOSS:

“The difference between free, and non-free or proprietary software, is similar to the divide between science and alchemy. Before science, there was alchemy, where people guarded their ideas because they wanted to corner the market on the mechanisms used to convert lead into gold.”

He also references the Dark Ages movement to further society’s advancement. This crusade began when mathematicians and scientists began sharing their individual knowledge with their peers, instead of hording their discoveries in the interest of self promotion.

The

Can Blogging at Obama Affect Technology Policy?December 2

Several opinion-makers trying to influence President-Elect Obama’s technology policies thorough blogs. Part of the intent, no doubt, is to simply use a historic election and a public focal point to aid mass communication. But it does seem like these bloggers seem to be nurturing long-shot hopes that they’ll actually be heard. Here are three examples:

Most of this stuff is very much at the vision-and-principles level, with no attempt to link the suggestions to how federal technology policymaking actually works. This begs the question, how would you actually (rather than rhetorically) attempt to influence Obama in novel ways? To make the goal concrete, here’s a hypothetical challenge: get Obama to take $1 billion of the many billions he’s promised for green energy research, and use it to fund a new NSF/NIH progra

Future-of-Work Mini-X-Prizes at Cloudworker.orgDecember 1

The easiest way to predict the future, as Alan Kay said, is to invent it. Some friends of mine, over at a stealth design/innovation startup called WilsonCoLab, decided to start a site dedicated exclusively to this task at www.cloudworker.org, which beta-launched today with a neat contest (seriously flattering to have a word you coined taken this seriously!). Cool logo, eh?

The rather festive-sounding “Light Up Your Cloud” contest invites you to submit anything you like — pictures, podcasts, videos, blogs, twitter-feeds — that showcases how you are creating a my-size-fits-me career using modern technology. Think of it as monthly mini X-prizes (no relation) to stimulate innovation around the concept of “work.”

This beta (or “zeroth”) iteration of the monthly contest has prizes sponsored by bestselling author Dan Pink (signed copies of The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, the career guide f

Facebook: All Your Identities Belong To Us!!December 1

The New York Times reports this morning that Facebook is set to expand “Facebook Connect”, the controversial service that reports your activities on external sites to your Facebook profile. Facebook caused a stir a while ago when it launched this service without giving users the ability to control updates, leading to people finding out that their shopping habits were now open to their Facebook friends. While Facebook has addressed privacy issues, this move is sure to spark a wider war for ownership of on-line identity.

The NYT story notes that Facebook is facing competitive efforts from MySpace, Yahoo, and Google (surprising omitted from their list is Microsoft) who are also moving ahead with efforts to serve as an identity master repository. There’s also no mention of the OpenID project, a non-commercial effort to establish a single-sign-on capability across the Internet. Facebook has an edge though, in that the Facebook ID can become not only just a single sign-on tool, but can enable users to share information about the sites they visit with their social communities. To some, this will smack of an invasion of privacy, but to many others, Facebook’s efforts with Connect will allow them to broaden their social networking activities beyond Facebook and it’s native applications.