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IT Must Learn to Bend or Business Will BreakToday

The current economic climate is having a devastating effect on almost every business around. In order to adapt to changing conditions and opportunities, businesses will need to use flexible, adaptable systems to survive. The days of expensive year-long implementations of behind-the-firewall software look to be behind us.

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I recently attended a Forrester Briefing and listened to comments by analyst Peter Burris, a very smart guy. The company has done a host of studies showing that technology will be a growing part of how businesses compete and differentiate themselves in the future.

While systems and software used to be very "behind the scenes" and often transaction-based, that is the case no longer. Consumers and businesses alike buy differently, consume differently, and recommend differently. Trends such as social networking, video on demand, and e-commerce will continue to force businesses to adapt to keep up with their customers. They cannot rely on systems that take years to implement, and most don't ha

Google Lively Is Dead-lyYesterday

In an economic environment where a number of companies are stumbling, it's important to remember that sometimes even Google makes bad decisions. Such would be the case with Lively, a browser-based virtual world environment - and purported Second Life killer - that Google launched this summer to great fanfare.

Now, a little over four months after Lively's launch, Google has decided to turn the lights out on the alternate reality, announcing that they are discontinuing Lively at the end of this year.

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Google tried to be polite about pulling the plug:

"Since Lively's launch, we have been delighted to see the creative ways you've used the product. We enjoyed hanging out in Jen's coffee house, and checking out the Brasil Party room. We got a kick out of the YouTube videos in a variety of languages telling stories about your avatars. And we've been

Wild Apricot: "Economic Scars"Yesterday

Editor's note: we're currently running a series of 'Sponsor Posts', focused on use cases and business stories. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Wild Apricot is a young technology company out of Toronto, Canada. We provide Software-as-as-Service for associations, clubs, and non-profit organizations. This is our story of an investment round that fell through due to economic conditions.

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Our clients are primarily based in

Yahoo! Glue Finally Comes to the US and It's AwesomeYesterday

This May Yahoo! started testing an "all in one" search product called Yahoo Glue in India. It's a really cool service that tonight becomes available to US users of Yahoo.

Yahoo! Glue search results include web search, images, news, blog search, Wikipedia and YouTube videos. That's right - in the India version at least Yahoo! displayed search results from both Google's YouTube and Google Blogsearch. The end result - all these links on one page - is pretty awesome.

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The Indian version prioritized pages relevant to India, which is interesting, but a little unhelpful to those outside of India. Tonight's roll out will include a version that prioritizes US relevance and uses an algorithm to determine which media type is most relevant to a particular search. That type's widget will appear highest on the page. Starting at 6:30 PM PST tonight you should be able to give it a spin and let us know what you think at Glue.Yahoo.com.

Mozilla: One Billion Addons Served - Here Are Some of Our FavoritesYesterday

Mozilla today announced that it has served its 1 billionth addon download since they started keeping track of these downloads in 2005. Currently, Mozilla's users are downloading close to 1.5 million addons every day.

Mozilla has cultivated one of the most active and interesting developer communities around its products and seeing numbers like these will surely give a lot of other developers an incentive to try their hands at developing new plugins for Firefox as well.

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Mozila also just released a new interface to showcase some of the top Firefox addons, which will surely bring a lot of new users to those plugins featured there.

Your Favorites

We asked our readers and Twitter followers about their favorite apps and, as expected, received a wide variety of answers. For