Archive for the 'Europe' Category
September 30, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
There are a number of conferences and workshops with themes related to the Semantic Web being held in the last quarter of 2008.
First up is the 7th annual International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) being held in Karlsruhe, Deutschland on Oct 26 – Oct 30 2008. The ISWC 2008 conference will have a strong focus on Semantic Web Ontology and research.
The OntoContent 2008 workshop is being held in Monterrey Mexico on November 28 2008. This conference has many workshops relating to Semantic Ontologies.
The International Workshop on Interacting with Multimedia Content in the Social Semantic Web (IMC-SSW) will be held on Dec 3 2008 in Koblenz, Deutschland. This workshop; held in conjunction with the Semantic and Digital Media Technologies Conference, has topics that explore utilizing Semantic Web technology with multimedia.
On December 8th – Dec 11 2008, the 3rd Annual Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand. This conference normally focuses on Semantic Web Services, Applications and Social Networking.
September 26, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
Trampoline Systems; a London Based provider of Enterprise Social Software, recently launched SONAR FlightDeck at the Network Roundtable in Washington DC.
SONAR Flightdeck is the latest product in Trampoline Systems SONAR Suite product line. Flightdeck is a enterprise social networking tool that helps companies focus on knowledge and relationship identification.
Flightdeck works by gathering high value strategic information gathered in everyday corporate communications such as email, wiki’s, blogs and documents and helps managers visualize and identify the top influencers and performers , bottlenecks and even the social networking laggards within a company.
Flightdeck runs on top of the SONAR Server which is an analytical engine that is composed of natural language processing and social network analysis algorithms that identify the information flows, social networks and tasks occurring within a company.
Flightdeck would be most beneficial to companies that are engaging in merger and acquisitions, new product roll-outs or major corporate initiatives. SONAR Flightdeck is designed for managers within an organization whereas Trampoline Systems other product SONAR Dashboard is designed for general employee usage.
Trampoline Systems competitors in this space include Microsoft, (with its recent acquisition of Powerset) Autonomy and Semantra.
September 18, 2008
Written by Thomas Christel
There are a number of great insights about Web 2.0 tools and technologies in the enterprise space that are provided by the top analyst firms and dedicated to executives & IT professionals. Since my day-to-day experience at Yooplus is working with the Italian and European markets, I may be able to add some additional insights on Enterprise 2.0 adoption across Europe.
IDC’s View:
“The adoption rate for Enterprise 2.0 will nearly double in Europe in the next 18 months, and nearly half will use Web 2.0 to enhance internal collaboration,” according to a survey conducted by IDC that has been presented in September 2007 at the European ICT Forum in Berlin. “Surprisingly, Spain, Denmark, and Italy are the early-adopting nations of Europe and will continue to show the highest adoption rates over the next 18 months, even ahead of the UK and Germany,” said Pim Bilderbeek, vice president of European telecommunications and networking consulting for IDC.
McKinsey’s View:
“July 2008. This year’s worldwide survey reveals continuing investments in Web 2.0. Companies that are deriving business value from these tools are now shifting from using them experimentally to adopting them as part of a broader business practice. Fundamental changes are beginning to take place among the satisfied companies as a result of their ambitious use of Web 2.0. These companies are not only using more technologies but also leveraging them to change management practices and organizational structures. Some are taking steps to open their corporate “ecosystems” by encouraging customers to join them in developing products and by using new tools to tap distributed knowledge. Overall satisfaction of Web 2.0 adoption, in Europe, was split with 22% reporting the lowest dissatisfaction and 20% reporting highest satisfaction, leaving 58% somewhere in the middle.”
What I See:
- Managers and professionals don’t want to wait for IT or consultants to get around to implementing their social enterprise solutions: they are looking for rapid adoption and deployment. They want to test and determine the value, benefits and competitive advantages quickly
- They want to pick, choose and customize their social enterprise environments, they want the flexibility of all the tools (blogs, wikis, rss, tags, search, im, voip, etc) integrated in one social platform
- They want to empower their teams to collaborate and share information, ideas, knowledge, communications and productivity not just internally, but also externally with partners, vendors and customers
- The social enterprise paradigm is not just for the big corporations but for all sizes and industries, from start-ups to non-profits, from waste managements to financial services as it is for every department within companies, from marketing to human resources.
Adoption of Enterprise 2.0 or the “social enterprise” is happening across Europe, some countries more aggressively than others, but now I am beginning to see return on the investment and real business benefits for all sizes of companies. There are also a volume of tools and technologies available from high-end consultant assisted solutions to rapid adoption and deployment of social enterprise platforms. Because after all “sharing is better!”
 Thomas Christel is co-founder and VP of marketing at Yooplus srl, a social enterprise company, providing the we+ workspace, a team collaboration and social software platform with all the Web 2.0 tools built-in (blogs, wiki, rss and tags). The we+ workspace provides the ability to capture and share knowledge, provide project/activity transparency and improve team communications, collaboration and productivity. To learn more visit, www.yooplus.com or contact Thomas at t.christel {at} yooplus(.)com
May 8, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
 In the three months since I posted an initial Review of Business ByDesign in the OnDemand Beat, there has been a flurry of announcements and activity relating to the roll out date of the product.
Larry Dignan and Dennis Howlett broke the news the week before the annual SAP Sapphire event, that the planned 2009 rollout of Business ByDesign was to be delayed by up to 18 months.
Vinnie Mirchandani and a few of the other Enterprise Irregulars had a chance to meet with SAP Co-CEO’s Henning Kagermann and Leo Apotheker at Sapphire 08 and found out that there were a couple of key reasons why SAP pulled back on the original planned release date.
These are valid reasons indeed to delay Business ByDesign’s launch and might in this case actually help lead to a better product.
But in the meantime one can be certain that Netsuite (with its recent OneWorld release) and other OnDemand ERP competitors wont sit still during the next 18 months and SAP will have quite a bit more work to do to gain market share and partner acceptance of Business ByDesign once released.
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