Eastman Kodak Gets Web 2.0 Religion
You know that Web 2.0 is mainstream when the oldest of the old guard companies; Eastman Kodak, appoints a Chief Blogger.

The Acronym Game Begins Anew With Platform As A Service
No sooner had some bloggers declared usage of the acronyms Web 3.0 & Enterprise 3.0 verboten for describing the next iteration of the consumer and business Internet, Salesforce.com, Google and others have rushed in with Platform as a Service as a worthy acronym to replace them.

Enterprise 2.0 In 12 Steps
CIO magazine’s 12 step program for adopting Web 2.0 in the Enterprise

Will Iceberg Sink Traditional Software Development
Phil Butler believes that traditional software development is soon to be usurped by Enterprise Mashups. According to Iceberg CEO; Wayne Byrne, Iceberg will do most of the usurping because it “Can do everything your average enterprise mashup can do (like Kapow for example) + everything Salesforce can do in one application.” Wow….

Why the Enterprise Wont Save Web 2.0
Charles Hudson gives very compelling arguments as to why Web 2.0 repackaged for the Enterprise wont necessarily translate into revenue for Web 2.0 firms.

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.

One of the factors that has so far hindered wider adoption of Cloud Computing and Software as a Service in the US is a lack of consistent and inexpensive broadband service throughout the entire US.

A new report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation ranks the US 15th (Yes that’s right 15th) globally for broadband adoption. The US ranked number 4 in 2001 so this drop off in adoption is very alarming considering that we are in the midst of a major fundamental change in enterprise computing with Cloud Computing and Software as a Service becoming more prevalent.

The ITIF broadband policy report measures 3  major factors; price, speed, and availability to come up with its rankings. 

The report has numerous recommendations to improve US broadband adoption and also has case studies from countries that rank both above and below the US in terms of adoption.

Three recommendations that I think may have an impact in the short term if adopted include:

• Enact more favorable tax policies to encourage investment in broadband networks, such as accelerated depreciation and exempting broadband services from federal, state, and local taxation.  (This will help immensely with making broadband less expensive for SMB customers and start-ups and give the incumbent Telco and Cable providers incentive to modernize their aging infrastructure)

• Continue to make more spectrum, including “white spaces,” available for next-generation wireless data networks. (This is critical as has been proven in Korea…more and more Enterprise 2.0 and Saas applications will be available via mobile devices)

• Expand the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service Broadband Program and target the program to places that currently do not have non-satellite broadband available. (For the US to be more competitive in the future, Broadband access has to be universal throughout the US. Satellite broadband is relatively expensive and Satellite service is a still a bit spotty)

Unfortunately many of the recommendations in the report are based on government policy and that policy is always up to change depending on who occupies state and federal government positions.

But alas, a government broadband policy is crucial as the higher broadband adoption rates in countries like Sweden (pdf) South Korea (pdf) and Japan (pdf) were achieved via strong and focused government broadband policies.

Either this shows that the Enterprise 2.0 vendors have to begin doing a much better job educating potential customers at the C-Level about the ROI and benefits of Enterprise 2.0 technology or CIO’s are a bit out of touch with what is happening in the industry and within their organizations.

What is your opinion, Is Enterprise 2.0 Hype or Happening?

Attentio

Trendpedia; even in its current Beta state, is very polished and is a nice alternative to its moribound competition.

I decided to give Trendpedia a whirl with a quick comparison of mentions of Web 2.0 versus Enterprise 2.0. This comparison should be very interesting at this point in light of the over saturated coverage in the Blogosphere last week over Forrester’s release of a report that they believe that the Enterprise 2.0 market is set to hockey stick into the 4.6 billion dollar range by 2013.

Plugging in Enterprise 2.0 versus Web 2.0 reveals that In the past 4 months articles or mentions of Web 2.0 have averaged a steady 300 a day while mentions and or articles related to Enterprise 2.0 averaged about 30 a day during the same time frame.

What is interesting about the chart above is that posts about Web 2.O actually spiked 63% over the normal 300 posts per day after the Forrester Enterprise 2.0 report while posts about Enterprise 2.O stayed the same.

This simple type of analysis is not truly statistically correct as many bloggers use the term Web 2.0 or Business Web 2.0 when writing about Enterprise 2.0 applications so the data is a bit skewed.

But taking the analysis one step further I compared FaceBook (still considered a more consumer orientated Social Media) versus LinkedIn (standard bearer for Enterprise 2.0 Social Media) and FaceBook was mentioned 92% of the time versus 8% for LinkedIn.

FaceBook has had 94,000 mentions in the past 4 months

While LinkedIn had 8000 posts mentioning it in the same 4 month period

So although there has been much discussion about the end of usage of the term Web 2.0 along with the demise of companies that focus exclusively on consumer Web 2.0, it appears that there is quite a bit of lag time in the Blogosphere in terms of reflecting these trends.

IPod Touch may replace IPhone In Korea
Interesting article on Web 2.0 Asia about how a new cheap unlimited wireless plan from Korea Telecom may very well give users an option of using their IPod Touch to replace more expensive IPhones in Korea.

Web Apps may be the next stage of Enterprise/Web 2.0 Adoption
One of the more anticipated sessions at this weeks Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco is Danny Kim’s on Web 2.0 mobile adoption in Korea and how the trends in Korea may portend for future US mobile usage (if we can ever upgrade our archaic mobile data networks..but thats another article) of Web and Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise Mashups are finally coming into their Own
Also at the Web 2.0 Expo, Serena Software, JackBe and Kapow plan to formally launch new and updated enterprise mashup development software and marketplace solutions. Look out for future OnDemand Beat blog articles where we will review each of these firms solutions.

Has Interest in Web 3.0 Peaked?
Jonas Bolinder, editor of Implemented has reported that mentions of Web 3.0 in the blogosphere reached its height in October 2007 and has not recovered. Looks like marketers and VC’s may have a harder time coming up with a buzzword for the next iteration of the consumer internet.

Sun is hosting a free event called Startup Camp in San Francisco May 4-5, 2008. Startup Camp allows startups to participate in an un-conference networking event and hear from web/enterprise 2.0 experts, meet other startups and apply to Sun’s Startup Essentials program.

The event also includes SpeedGeeking, where startup founders can compete in the Best Startup Contest by presenting a 5-minute pitch of their business to VC led groups of peers. Confirmed guests include: Pete Cashmore, Jonathan Schwartz, David Berlind, Om Malik, Matt Marshall etc.

This event should be a great way for startups to network and discuss ideas.

Oracle’s Enterprise 2.0 strategy consists of:

• Fusing Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into Oracle technology
• Delivering Enterprise 2.0-enabled Oracle Applications
• Focus on Oracle WebCenter

Oracle WebCenter, originally announced in 2007, is now in production and will be Oracle’s foundation for Enterprise 2.0.

WebCenter is an enterprise portal that can be used to display information about people, processes and data. The architecture of WebCenter is aligned with Oracle new mantra of “Complete, Open and Integrated” for its current and future products and solutions.

During his keynote, Charles Phillips oversaw a demo of Oracle WebCenter that focused on the ease of use of setting up Ajax enabled portlets with WebCenter. Quite a bit of the demo was used to show how Webcenter could be used to quickly get Enterprise 2.0 functionality into place within a company without extensive amounts of coding.

Oracle WebCenter is part of Oracle’s extensive and growing Fusion Middleware solutions that now include Business Intelligence, Application Servers, Enterprise Performance Management and the soon to be added suite of tools from BEA.

In a very short period of time Oracle has created a very comprehensive line of solutions for the Enterprise 2.0 space and will be interesting to watch over the coming years as the products mature and gain additional market share.

Announced at Campfire One, App Engine is currently in preview release and is limited to an initial pool of 10,000 developers. (The first 10,000 developer accounts were fully allocated on April 7th) Google App Engine initially only supports Python but will roll out other popular development languages over the next few months.

Google App Engine will provide 500MB of storage, 10GB bandwidth per day and 200M megacycles of CPU per day during the preview period.

The preview development environment includes the following features:

While not direct competition to Amazon Web Services or Salesforce’s Force.com, Google App Engine will allow developers to create an entire web application stack on the Google App Engine infrastructure. This will work great for developers for example who are new to ondemand cloud computing and will help them scale as the use of their applications grow.

Google has a number of applications in its appspot.com application gallery that were created with the first iteration of Google App Engine. Although their are only a couple of enterprise applications (versus the normal glut of Web 2.0 applications) listed in the gallery so far, I would expect the number of enterprise applications to grow quickly.

Below is the most straightforward definition I have seen so far of Wiki’s.