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Posts Tagged ‘Dashboards’

Google Adds Real-Time Updates from Business Owners to Place Pages

Google just launched an interesting update to its Google Local Business Center that makes Place Pages more interesting and interactive. After claiming their business through the Google Local Business Center, business owners can now easily post short updates about their companies on their respective Place Page. In addition, businesses that have been claimed by their owners will now feature a badge that highlights the fact that the actual owner of this business has claimed and improved the page.

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With Place Pages, Google aims to offer “a webpage for every place in the world.” Most users access these pages through searches on Google Maps.

As Google points out in today’s announcement, business owners can use the new “post to your place page” feature to post updates about their businesses directly from their dashboards. This gives local businesses the ability to send out updates about new products or – in the case of local restaurants – to highlight daily specials and new menu items.

It’s also good to see that Google is now giving local business owners the ability to make it clear that they have claimed their Place Pages and improved them with updated information (opening hours, phone numbers, etc.). Even though Google is quite good at generating this information automatically, getting the information directly from the business owners is likely to improve the quality of these listings and will make the information more trustworthy.

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MindTouch Cloud: The Open Source Alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce.com?

Sharepoint is the big giant in the enterprise collaboration space. Salesforce.com is now in the market with Salesforce Chatter, a service that embraces Facebook, Twitter and the applications within Force.com.

MindTouch has the potential to compete with the large market players. Today they are announcing MindTouch Cloud, an open-source, SaaS service that integrates business data from any number of sources, including Oracle, Sugar CRM and Salesforce.com.

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MindTouch Cloud is meant for a business community to create their own dashboards. It allows users to collaborate with a familiar wiki environment with the capabilities of an enterprise platform.

It’s also another example of how enterprise technologies are increasingly designed so the average business user may perform tasks that have traditionally been the domain of the IT department.

What differentiates MindTouch from Sharepoint and other services is its emphasis on the data. Users may collaborate across multiple enterprise systems and web applications.

MindTouch Cloud is an enterprise mashup service. Business critical information can be exported from enterprise systems and mashed up to create reports and build applications. It has the requirements for the enterprise, including authentication using LDAP, single-sign on security. Role management is built into the service with the capability to create new users, roles and groups.

Compare that to Salesforce Chatter and you see some similarities in how applications can be integrated to create an intelligent dashboard environment that fits into an enterprise environment.

MindTouch does need some work on its user interface. But it has all the features that can make it a valuable service for a business looking to build dashboards that can mashup enterprise data and external applications.

This is MindTouch’s first cloud computing effort. Pricing starts at $7 per user per month.

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Salesforce And Adobe Partner To Offer Flash-Based Applications In The Cloud

With all of its SaaS offerings, Salesforce.com is consistently integrating with other forms of cutting edge technologies, such as Twitter, Box.net, and more to offer clients more diverse and appealing options. Today, the company is partnering with Adobe to offer the “Adobe Flash Builder,” off of Force.com, Salesforce’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications.

The new offering is meant to allow developers and IT departments to build cloud-based rich media applications off of Force.com. Developers can use Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com to extend or enhance existing Salesforce CRM implementations and custom-built Force.com applications, or build entirely new applications to meet business needs.

Within the new offering, Adobe’s Flash Builder lets users build these cloud-based internet application that can be deployed to end-users via the browser though Adobe’s Flash Player or to the desktop through Adobe AIR.

The builder lets developers interactive UI features easily, such as drag and drop technology. Developers can also add data visualization
such as charts and dashboards for better management and monitoring of applications. The new builder is also integrated with Adobe LiveCycle Data Services that lets clients automatically synchronize data between the Force.com database and an desktop-based Adobe AIR local data store, allowing developers to build apps that easily connect between the browser and the desktop. A screenshot of a application built with the Adobe Flash Builder is posted below.

Salesforce recently upgraded its Force.com platform by launching Force.com Sites, an application that lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform. In terms of the enterprise, this is a big coup for Adobe’s Flash platform, which faces competition from Microsof’s Silverlight product.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Roundup: Bartz is tougher than you, new Zunes are pretty

Cisco forecasts lower revenue for Q1, stock drops 74 points – - Barron’s reports that on Wednesday’s conference call with analysts, Cisco management “forecast fiscal Q1 revenue to decline by 15% to 17%.” It’s not bad compared to the street’s estimates, but traders punished the company with a 3.4% drop in after-hours trading.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz wants you to know she’s tougher than you’ll ever, ever be — At Autodesk, she worked while undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. She had a knee replaced while closing Yahoo’s deal with Microsoft that may give the company a chance to turn itself around. She watched the operation under only a local anesthetic as doctors sawed her leg open. She regaled Fortune editor Patricia Sellers, “enthusiastically detailing the skin, fat, cartilage and bone that she viewed.” Do not mess with Carol Bartz.

[Photo: Fortune]

Trendrr is the latest company to serve a two-way API to its services — Following Digg’s announcement yesterday, social network trend tracking tool Trendrr has added software hooks that let other sites and apps to automate getting tracking reports from the site and incorporating the reports into other places. Who cares? The music industry, for starters. Marketing people will be able to have dashboards that include Trendrr data on the hotness-or-notness of the bands and songs they’re pushing. And Trendrr continues the, um, trend of Web 2.0 companies creating APIs to let everyone else get at their content for free. The business model for this is called We’ll Figure It Out.

Tumblr blatantly copies StumbleUpon with TumblUpon — The new feature atop Tumblr’s easy-to-use free blogs delivers a random page from another Tumblr blog when clicked. I suppose I could contact StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp to ask how he feels about this, but I already know he’ll only say something nice. In fact, he probably really does think this is cool. Because how many StumbleUpon users is it going to lose him? Exactly.

People forget that ten years ago today, Microsoft made a $150M investment in Apple. People forget that Macs ran Internet Explorer — Hard to believe now, but Steve Jobs needed the cash. Microsoft got some not-voting shares of AAPL, but more important, Apple agreed to ship Internet Explorer as the default browser on its next lineup of Macs. Below is Jobs’ onstage announcement, which features a Big Brother-like Bill Gates talking down to him from a giant video screen.

The partnership soured when Internet Explorer for the Mac turned out to be slow, non-innovative, and slow. Also, it was really really slow. I did time trials for Wired where my aging eMachines PC loaded some websites twice as fast as a sexy new flat-panel iMac. Open-source developers whipped up browsers that ran circles around Microsoft’s insufficiently-optimized application. Apple responded by building its Safari browser, and removing Explorer from its computers.

Speaking of Microsoft: New Zune HD media player brings tears to the eyes of jaded CNET editor — Donald Bell says he likes the new Zune’s browser, and the way it pulls in artist photos and other info to create a page for any song you load it with. Even the ones you ripped off via BitTorrent. But the reason I’m running this item is that the new Zune’s are much prettier than previous models. Take a look. [Photo: Donald Bell/CNET]

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Clarion’s MiND finds a home in LA-area Nissan Cubes
With the whole “direct to consumer” approach failing epically, Clarion has evidently resorted to pushing remaining inventory of its largely unwanted MiND mobile internet device onto Nissan dealers in Los Angeles. In all fairness, we do suspect that these are moving more briskly than, say, Celio’s REDFLY, but we can count the amount of MIDs we’ve seen in public on two or three hands. At any rate, Nissan has signed on to offer the multifaceted Atom-powered device as an optional accessory in its Cube, but at least initially, it’ll only be made available at select dealers in the LA area. For those opting to outfit their new whip with one of these, Nissan will include a dedicated docking kit harmonized to the vehicle’s instrument panel, and the user interface will also be tweaked for in-car usage. Look — this is absolutely better than those lackluster, overpriced NAV units shoved into most dashboards, but at $799 plus installation, it’s not like you’re getting the steal of the century here.

[Via Pocketables]

Filed under: Handhelds, Transportation

Clarion’s MiND finds a home in LA-area Nissan Cubes originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Jul 2009 20:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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