Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Demarcation’

OfficeMedium: Intranet for the Small Business User

We write a lot about the battles for the enterprise, the merits of Sharepoint and Google’s pitches into the corporate world.

But it’s always good to watch the new players who use existing open-source software to build something pretty quickly that people can use. OfficeMedium is a service that is a fit for the small business user with just enough social features to give it a decent chance of winning over companies looking to establish a community platform for their users.

Sponsor

OfficeMedium is a web-based, intranet and collaboration software. It’s developed on the Drupal platform so you know it has every possible module available to it for adding on if needed.

Overall, OfficeMedium is a clean, easy to use intranet software. In the new world of the enterprise, every employee will create their own media. OfficeMedium provides an environment to fit with this emerging trend but with enough hooks to satisfy the needs of a business where keeping people in the loop is often mission critical.

This front page has a clean UI with clear demarcation for recent content added or updated; comments; a calendar; a “shoutbox,” for quick messages and a basic activity stream.

.

The profiles we looked at have just a few fields for web sites but included a blog, personal and miscellaneous sites that the user may include. We’d add several more fields to this section to reflect the real media presence of the user.

The blog environment has built in notifications that may be sent to users. Comments can be turned on, off or set to read-only.

Overall, the social features are pretty decent but could use some improvement. For instance it’s difficult to find tags that are associated with the user or the company. A nice, robust cloud tag would be excellent to have front and center on every page. The navigation down the right column clearly identifies what the system can do but we wonder if this could be consolidated in some manner to provide a richer activity stream.

We’d also like to see rich media integration. Services like OfficeMedium can be fertile places for training and sharing marketing materials that may include videos. To have a place for them on the service would be quite handy.

But on a basic level – OfficeMedium works. Perhaps what we suggest is beyond what the small business user is looking for in an intranet. But overall, they do a good job of covering the basics. Here’s a summary of what they offer:

• Task and Event Management
• Personal and Group Calendars
• File Sharing, Storage, and Organization
• Contact Management
• Archiving

Further, the service provides the ability to integrate external parties with controls so the outside user can only see what is intended for them. That’s a big plus as more often than before, users work pretty closely online with outside parties.

OfficeMedium is $8 per user per month and $1 ore gigabyte. The first 512 megabytes are free.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

With Google Places, Concerns Rise That Google Just Wants To Link To Its Own Content

One of the original goals of Google has always been to help people find the information they are looking for and get out of the way as fast as possible. It was a point of pride, and in fact a design principle, to get people off the search results page to other places on the Internet. Yahoo was the site that tried to keep you from ever leaving, Google was the opposite.

Well, it was easier to send people away when Google was just a search engine. Now it has apps and Gmail and Google Maps and Google Books, and a lot of other reasons to stick around on Google itself. But there is still a clear demarcation between its content/communication sites and search. At least there was until late last week when it launched Google Places on Google Maps. Google Places is a local search page for restaurants and other local businesses that brings together the address, phone number, Website, maps, description, directions, photos and reviews all on one page.

When you click on a pin for a local business or place of interest on Google Maps a bubble will open up, and if you click “more info” sometimes it will take you to the Google Places page. So far, so good. Google Places is simply making Google Maps better, right?

The concerns arise, however, back on Google’s main search page, where Google is indexing these Places pages. Since Google controls its own search index, it can push Google Places more prominently if it so desires. There isn’t a heck of a lot of evidence that Google is doing this yet, but the mere fact that Google is indexing these Places pages has the SEO world in a tizzy.

And Google is indexing them, despite assurances to the contrary. If you do a search for the Burdick Chocolate Cafe in Boston, for instance, the Google Places page is the sixth result, above results from Yelp, Yahoo Travel, and New York Times Travel. This wouldn’t be so bad if Google wasn’t already linking to itself in the top “one Box” result, which shows a detail from Google Maps. So within the top ten results, two of them link back to Google content.

Your chances of clicking on a Google page for this particular search are pretty high. Google isn’t sending you away anywhere. And if you do go to the Google Places page for Burdick Chocolate, it is made up of rehashed content from other sites: snippet descriptions from InsiderPages, Judy’s Book, a menu link from AllMenus, photos from CityGuide and Yelp, and reviews from Igougo and CitySearch. On the right is a small Google Map and below that are Google search ads.

It’s actually a pretty useful page, and there is certainly value in aggregating all of this information in one place. Google might even license the data, which would mitigate any protests that it is “stealing” the content like we see with Google News. But nobody really cares about that. The real issue is whether or not Google is going to favor its own pages in its index when it comes to local search. SInce Google’s algorithm is a black box, there is no way to know one way or another. But the question is out there.

Maybe the Google Places page for Burdick Chocolate ranks highly only because Google used it as an example in its pre-briefings and a lot of bloggers subsequently linked to it. The point, though, is that these Google Places are getting into Google’s index. (Tartine Bakery is another example). Even if they make it onto the first page of Google search results for legitimate reasons, their very presence goes against the fundamental principle that Google’s main purpose is to link out to the best information on the Web, not to hoard the links for itself.

We know what will happen if it keeps going down this path. It will turn into Yahoo.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Read the whole story…

Five Apps for movie nuts

Filed under: iPhone, App Store, iPod touch, App Review

Just a few years ago, lovers of movies had one option of finding out where and when a film was playing: the newspaper. Remember them? They came sometime after scrolls and before Pong.

Next came Mr. Moviefone. Who of you cannot hear a certain voice in your head as you read: ‘Hello and welcome to Moviefone’? The voice has been doing it since 1989, and has recorded over three million voice prompts. Moviefone represents many theater chains including: some AMC screens, Cineplex Odeon, Clearview Cinemas, Galaxy Cinemas, and National Amusements theaters depending upon location.

And then came the Internet.

Some years later, in 2000 Fandango emerged to create some competition. Using a ton of funny commercials and movie trailers featuring paper bag puppets, they gave Moviefone a run for their money representing such chains as: some AMC screens, Carmike Cinema, Century Theaters, CineArts, Cinemark, Edwards, Regal, United Artists, and others depending upon location.

Both have Internet sites where, for a service charge ranging from $.75 to $2.00, tickets could be bought online to make sure you wouldn’t be shut out of that midnight showing of Transformers 2.

Then came the iPhone/iPod Touch and things got considerably easier, although there is no clear demarcation of what service sells what, or where. I want to give you two alternatives, each using one of the two competing services.

Now Playing – Free
This is one of the nicest apps going. It uses Fandango for purchasing tickets, but it does a whole lot more. In fact, it has the fullest feature set of any movie app I’ve come across. Here are some of the things it can do:

Netflix management: Many options found on the Netflix site are available here but I found them a bit harder to get to than on the web site. Queues can be re-ordered, add to or deleted from. When adding you have the option of moving your choice to the top of your queue. If you’re not sure if you want it, you can be transferred to Amazon, IMDb, Wikipedia or even the Netflix site via Safari for more information. I should note that when using any of the Netflix oriented functions, the app takes quite a while to download all your Netflix account information.

Movie searching by theater: Choose a theater and get show times and the option of playing a trailer. A website button brings you to all of the sites mentioned plus the Metacritic review site, or you can read the first paragraph of a number of reviews from top critics. You are also alerted if the movie is already in your Netflix Queue and given the Netflix star rating.

Movie schedules can be emailed. A full list of upcoming movies along with DVD release dates can be found along with the ability of saving any upcoming title to your Netflix queue to receive it after it’s released.

It doesn’t have the nicest interface out there, but it’s jammed with functionality and the price is certainly right.

Note: Fandango service charges a ‘convenience fee’ ranging from $.75 to $2.00 depending upon venue and location.

Continue reading Five Apps for movie nuts

TUAWFive Apps for movie nuts originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 09 Aug 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Read the whole story…