Niall Cook » Vendors

Will Google Chrome OS be the Enterprise 2.0 OS?

Niall Cook — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:37:20 +0000

Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand today, you can’t have failed to hear that Google has announced a new project to develop the Google Chrome Operating System.

Google came pretty late to the browser party – too late in fact. So targeting the operating system itself makes perfect sense. Some say it’s a direct threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop. That may turn out to be true, although I’d strongly advise Microsoft to acquire eyeOS or one of the many Web OS vendors.

What I find most interesting however, given Google’s forays into the enterprise social software space, is whether GCOS has the potential to be the first serious attempt at an Enterprise 2.0 operating system. It has everything going for it: open source; lightweight; speed; simplicity; security. Not to mention the fact that it will run any web-based application, and therefore any web-based social software application.

I fully expect to see the whole suite of Google Enterprise applications being pushed heavily through GCOS.

download I Capture the Castle

What do you think: will GCOS be the answer to all your Enterprise 2.0 prayers?

Nosco: Prediction Market Software for Companies

Niall Cook — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:43:09 +0000

At the Enterprise 2.0 breakfast I held for Hill & Knowlton clients in Toronto last week, someone ask me about tools for capturing ideas from sales people with voting and commenting capabilities. Nothing sprang to mind, but I promised I would do some research.

Seems like a bit of an untapped market to be honest*, but one that hits all the buttons is Nosco (www.nosco.dk) from a Danish firm.

Not only does it allow voting and commenting, but it also allows participants to buy and sell shares in the best ideas and run competitions. For sales teams, I think these kinds of features could be ideal. The software can be hosted securely externally (so up and running quickly) or installed on a customer’s own servers.

* Since posting this, Noam Danon left a comment pointing me to QMarkets, another potential candidate. Any more out there I’m missing?

** Add Consensus Point to your list as well. President David Perry informs me that they “actually started developing prediction markets 15 years ago but things *really* started heating up with The Wisdom of Crowds came out.”

What are you working on? Twitter-like tools for the enterprise

Niall Cook — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:43:01 +0000

In Enterprise 2.0, and indeed as early as June last year, I talk about the benefits of internal micro-blogging using enterprise versions of tools like Twitter.

If this is an area of interest to you (and it probably should be), then I strongly recommend you read two posts from Jeremiah Owyang and Neville Hobson.

In List of enterprise microblogging tools: Twitter for the intranet, Jeremiah has started a list of vendor offerings in the area (currently standing at eight). Well worth watching I think.

Neville takes one of the offerings, Yammer, for a test drive in Twitter for the enterprise from Yammer.

Like blogs, wikis and other social software that has gone before, I advise caution. Make sure you know what you want from such tools (and also what you need in terms of security and control) before diving straight in.