Geek News and Musings

The social enterprise wars are heating up. Last week, Jive’s Tony Zingale came on to talk about a user survey that showed quantifiable value his customers were getting from Jive’s software and answer why Yammer and Salesforce get the bulk of the industry press.

I invited Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Yammer’s David Sacks on the show if they wanted to rebut anything said. Sacks took me up on it, bringing his own user survey, a funny video aimed at today’s Chatter launch, and some fighting words.

All are below.

Android has passed yet another milestone in its race to the top: With 32.9 million handsets sold globally this last quarter, it has ousted longtime champion Nokia (with 31m) for the title of most popular smartphone OS maker in the world. It’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, of course, since Nokia also makes its own handsets, but quibbling aside, the toppling of such an iconic mobile company is no small event.

The numbers don’t seem to include tablets, though it recently transpired that even the top-selling Android tablet sales were, to quote Samsung, “quite small.” We won’t see the Honeycomb effect until later in 2011. But it seems as though Android still has nowhere to go but up — that is, if you consider downmarket “up.”

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Mozy Founder Josh Coates launches Instructure today. He’s hoping to disrupt the entrenched player in the University LMS space, Blackboard, and take a big part of its $377 million or so in revenue.

In 2007 EMC acquired Mozy, an online backup solution, for $76 million. Coates stayed for another year, then left.

Since then he’s been helping Nepalese refugees integrate into American society, and he’s a big WWII buff. He purchased and restored a M18 Hellcat Tank Destroyer. You can see the restoration process here (he keeps it in his garage). And here’s a video of his wife blowing the crap out of the side of a gravel pit.

I like how Coates rolls. The guy has a fully operational M18 Hellcat Tank Destroyer in his garage.

When he’s not blowing things up or helping other people, he teaches a venture startup course at Brigham Young University. And that’s where two of his students came up with the idea of making a better Blackboard. If you’ve been in college in the U.S. since around 2000, you’ll know all about Blackboard.

Last year the company raised around $1.5 million, nearly half from Coates himself, and got to work. They now have 20 employees and working with twenty six educational institutions, some of which have left Blackboard entirely.

Instructive is offering their Canvas LMS product as a hosted SaaS solution. Universities can also download an unsupported open source version of the product, or install a for-fee version with support.

Here’s a commercial the team created for the product, based on the Apple “1984″ commercial. That flamethrower is also his. Watch to the very end to really see it in action.

My pals Tod Kurt and Mike Kuniavski are the proprietors of ThingM, a company that makes nifty programmable LEDs and other smart electronic components.

They just sent out their latest ThingM newsletter showcasing a few cool projects that use BlinkMs: a robotic drum kit, cabinet handles that light up when you touch them, and books that blink.

BlinkM in Books with Personality

BlinkM in DrumKit

ThingM in Glowpull

Here we go again: another impressive 7-inch Android tablet with a Gorilla Glass screen, 4G networking, and a suave interface. But is this thing more of the same or something new.

The tried-and-true 7-inch tablet is, by now, old hat. In fact, little about the Dell Streak 7 is new except the clear emphasis on media playback and T-Mobile’s 4G wireless. On the aggregate, I’d say that this is a strong showing for Dell but does just enough to stand out from the current tablet crowd.

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We had noted that Senator Patrick Leahy was doing the Groundhog’s Day thing of reintroducing his flawed patent reform proposal that doesn’t actually address the problems of the patent system. He does this every year, insisting that this will be the year it’s passed, and nothing ever actually happens. But, in a bit of a surprise move, Senator Chuck Schumer (who does not have a good history on curtailing IP-law abuses — but rather has a history of expanding them), apparently introduced an amendment that at least opens the door to ending business model/business method patents.

It doesn’t go there completely, but would “authorize a pilot program for review of business method patents.” I’m not quite sure how you have a “pilot program” to study whether or not business method patents should be valid, but I’m surprisingly encouraged by the idea of actually running some sort of test program to get actual data to determine whether or not a particular program makes sense. Of course, given that it sounds like it makes sense, I’m guessing that either it will quickly get rejected or the details will show that it’s really not what it appears to be at first glance.

Separate from this, there’s apparently another amendment that narrowly focuses on banning patents on tax strategies. We’ve already noted how there’s been an explosion of “tax strategy” patents in the last few years, and Congress has tried to carve them out before as well. As I said last time, while I think tax strategy patents are a really bad idea and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place, I’m troubled by specific types of exemptions, rather than trying to fix the actual patent system that allows tax strategies to be patented in the first place. Cutting out just tax strategy patents is a duct tape solution that ignores the larger problem.

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Android: Plugging in your phone and mounting the SD card is inconvenient. If you have a rooted Android phone, free app Samba Filesharing will let you browse its SD card right from your computer over Wi-Fi. More »

Apple has quietly made a change to its repair policy regarding the liquid contact indicators, or LCI. You may remember last years lawsuit surrounding the issue. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

You can tell a lot about a person from their mobile app library. Are they avid Doodle Jumpers, or do they prefer to challenge their wits with a few rounds of Civilization? Do they stretch their vocal chords to the beats of T-Pain or Glee’s background choir? You get the idea.

Given how much time people spend building out their app libraries, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that they love to share their collections with friends. In fact, Bump — an app that makes it easy to swap contact information, music, and other data between mobile devices — says that users have been asking for an easy way to share lists of their favorite apps for ages, and that it’s the second most popular request overall (behind music sharing, which has already been implemented). Today, all of those users are getting their wish granted.

Bump has just launched a new version of its iPhone application that makes it easy to share apps with your friends. Fire up the new feature, and you’ll be shown a list of apps that have been installed on your phone (more on that in a moment). Tap the ones you want to recommend to your friend, Bump your phone with theirs, and they’ll immediately receive a list of your recommendations along with links to the App Store for each.

Now, Bump isn’t the first application that lets you get a list of your iPhone applications. We’ve seen others like Chomp and Appolicious, which let you share app recommendations with friends and can also suggest applications based on your previous ratings.

The difference, says Bump co-founder David Lieb, is that the app exchange using Bump is more personal. You aren’t posting your recommendations to followers on Facebook, or through the application’s internal social network — you’re tapping your phone together with a friend and swapping recommendations immediately (assuming they have Bump too).

Now, Apple doesn’t actually let developers do this through a native API — every service that generates a list of your installed apps has to find a workaround. Lieb believes that Bump’s is generally better than the competition’s, and while he wouldn’t get into details on how it works, he says it involves looking at the list of applications that are currently running on the phone. The only catch: apps that you don’t run frequently won’t show up. Of course, if you’re recommending an application to your friend, then it probably isn’t sitting dormant on your phone.

Bump isn’t just available for the iPhone — it has a strong Android presence as well. Lieb says that the Android version already supports basic app sharing, and it’s currently working on an overhaul due out later this month. This new version is going to allow users on iPhone to recommend apps for Android and vice versa (assuming, of course, that the same application is available for both operating systems).

It was only last week that Google acquired SayNow, a voice messaging startup, They’re already putting them to good use. I mean really good use.

As they’ve just announced on the Google Blog, the search giant has teamed up with the incoming SayNow team and Twitter to create a simple speak-to-tweet service for people currently engulfed in the turmoil in Egypt.

Says Google:

It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.

Very, very cool. And important. Especially since reports have the last operating ISP in the country, Noor, being shut down as well.

Some of these are amazing already.

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