Seesmic Desktop 2 will be released from Beta testing next week. It is being branded/marketed as the first open social platform developed using Microsoft Silverlight.
The exclusive launch event will take place in San Fran. Look to see reps from The Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Ning, MSFT, and more in attendance. Expect Flickr integration, and add-ons such as Bing maps and a marketplace of over 40 plugin services.
In addition to the launch, Loic Le Meur is delivered a series of 30 videos targeted on Building Your Brand. The content is based on his conference participation, speeches, and conversations with the top worldwide brands large and small.
The Wine and Web Show hosted by Gary Vaynerchuk has launched on Sirius XM Radio on Thursday August 26th.
Show Overview
Wine and Web is a 2 hour live call-in show in which host Gary V navigates the world of wine culture and tasting and social media. The two areas are subjects that he has amassed a cult-like following
through his video blogs on winelibrarytv.com
In his “Wine of the Week” segment, he will taste a different wine for the very first time, live on-air and on “Site of the Week” will feature his take on new sites, trends, and more!
“Gary’s entrepreneurial spirit and energetic expertise in wine make him and Wine & Web the perfect match for satellite radio and our cutting edge, sophisticated audience,” said Scott Greenstein, President and Chief Content Officer, SIRIUS XM Radio. “His passion for life and wine is infectious, and will resonate with people of all ages and backgrounds.”
What are your thoughts on Gmail Priority service that is being projected to be game changer?
How It Works
The Priority Inbox sorts and pushes your most important email messages to the top of your inbox. Through an algorithm, the service determines the messages that are important by frequency of email messages sent and emails replied to.
While Google has done a good job with the initial filter set-up with the Priority Inbox, users also have the ability to tag their messages as important or not-so important and the service will record and adjust to those configurations.
WITI (Women In Technology International), is launching the Annual WITI Women and Technology Summit set for San Jose, CA on 9/12 - 9/14th, 2010.
WITI is the a leading professional org for women that are involved actively with technology. The motto is “Collaboration, Strategy and Growth” for the 2010 event.
Highlights of the Annual WITI Women and Technology Summit include:
Keynote Speakers
Sandy Carter, Nilofer Merchant, Entrepreneur, CEO & Chief Strategist, Rubicon Consulting, Kathrin Winkler, Chief Sustainability Officer, EMC
The 15th Annual WITI Hall of Fame Awards will include Sandy Carter of IBM, Dr. Ruth David of Analytic Services, Inc., Dr. Adele Goldberg, Dr. Susie Wee of Hewlett Packard and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Katie Boehret, Reporter for The Wall Street Journal, will serve as Master of Ceremonies. The event will be held on September 13th.
To learn more about the WITI -Women in Technology Summit, group rates, and to register for this event, please visit: http://WITI.com/Summit
The Social Networking community dot429.com has launched and in a few short months has gained traction as thousands of members have now created active profiles on the site.
dot429.com targets lesbian, gay, transgender, and bi-sexual professionals in the spirit of networking and empowerment through awareness.
In an era where the United States government is still deciding whether it is ‘ok’ to disclose sexual orientation within the military and mainstream America still is split on lightning rod topics such as gay marriage, dot429.com is a huge step forward towards mainstream acceptance.
Businesses who target the lgbt demographic now have a network to advertise their products to.
The network combines a simple yet slick design to entice new users to join online, with the offline, in-person aspect via dot429 Brunch events that are held throughout the US.
The homepage features a signup option, interviews from the community, featured articles and more.
Growth-wise, the site is expecting to have 100,000 members by the 4th qtr 2010.
For more info on the site, log-on to www.dot429.com
Topic: Find out how you can solve your challenges with conceptClassifier for SharePoint and leverage SharePoint 2007 and 2010 in this free one hour webinar. This informative webinar will focus on records management in SharePoint and how Concept Searching’s award winning conceptClassifier for SharePoint automatically generates conceptual and descriptor metadata from documents, automatically changes the Content Type, and automatically declares records. Juan J. Celaya, President and CEO of COMPU-DATA International, LLC will share his expertise and experience using the U.S. Army’s Joint Services Records Research Center (JSRRC) as a case study and illustrate how they solved the challenge of processing millions of records to support veteran’s claims using conceptClassifier. Please join us on June 23rd from 11:30am – 12:30pm EST and explore real world examples of how to simplify your Records Management processes in SharePoint:
View the video player above for the presentation from SharePoint MVP Paul Schaeflein as he delivers
his session on Development Leveraging REST and LINQ in SharePoint 2010. The session is over 1 hour in length complete with meeting intro from myself and Eric Harlan.
The Amazon Web Services Team has announced a new storage option for S3 customers known as Reduced Redunancy Storage (RRS).
So What, Who Cares?
RRS reduces costs by storing reproducible and non-critical data at lower redundancy levels than standard Amazon S3.
RRS is backed by Amazon S3’s Service Level Agreement.
May 26th will feature a webinar breaking down the details regarding RRS.
How Much Will It Cost?
Amazon S3 RRS starts at $0.10 per GB per month and decreases with the increase of data storage.
Baltimore SharePoint User’s Group will welcome a special guest speaker on Thursday May 20th, 2010.
For more information on BSPUG log-on to www.baltimoresug.org
The Open Government Initiative spearheaded by The Obama Administration is spawning a bunch of discussions around the Beltway about Social Media’s impact on Federal Govt. Agencies.
March 31 will witness the 1105 Government Group’s Webcast on Social Media and Security.
Date: Wednesday, March 31
Time: 2 p.m. Eastern Time
Duration: 1 hour
Moderator: Doug Beizer, staff writer for Federal Computer Week
Panelists: Linda Cureton, CIO, National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Chenxi Wang, Principal Analyst, Security and Risk Management, Forrester Research Inc.; and Samuel Chun, director of the Cyber Security Practice for HP Enterprise Services U.S. Public Sector,
Topic of Discussion:
Security barriers to adopting collaboration tools across the government from a human resources and leadership perspective.
This presentation will address:
Security vulnerabilities facing government use of collaboration tools;
The leadership imperative in cybersecurity at an agency-wide level;
Case-studies of agencies that have successfully overcome the barriers facing adoption; and
A discussion of tools and techniques that can reduce security incidents and make agencies better stewards of information.
Animoto’s product team has now rolled out high-resolution as an upgrade for its service.
Hi-res provides a higher picture quality than standard Animoto videos and can be burned
to DVD or viewed on a large screen monitor without becoming grainy and distorted.
Each upgraded video provides an MP4 files to playback or .ISO for DVD burning.
On the video toolbar, switching to Hi-Res launches a video player that is a larger size than traditional Animoto video players.
You can now share & embed your videos in hi-res so that your audience views them in their full resolution. For instance, if you’ve upgraded a video to hi-res and then share it to Facebook, your friends can watch it in hi-res from within their feed.
Also, if you embed videos to your blog or web site, you can customize things like autostart, looping, and streaming resolution.
The Global SharePoint User’s Group will introduce Sandboxed Solutions at the March Meetup.
Topic : SharePoint 2010 Sandboxed Solutions
With a lot new features included in SharePoint 2010, it has and will become very easy for the developers to design, develop compelling and robust applications and deploy them safely using the new Sandboxed Solutions. The speaker would speak on why we need Sandboxed Solutions; cover Sandbox Solution Building, Deployment, Debugging, Monitoring and various other stages.
Intended Audience: Developers, IT Analyst, Administrators
Agenda:
#1 Existing Challenges for Developers & Administrators ( WEG )?
#2 What Sandboxed Solutions bring? and comparison against Farm Solutions.
#3 Why Sandboxed? and When?
#4 How to use Sandboxed Solutions
#5 What Can and Cannot be done using Sandboxed Solutions
#6 Restrict Sandboxed Solution
#7 Monitor Sandboxed Solution
#7 Validate Sandboxed Solutions
#8 Demo’s
Srini is Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist with over 10 years of experience designing and implementing IT solutions on a variety of platforms, including SharePoint Services, SharePoint Server 2007 and now evaluating SharePoint 2010 beta. He works in many areas within SharePoint; however, his area of expertise includes SharePoint Features, the SharePoint API and Branding. As a subject matter expert, Srini is often asked to review, improve and approve a variety of technical designs and approaches. He regularly contributes to several blogs, has done a fair amount of speaking, training and authored several screencasts. twitter @srinisistla and blog @ http://codename-srini.blogspot.com
Please use the correct contact info…
We will be distributing the LiveMeeting information the day of the event via the Email you provide. We will also be giving away our prizes based on those that attended and the emails you provide as well.
Name of speaker & organization: Christophe Fiessinger, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corp
The speaker will provide an overview of the key investment areas andcapabilities of Project Server 2010 and Project Professional 2010. Theareas to be covered include demand management, portfolio analysis, timetracking, business intelligence/reporting, and other better togethercapabilities being built of top of SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprisefeatures. Learn key enhancements as well as key usage scenarios ofProject Server 2010.
Christophe Fiessinger is Senior Technical Product Manager forMicrosoft. As part of the Microsoft Business Division Product MarketingGroup he focuses on the enterprise project and portfolio managementsolution - EPM. Christophe is responsible for technical readiness.
The presentation will include a product demo.
Suggested audience: Administrators, Developers, Management and End Users
Audience experience level: Beginner
—-
Location:
At the offices of Hire Strategy, 11730 Plaza America Drive Reston, VA 20190
Map: http://tinyurl.com/24qv88
The Open Government intiative set forth by the Obama Administration has rapidly grown into a white-hot topic throughout government agencies in Washington DC and surrounding areas. On March 18th, 2010, Adobe in partnership with Federal Computer Week will be hosting a FREE half-day seminar entitled “Unified Cross-Agency Collaboration - How to Craft Your Agency’s Open Government Plan,”
Verizon Wireless has recently announced that the company would integrate Skype application to select smartphone devices in a joint press junket at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona.
Verizon subscribers will have the ability to download Skype as early as the latter half of March 2010.
Leveraging the application, Verizon customers can contact another member of Skype free of charge anywhere on Planet Earth. The main requirement is that Verizon subscribers need to have a voice and data plan.
In the not-so recent past, cellular phone companies were deadlocked in a battle against Skype and other services for fear that the free services would eat away at core business.
For a corporation that many viewed as ‘behind-the-times’ in comparison with rival Apple, the recent announcements have many wondering with enthusiasm how the combination of Windows Phone 7, Outlook Social Connector, and the enhancements of the 2010 Suite of Office Applications will shake up the marketplace.
OSC connects the user to the social experience via a provider that connect the social and business networks that you utilize. The surprise in this initial offering is that it has partnered with LinkedIn amongst the other networks introduced which are: Facebook, MySpace.
Impact on Productivity
How will information workers be impacted by the increase in “social media noise” within their respective inboxes? Many organizations have completely blocked social media within corporate settings and have been either reluctant or dismissive about creating a solid Social Media policy that addresses the upcoming changes in the workplace. Is there a business reason for employees to use Facebook or MySpace? Time will reveal these answers as decisions will need to be made.
Particularly (but not only) in the German speaking world (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) Xing is much more popular than LinkedIn for professional social networking. Any chance to get a connector for Xing? And what about Facebook? I have over 200 friends there, at least half of them I know professionally…
Microsoft announced the Outlook Social Connector as early as Nov 2009 but additional testing has lead to the integration of Facebook amongst additional new features.
Features Include:
The People Pane - This includes a profile appearance of your friends/colleagues when you receive a message from them.
Rich history - Instant access to a history of recent message traffic and attachments from each incoming/outgoing message.
Activities Real-time updates from social networks
SharePoint 2010 Integrate your Social networks right into the revamped MySite. I believe that Windows Phone 7, SharePoint 2010, and Outlook 2010 will be a killer trio. Joel Oleson put together a great post on Win Phone 7 and SharePoint 2010 capabilities
Extend A The OSC Software Development Kit will enable developers to integrate a variety of social networks. The possibilities to build a true Social Media Center are becoming apparent.
From the Microsoft Outlook site regarding compatibility:
“NOTE: The Outlook Social Connector included in the Office 2010 Beta is not compatible with the beta providers currently available online. Office 2010 Beta users must install the Outlook Social Connector 32-bit Beta in order to successfully use the social network providers currently available. Also, you cannot install the 32-bit OSC Beta on Outlook 2010 Beta 64-bit.”
System Requirements
OSC is supported by the following Operating Systems: Windows 7; Windows Vista; Windows XP
OSC is supported on the 32-bit version of Outlook 2010 beta, Outlook 2003 and 2007
The Baltimore SharePoint User’s Group welcomed a special guest speaker to the meeting held on February 18th, 2010.
Tom Miller of Bluethread stopped by to discuss BLOB storage within SQL Databases and what his company’s product StoragePoint can do to alleviate under-performing database management leveraging the tool.
StoragePoint is deployed to the Web Front End server as a solution package and provides a list of options within the SharePoint Central Administration site to manage and configure the tool.
StoragePoint is available as a 30 day trial installation for evaluation and testing purposes with full support for SharePoint 2010 at this time.
For more information on StoragePoint, log into www.storagepoint.com
Video of the Windows Phone 7 Series debuted at the Mobile World Congress
Written by: Shadeed Eleazer
If the mobile wars were not already at a white hot frenzy, Microsoft has definitely added a few coals to the inferno by overhauling its internal mobile strategy for and returning back to the drawing board to hammer out a new release of a new device that looks to aggressively compete with the innovations set forth by Apple’s iPhone and Google Droid SmartPhones.
The most refreshing news surrounding the release of Windows Phone 7 is that it does not resemble an iPhone, as many of the recent releases have seemingly set out to do. The competition is in its innovation.
The Windows Phone 7 is a departure from the latest rounds of cell-phone interfaces. The user interface is based around information as opposed to applications. The user is greeted with “live tiles” labeled as:
Office, People, Pictures, Games, Marketplace, and Music and Video.
Music and video is handled by Zune, which the user interface mimics. X-Box Live integration is also a plus with this device. The real wonder of the phone is in the People hub, which features real-time updates of Windows Live and Facebook. At the Mobile World Congress, Twitter has not been announced as an integration partner with Windows Phone 7 but you can envision Twitter integration down the line, quite possibly close to release.
Bing will handle the maps and search duties with Microsoft announcing that Windows Phone 7 devices will have a dedicated button on the keypad.
Expect the Windows Phone 7 device to hit retailers close to holiday season. Hardware partners have lined up to support this device including Dell, Toshiba, Samsung and HP.
Mobile carriers include Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile amongst others.
Twedemption HomePage allows Twitter users to login using Twitter credentials
Written by: Shadeed Eleazer
The Direct Message is one area of Twitter that many active members of the real-time
communication platform have come to dread. Since there is no approval mechanism on
sending and/or receiving DMs, people can use the Direct Message feature to flood your inbox
with sales offers, event invites, offers for e-books and more annoyances.
Pile-up and subsequent management and removal of junk DMs is a painstaking tasks.
Deleting DMs is a per-DM process which can take forever in a world of deadlines and
new friend requests.
The downside to this is that users risk the chance of missing out on Direct Messages that
are personal in nature from esteemed colleagues within their network.
Enter Blast Application, with the development of a new app known a Twedemption.com
Twedemption.com is a script written in PHP that enables active Twitter account holders
to mass delete DMs for a one time fee of $5.99
Once the initial purge is complete, the script runs every hour attempting to delete 50
to 100 DMs.
This service may be of value to Twitter holder with a follower base of over 10,000 or
celebs and other verified accounts.
Dino Luzzi, CEO of Blast Apps mentions, “If you’ve been receiving a lot of auto generated-direct
messages or are building quite a following, this type of program is invaluable for Twitter users,”
Blast Applications is a developer of Facebook, Twitter, and iPhone apps.
The Questions
Will the $5.99 fee scare off a number of Twitter users who need to purge their inboxes?
Is an inbox free of junk DMs something that is worth paying for in a one-time fee?
Have Twitter users grown accustomed to free services since many Twitter-friendly apps are free?
What bells and whistles would you add to improve this service?
Amazon Simple Storage Increases Security and Retrievability of Objects
Amazon S3 Unveils New Versioning Feature
written by: Shadeed Eleazer
Amazon Web Services has announced a new Versioning feature for usage across all Amazon S3 Services.
What is it?
Through the Versioning feature, Amazon S3 now preserves all existing objects with any POST, COPY, DELETE, or PUT operation performed. Now, older overwritten or deleted objects can be obtained via specifying specific versions in your request.
Why is this Needed?
In instances where users are allowed to perform specific actions with an S3 account, objects (content) can be accidentally overwritten or deleted. Application failures can also disrupt storage of content. Versioning of these objects enables easy recovery.
Public beta testing has concluded and has led to an addition of MFA Delete being added to provide additional security and control over access to S3 objects. Using MFA Delete on your Amazon S3 bucket will require two forms of authentication in order to delete an object
*AWS account credentials
*Six-digit code and serial number from auth device from a participating third party provider and to set it up for use via the AWS website.
