Ajax Girl

Jive Software has released version 2.0 of Clearspace, its collaboration suite for businesses. The company is also announcing that it has acquired Jotlet, makers of online calendar software.

Jive provides two products with the Clearspace name, both of which run on the same platform. The one getting upgraded is simply known as “Clearspace” and is used by businesses for internal collaboration purposes. This means holding discussions, sharing and working on documents, blogging, running polls, organizing projects, handling group tasks, and more. The other product is called “Clearspace Community” and consists of software that businesses can use to communicate with customers and the broader community.

Clearspace 2.0 has been upgraded in 5 primary ways. There are more social networking features that employees can use to learn about each others’ professional activities. The experience is more iGoogle-y, with lots of drag-n-drop modules that can be added and removed for customization purposes.

Jive has also built out what it’s calling an XMPP cloud that essentially gives outsiders access to particular sections of a Clearspace community. For example, if you are organizing a project using Clearspring (another new capability), you can invite partners from other companies to join you for just those projects. This feature exposes Clearspring to those who haven’t seen it before and gives it a viral edge.

Over the coming year, Jive will incorporate Jotlet’s technology into Clearspace to beef up its calendaring functionality. The company says it acquired Jotlet because it had a good API and integrated well with Outlook.

Jive claims that it now has over 2,000 customers, which includes 15% of the Fortune 500. It likes to explicitly pit Clearspace up against Microsoft SharePoint, which it says focuses more on file sharing than true collaboration. Clearspace, which is based on Java, comes as both a hosted and an on-premise solution, and is free for 5 people to try out. Additional seats are $59/year up to a certain size before enterprise pricing kicks in.

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Google is hosting the second of their developer events, called “Campfire One,” on Monday (April 7) evening. Multiple people have forwarded email invitations to me for the event, where Google promises they’ll be “unveiling another exciting technology” to the developer community.

The first Campfire One event was held for thirty outside developers on November 1, 2007, where Google announced details of their OpenSocial initiative. They describe the events as “Every once in a while we’ll invite members of the developer community on campus to talk shop, share some news, and eat S’mores. We’re calling this “Google Campfire One.””

I wasn’t invited to the event, but I clicked through on the invite link in one of the emails and signed up. A confirmation was sent back immediately afterwards. Since the RSVP page doesn’t appear to be limited to invited developers only, I won’t publish the URL.

My guess is that Google will be announcing the launch of web services that will compete head on with those offered by Amazon and others. The anchor for these services, we hear, is their internal database system called BigTable. Google has definitely briefed press on the imminent launch of BigTable as a web service, although as we said last week we haven’t been contacted.

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I’ve had a very odd weekend.

First, I’ve taken a dozen or so phone calls from concerned relatives and friends over this NYTimes article. But a bigger issue is that the Internet was down in the house starting late Friday night, so I haven’t been online much. On Saturday I called Comcast, my service provider, and a recorded system said it would be back up in 30 minutes. That never happened.

So I’ve been running around to various cafes and friend’s houses to steal bandwidth and try to be online at least a little. The best connection was at Keith Teare’s house, but I had to deal with a chicken roaming around his front yard (picture) and making a lot of noise. They don’t know where the chicken came from, it just sort of moved in and won’t leave. This is Palo Alto we’re talking about. There should be no live chickens in Palo Alto. But I digress.

This morning, going on 36 hours of down time, I called again, waded through the automated system and a pitch to get a new premium cable company, and spoke to a real person. She told me that Comcast was having a California-wide outage and didn’t know when it would be back up. i hung up on her mid-sentence. This California-wide outage seemed to be limited to my house - all of my friends said their Comcast connection was just fine.

And then I lost my cool, tearing into Comcast on Twitter. Jeff Jarvis and others picked up the story and blogged about it.

And this brings me to the point of this post. Within 20 minutes of my first Twitter message I got a call from a Comcast executive in Philadelphia who wanted to know how he could help. He said he monitors Twitter and blogs to get an understanding of what people are saying about Comcast, and so he saw the discussion break out around my messages.

Twitter As An Early Stage Warning System For Brands And Companies

So Comcast sent a team out to fix my connection and apologized profusely, which is great for me but doesn’t help the other customers who don’t think to complain publicly about the company. Nor does it address the fact that Comcast and other cable providers have little incentive to invest in infrastructure or customer service since they have geographic monopolies on their service.

But wow, they’re doing at least one thing right. Well before most people they have identified blogs, and particularly Twitter, as an excellent early warning system to flag possible brand implosions. This may help them avoid situations like what Dell went through with Jeff Jarvis in 2005.

It’s trivially easy to do a brand search on Tweetscan and create a feed for any new postings. Whether you join in the conversation directly or reach out to aggrieved customers is up to you. But Twitter is the place where conversations are exploding well before they even make it to mainstream blogs. With the information just sitting there, it’s surprising that more brands aren’t watching the tweetosphere.

And a piece of advice to anyone with a Comcast service problem. Skip the hold time on their customer service line and go on the attack at Twitter instead. You may find your problem fixed in a hurry.

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We’ve received word that Facebook has released its chat/IM application to a few unspecified networks. The “pre-launch beta”, as Facebook is calling it, apparently started sometime last night.

InsideFacebook has some screenshots and a summary of their first impressions. If you’re part of a network that has been given access already, please let us know in the comments.

The only thing new that we’ve learned is that Facebook Chat will incorporate mini-feed stories into IM conversations. If you’re chatting with someone and they do something to your profile, like post a message on your wall, you will get a notification into your chat window with them.

Not that anyone’s keeping score, but it looks like, technically, Facebook managed to make their promised launch date of last week with the limited launch sometime before or around midnight on Saturday.

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Searching for the perfect browser can sometimes be a headache. Although there are several available to use, not all of them are created equal. I’ve worked with Internet Explorer for a couple of years and always wanted a better experience. There were way too many vulnerabilities and kinks to deal with. Of course, I naturally started using Mozilla Firefox as soon as I heard of it. I’m still extremely satisfied with this browser, but I am always looking for something better.

I came across the Safari 3 web browser and decided to give it a try. Users can access this browser via a Mac or Windows based computer. Apple products are well known for their intuitive interfaces. Instead of having to fight for hours to understand one single detail, you’ll be able to easily start working with them in a short time. After just a few minutes of using the Safari 3 web browser, I was able to notice that not only does it work just as good as Mozilla Firefox, but even better.

It has a minimal appearance that will allow you to focus exclusively on your Internet experience and not just the browser. Some web browsers will overwhelm you because of crowded add ons or extension. You won’t have to worry about that with Safari 3. It will easily direct you to where you need to go without a fuss. If you have long searched for a better web browser experience, then consider trying Safari 3. You’ll be extremely surprised at its ease of use and intuitive interface.

Countless startups, such as Sun, Yahoo and Google (as well as newcomers like Meebo) were started at Stanford, or by Stanford graduates. Now Stanford wants to help its students by providing seed funding directly, and in the process will get a little equity in those new ideas, too.

Stanford Student Enterprises, a Stanford student association with several hundred employees and $13 million in assets, has launched an early stage venture fund called SSE Ventures to invest directly in student founded startups.

Until now, the organization has focused on managing various investments, operating a student banking service, managing Stanford’s phone directors and selling Stanford apparel.

The new entity, founded by Matt McDonald, Matt McLaughlin, Samuel Lipsick and Brian Chavarria, says it will invest $50,000 or $100,000 in each approved proposal from Stanford undergraduate or graduate students.

SSE Ventures has also put together an advisory board to help review proposals. The board includes The Founders Fund, Charles River Ventures and angel investor Rajeev Motwani. Of course, those advisory members will be getting an early look at all of these startups, making it well worth their time.

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Over the past few days at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to hang out with about 700 Internet entrepreneurs from all over Europe. The startup scene in Europe reminds me of Silicon Valley four or five years ago—hungry startups building Web companies on the cheap and products that scratch a personal itch.

Swedish startup Twingly, for instance, wants to come up with spam-free blog search by starting with the best 450,000 blogs and letting users share blog posts with each other. Paris-based Zilok is creating an eBay for renting things such as drills and digital projectors. London’s Fav.or.it makes a feed reader with extra powers—you can leave comments on blogs within the reader, it ranks posts based on how much they are actually read, and it lets you filter posts by tag, rank, or category. In Munich, andUnite has created a service that allows you to collect your search terms and share them with others.

And a handful of companies are even gaining substantial traction. I was surprised to learn that the social network Netlog claims 30 million unique visitors and four billion page views per month (comScore counts 11 million visitors, but five billion page views). Netlog operates in 15 different languages, and 20 countries. Then there is eBuddy, the Meebo of Europe, which boasts 12 million Web users and 1.6 million mobile users of its Web-based instant-messaging service.

Most of the startups I encountered, however, are still operating under the radar—in Romania, Sweden, Holland, Ireland, France. But a cross-border Web 2.0 culture is definitely gaining steam across Europe. Technology itself is helping to break down borders. A VC showed me the landing page on his mobile phone. It wasn’t his e-mail. It was Twitter. Another startup founder told me that Twitter helps him keep a dialogue going with other entrepreneurs and VCs across Europe, and even with contacts in the U.S.

Europe is still a mosaic of employment law, tax regulations, and cultural habits that can influence where it makes the most sense to locate different parts of a business. One Dutch CEO, for instance, told me that it costs a minimum of 18,000 Euros just to incorporate in the Netherlands. And that is just the government’s fee.

When I asked which region was most likely to emerge as Europe’s Silicon Valley, the answers were all over the map: London, Munich, Berlin, Zurich, Geneva, even Barcelona. The money is in London, cheap office space is in Berlin, the mobile expertise is in Helsinki, the weather’s nice in Barcelona, and the inexpensive engineers are in Estonia (which may not even consider itself part of Europe, but is close enough to manage from Berlin or Amsterdam).

As Europe searches for its Silicon Valley, it may turn up as a state of mind rather than a specific place. The truth is that Europe may not need a single Silicon Valley because business is becoming so distributed. While some may disagree, the idea of concentrating all the talent and capital in one region seems so last century to many Euro 2.0 entrepreneurs.

(Photo © Pieter Baert).

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