www.brownmountainlights.net

With an increasing number of legal opinions online, rather than locked behind LexisNexis or Westlaw, Fastcase was bound to arise. Fastcase is an up-and-coming competitor to these locked-down, expensive services, offering access to a large legal database at a fraction of the cost. Fastcase still needs to scan and index all the legal opinions still held in books, but this is something that an offshore team can do at a low price.

Niche today, market dominance tomorrow. That’s the way the open-source song goes…

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The industry? Legal research.

Bigger law firms will continue to use Westlaw and Lexis for a long time. The established vendors have the most current and comprehensive databases, and, says Thomas Fleming, lawyers know them best….[Fleming's] firm uses Fastcase for quick searches and to cross-check citations, but he says it has a “phenomenal niche” serving smaller firms that can’t afford Wexis.

Fastcase won’t unseat Lexis-Nexis or Westlaw anytime soon, just as open-source software alternatives aren’t putting anyone out of business today. But the writing is on the wall, according to a June 30 Forbes article released online this week:

It’s happening again. Another bloated, proprietary industry is giving way to an “open-source” alternative.

MySpace, owned by News Corp. since 2005, nevertheless remains far ahead of Facebook in the U.S., where both companies are based. The same ComScore numbers found that MySpace has 73.7 million unique visitors in the U.S. versus Facebook’s 35.6 million, and that neither site grew much in the past month. Other number-crunching firms show similar results: a Compete.com graph of the two, for example, shows MySpace’s U.S. traffic shrinking a bit while Facebook’s is growing steadily, but not astronomically.

Overseas challenges
Still, even a fast-growing site like Facebook faces issues abroad. Ad dollars–typically stronger in the U.S. than overseas–still aren’t rolling in on social networks the way many expected them to, and last month Facebook took out a $100 million loan to keep pace with growth. MySpace, meanwhile, just rolled out a site redesign that aims to make it more appealing to both users and advertisers.

And Facebook continues to work on image issues. The independently run company, its valuation pegged at a jaw-dropping $15 billion after an investment from Microsoft, has also been boosting its executive team to lift its reputation from Palo Alto start-up to legitimate international corporation. This spring, the company courted Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications and public affairs at Google, to join its roster in a similar capacity as a policy-focused PR czar.

But the Facebook strategy appears to be working, too. Numbers released by ComScore earlier this week about Facebook’s growth in France suggest that the translated sites are having some positive effects in building international audiences. On Thursday, Chinese and Russian versions of the site debuted, bringing the translation offering to around 20 languages.

Facebook, according to ComScore, pulled in 123.9 million unique visitors in the month of May, beating MySpace’s 114.6, and 50.6 billion page views compared to MySpace’s 45.4 billion. It’s been a slow but steady upward climb for Facebook, which was founded by then-Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. The site was restricted to members with e-mail addresses from a handful of elite universities before gradually expanding to the general public and becoming a genuine Silicon Valley sensation when it kick-started the developer platform craze last year.

New numbers from metrics firm ComScore show that in May, the battle of the social-networking sites may have gained a new front-runner: Facebook appears to have surpassed longtime rival MySpace in worldwide unique visitors for the first time. ComScore representatives said that this began in April when Facebook passed MySpace by a hair, and widened in May.

This post was updated at 1:04 PM with comment from ComScore.

It was a very different story for MySpace, which was founded in 2003 and achieved mass-market success in a relatively short time by gearing itself toward independent bands and their fans.

Then there’s the fact that while MySpace might be Facebook’s chief rival in the U.S., there are plenty of other social networks with big followings in different pockets of the globe that pose local competition. Orkut, run by Google, has a lock on Brazil and also eats up a big portion of the market in India. Hi5 is big in Latin America. Friendster, long past popularity in the U.S., has nevertheless gained a sizeable following in several Asian countries.

(Credit:
ComScore)

This appears to confirm the common wisdom that Facebook’s present growth is largely overseas. And that, of course, assumes that the numbers are accurate–online metrics firms, ComScore included, have been subject to plenty of scrutiny on behalf of Web companies and ad firms. Additionally, some of MySpace’s overseas traffic does not come from the MySpace.com domain; its Chinese-language site, for example, is MySpace.cn. (ComScore representatives said later that its assessment of MySpace’s traffic encompassed all the site’s domains.)

In January, Facebook unveiled plans to provide translated versions of the site, something that MySpace has done since 2006 after first launching separate versions of the site for other English-speaking countries like the U.K. and Australia. There are now 29 localized versions of MySpace, and the company has office space in 20 different countries. MySpace representatives have explained in the past that their aim is to build communities centered on regional culture, not to simply expand the same networking tool worldwide.

Yelle, pronounced Yeah-elle, was discovered by EMI’s unit in France one week after she posted “Short Dick Cuizi,” a song that took swipes at a member of a rival band. She renamed the song “Je veux te voir” and then released Pop Up, which features three songs, “Je veux te voir,” “Parle a ma main,” and “A cause des garcons” attracting big audiences at YouTube.

French singer Yelle is helping to usher out era of disc promos

A version of “A cause des garcons” has been viewed 3.5 million times since August. Her songs have also been heard on such TV shows as “The Hills” and “Entourage.”

EMI says it has already seen positive results.

Beyond the cost savings that digital music offers, Rougvie says there is growing need for an act to obtain a “groundswell of digital support” from music blogs, download stores, and MySpace to prove to a label that it can attract fans and is worthy of a larger investment. For that reason, focusing on digital at the beginning of a promotion makes sense.

Naturally, EMI is trying it again.

“We’re definitely spending less than on a traditional campaign,” Rougvie said. “It doesn’t make sense when you’re going out the door to spend a lot of money putting out a physical product and taking in costs before you know what (the demand is).”

(Credit:
EMI Music)

Sweet faced and playful, French electro-pop star Yelle seems an unlikely figure to stick a dagger into the heart of a much-loved but quickly disappearing staple of the music industry.

Last year, the label brought Utada Hikaru, Japan’s top recording artist, to the United States. EMI helped the singer find an audience in the U.S. without pressing any CDs initially. But the U.S. digital-only campaign was at best an effort to put otherwise hard-to-find product in front of her U.S. fans. Before digital music, those fans might wait months before an expensive import CD hit our shores.

Caroline Records specializes in introducing international music stars to U.S. audiences. Naturally, this means executives are often less sure of whether a foreign performer can find a niche audience here. Spending big on untested and unknown acts doesn’t make sense. As part of the digital-only promotion, EMI didn’t seek radio airplay for Yelle’s music and didn’t buy banner or print ads in traditional music magazines like Rolling Stone or Blender.

“I don’t know when my first EP on vinyl will come out,” said Yelle, whose real name is Julie Budet. “I don’t know whether it will come out. I think it’s a bonus if it does. It’s a plus. I think now you can download music, buy CDs, and that’s what people really want. But I would be really proud if my album will be out in vinyl.”

For an industry that has been decimated by digital technology, this is an example of how at least one of the four largest music labels is putting it to work.

The label couldn’t have asked for a better test case than Yelle. The 25-year-old from St. Brieuc, France, told CNET News.com on Wednesday that she grew up with the Internet and fully understands its power to promote and distribute music.

Digital allows EMI to get product to niche audiences affordably as well as generate incremental income for the company. Hikaru would later go on to sell 7.2 million downloads worldwide.

The movement to phase out discs as promotional devices has been around for some time. Last year, EMI drastically scaled back the numbers of CDs it sent out as promos. Just a few years ago, the label may have sent out CDs as complete albums. Now it distributes secure online access where retailers or reviewers can hear songs.

While Yelle is a fan of digital music and technology, she says there is still a place for plastic.

She is unwittingly helping The EMI Group, one of the four largest music companies, to push CDs further into the shadows. Already a star in her own country and a growing nightclub favorite in the U.S., Yelle was being promoted until recently in this country exclusively through digital means.

For decades, music labels trying to break in an act pressed thousands of vinyl records or CDs to distribute to disc jockeys, record stores, journalists, and fans. Those types of promotions have grown too expensive in an era of shrinking music sales, says Jeff Rougvie, general manager of EMI’s Caroline Records, who is leading Yelle’s U.S. campaign.

Instead, executives took to MySpace, music widgets, and powerful music blogs like Pitchfork. The label started digital and stayed digital until it reached a critical mass. On April 1, EMI finally released a CD version of Yelle’s album, Pop Up.

But Microsoft can’t be happy about failing miserably to compete in the 21st Century, as the Guardian notes, choosing instead to preserve its 20th-century gains:

The New York Times hits the nail right on the head: If Microsoft were at the top of its game (as its numbers suggest), it wouldn’t need to acquire Yahoo!:

Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is a public confession of failure: an admission that despite the company’s resources Microsoft has failed to build up an effective presence on its own in key areas such as search, web advertising and services that Google has been so spectacularly successful at. Instead it is trying to buy its way into the 21st century. Microsoft has proved very successful at preserving its 90% plus monopoly of operating systems, spreadsheets and word processing but is much less successful where it faces stiff competition.

of course, just as with IBM, becoming “sluggish, bureaucratic, [and] slow” is not to say that Microsoft is going out of business any time soon. Rather, it’s just to say that Microsoft’s glory days of market innovations are well past it (not that anyone was doubting this – when is the last time it really did anything innovative?).

Microsoft will likely start to offer a pension plan and start paying dividends. (Oh, wait. It already does. The “revolution” is well underway….)

Which is why I’ve never believed we needed government regulation to beat Microsoft. We just need the market. The market created open source and Google. Governments didn’t. The dollar (or, more likely, Euro will find a way to compete. In the case of Microsoft, it has and will continue to do so, much to Microsoft’s detriment.

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Microsoft won’t go away. But it won’t be king of the hill anymore. It will just be king of the 20th Century.

…[Iif its proposed acquisition of Yahoo signals anything, it serves as a confirmation that Microsoft’s glory days are in the past. Having failed to challenge Google where it matters most — in online advertising — it has been reduced to bulking up by buying Google’s nearest but still distant competitor. In many ways, the company has become exactly what Bill Gates used to fear the most — sluggish, bureaucratic, slow to respond to new forms of competition — just as I.B.M. was when Microsoft convinced that era’s tech behemoth to use Microsoft’s operating system in its new personal computer.

Though I could never ditch my cell phone for good, it wouldn’t be wise in my line of work, but still there is something very delicious about being able to ditch your mobile for a few days. That’s why next year, I may have to stay somewhere else.

Kent German, CNET’s cell phones guru, answers your questions about cell phones, services, and accessories and reports on the state of the industry. Send him a question. For past columns, check out the columns in the On Call archive.

Fortunately, my fears proved to be (mostly) unfounded. The office or mom never rang, and it was nice to send a quick text about meeting the group for dinner. Most of the time, I left my phone in its rightful place on the table while I walked the short distance down the hill to check up on a friend who was staying in town. Only once did an unwelcome call invade my space, but I convinced myself to let it go.

But this year I had a rude awakening. After arriving at our resort, I was surprised to learn that I had reception. My bars never slipped above two but I had enough coverage to make calls and send texts. While part of me was suddenly pleased that I could keep in touch with friends who were staying at other resorts, I also was somewhat miffed. Now the office could call or mom could phone to tell me I forgot a relative’s birthday. Suddenly, I feared the real world would do more than just invade my vacation; it would sit next to me at the pool. As I see it, when I’m completely out of touch I have a good excuse not to take the call. But, if I get reception I feel that I have a responsibility to answer. You may think it’s crazy, but that’s just me and I know quite a few people who feel the same way.

On the other hand, one of my gadget-obsessed friends didn’t fare quite so well. While trying to find directions to a nearby town, he quickly became exasperated after he couldn’t get a GPS satellite lock on his iPhone 3G. You should have seen the bewildered look on his face when I handed him directions I had written on a sheet of paper.

Like many people, I feel a bit naked without my cell phone. If I ever leave the house without it, which a rare occurrence in itself, I will go back for it under almost all circumstances. I’m not proud of this instinctive reaction, and I acknowledge the technology-rules-man overtones, but that’s what modern urban life has become.

Every summer, however, I look forward to a few days when packing a cell phone is not a priority. Sonoma County’s Russian River area is a beautiful and relaxing spot to spend a long weekend. Few things can beat reclining by the pool with a cocktail and the hot sunny weather is welcome after a cold San Francisco summer. But the best thing about the Russian River is that cell phone service can be hard to come by. Except for a few spotty areas with AT&T service, the entire area was one huge dead zone. And that suited me very well. Since my phone didn’t work, there was no point in even thinking about it–quite a liberating feeling indeed. So there it would rest on the table for three days while I enjoyed a peaceful vacation without the intrusion of a ringtone or the outside world at large. After all, isn’t that what a vacation is all about?

(Credit:
Russian River Travel)

It's mighty quiet up there.

Carnoy asserts that 2008 will not bring a Blu-ray player from Toshiba, but it may “change its tune” in 2009.

Toshiba will not try to increase the quality of upconverting DVD players, but it will release a Blu-ray player this year. Why you ask? Simple — it has too much invested in the HD game and now that Sony is no longer the enemy, why would it even consider spending even more cash on upconverting when it can sign an agreement with the Blu-ray backers and release players?

Aside from that, the company’s chief executive, Atsutoshi Nishida, may sound averse to jumping on the Blu-ray bandwagon and sympathetic to upconverting, but what is the likelihood that upconverting DVD players will outpace Blu-ray players once the latter’s price falls to a more consumer-friendly level? Further, why would Toshiba dump even more cash into something that can’t stand up to new technology?

As it stands, Toshiba is on the ropes in the HD business. Just two months ago, the company was still a hearty contender in the space and was sitting at the forefront of HD technology. Since then, the company gave up its bid to become the format of choice going forward. But if Toshiba realizes that HD is the future, why would it forego its stance as one of the leaders to back an outdated format? Surely that won’t make sense from a business or PR perspective.

And although Nishida indicated that his company currently has no plans for a Blu-ray player, let’s not forget that it’s only March and he has the cash and time to release hardware in a matter of months.

Pointing to a Wall Street Journal interview with Toshiba’s CEO, Carnoy extrapolated information from the discussion and concluded that because the company’s chief executive said his company would “improve this [upconverting feature] even more, so that consumers won’t be able to tell the difference from HD DVD images”, Toshiba has no designs on a move into the Blu-ray player market.

In a recent post on the News.com blog, David Carnoy opined on the future of Toshiba and its ill-fated decision to back a losing format for so long.

Let us also not forget that some of Toshiba’s biggest competitors — LG, Sony, Panasonic and others — have already signed on to the Blu-ray strategy and offer players. Knowing this, why wouldn’t Toshiba get into that market to ensure it’s not locked entirely out? And if it does want to eventually get in, wouldn’t it want to do it as soon as possible so its competitors don’t control too much of the market?

Coming to a store near you…in 2008

And while Carnoy makes a good point in saying Toshiba Blu-ray players will be available next year, I think he’s off by one year.

Simply put, the future of Toshiba has everything to do with Blu-ray and regardless of what he spews in a Wall Street Journal article, the company’s CEO knows that. A Toshiba Blu-ray player will be released this year and if I had to venture a guess, look for it by the fourth quarter so it can capitalize on the Christmas rush.

(Credit: Crave)

The company said it will continue to allow Windows XP Home edition to be sold for a class of computers it calls “ultra-low-cost PCs.”

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Windows 7 and its intended feature list have been the topic of speculation since Microsoft discussed some details of the new software last summer.

Vista, the current version of Windows, has sold well, according to Microsoft. But the operating system’s debut was marred by repeated delays and shifting feature lists. Last week, Microsoft stepped up efforts to drive adoption of Vista by businesses.

Most of Gates’ speech was devoted to topics closer to home for the crowd, such as how Latin America can be more competitive.

In response to a question about Windows Vista, Gates, speaking before the Inter-American Development Bank here, said: “Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version.” Referring to Windows 7, the code name for the next full release of Windows client software, Gates said: “I’m super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways.”

Unclear is whether Gates was referring to early testing of Windows 7 coming within the year, as opposed to a widespread release or debut. An early test geared toward developers would be conceivable. The company has repeatedly said that it will accelerate the development of new Windows versions, largely as a response to Vista’s roughly five year gestation period.

Less than 24 hours ago, a Microsoft representative told CNET News.com that the company expects to ship the successor to Vista roughly three years from Vista’s January 2007 debut.

CNET News.com’s Mike Ricciuti contributed to this report.

Microsoft on Thursday declined to extend a lifeline for Windows XP, saying that only a limited number of specialized machines will be sold with the operating system after June.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

MIAMI–Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Friday indicated that
Windows 7, the next major version of Windows, could come within the next year, far ahead of the development schedule previously indicated by the software maker.

At that time, Microsoft said little except that Windows 7 will ship in consumer and business versions, and in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The company also confirmed that it is considering a subscription model to complement Windows, but did not provide specifics or a time frame.

Unfortunately, the one thing missing is a way to embed the clip on other sites, so if you want to see how it looks beyond the screenshot below, you’ll have to go here

The short clip I uploaded earlier today came from my digital camera and was converted from AVI to DivX with no noticeable loss in quality. The one caveat there is that, to see it, users have to install the DivX Web player in their browser, the same thing you have to do with Flash and YouTube. DivX’s player, however, has a few tricks up its sleeve. For one, you can pop out any video to its original quality, which on some widescreen videos looks just great. It’s also got a much more complex options menu for every clip that lets you do fast forward and rewind, and even save the clip if you have a premium version of the player–the same kind of things you get with Apple’s QuickTime.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

The service is allowing users to upload gargantuan video files by most standards. The current cap is 1GB, which is what many free Web storage services offer as their entire limit. I’m told users will be able to upload even larger sizes in the future. The best thing is that there’s no time limit, so as long as your video is under the size cap, it can be as long as you want. Considering the news about YouTube extending its video length, this is a necessary move.

That was in February though, and since then a group of half a dozen developers has put together their own solution, called Vreel. Originally planned to launch back in March, it opened up its doors this morning.

Update 2: Vreel is getting more servers and should be officially “re-launching” soon. We’ll keep you posted.

Update: Oops, looks like we helped take the site down. Removing links for the time being–will put them back up when the site returns.

Update 3: Everything is back to normal. Links are back.

When I put together a small comparison test of video services earlier this year, an overwhelming number of people got on me about not including Stage6, a side project of the people behind the popular DivX codec to showcase what their technology was capable of. Shortly thereafter, Stage6 shut its doors in a rather dramatic fashion–giving users mere days to find somewhere else to host their high-resolution videos.

High-quality videos on Vreel shine. You can even view them in close to native resolution with a pop-out player.

Like its predecessor, one of the service’s strong suits is that it uses DivX, a codec that’s not as popular as Adobe’s Flash for Web video, but beat it to market for delivering high-resolution videos and is largely the format of choice for videos found on sites like The Pirate Bay. Since then, Flash has caught up technologically, but high-resolution videos have not quite reached the mainstream, only popping up on sites like Dailymotion, Vimeo, and in a gallery on Hulu. The user-uploaded videos already filling up Vreel’s servers are beautiful (albeit mostly illegal).

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

Speaking of old, SAP was founded in 1972 and Salesforce.com in 1999. Salesforce.com is approaching $1 billion in annual revenue, and a much smaller margin than SAP, with its software-as-a-service platform and subscription business model. SAP has been slow to adopt the software-as-a-service model, but is prepping to launch Business ByDesign. It will be more directly competitive with NetSuite than Salesforce.com, which is built primarily around CRM applications.

The history footnote of the evening came from Benioff, who challenged Plattner to build SAP applications on the Salesforce.com platform. “I want to figure out how to get SAP to build on our platform,” Benioff said. “SAP needs to write its new apps on our platform, and I need to help him do that because there is no way he can figure that out…we will be in a war to get more developers on our platform.”

Debate partners: Marc Benioff and Hasso Plattner

Plattner rambled on about betting on modification-free software with SAP R/3 in 1993, only to find that customers wanted to customize it. SAP’s plan today is to provide 2,100 service interfaces in Business ByDesign, its forthcoming hosted suite of applications for the mid-market. Those interfaces will mesh with each other but will not be customizable. He differentiated Business ByDesign from Salesforce.com by virtue of the completeness of the SAP suite. SAP has been working on Business ByDesign for four years with 2,500 developers on the project, and it won’t be generally available until later this year or 2009.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–Two titans in the enterprise software business faced off Thursday at a Churchill Club event at the Computer History Museum here, and a bit of history was made.

Benioff claimed that the Salesforce.com platform could run any kind of enterprise application. He asked Plattner why Salesforce.com beat out SAP for the Dupont business. “We had a shitty CRM system,” Plattner said. He then said that the new SAP CRM 7.0 is the best product in the field. “You had a good time and now we are. If you are really successful how much are you worth?” Plattner said.

To put this debate in historical context, Benioff has been known to disparage SAP, which generated $15 billion in revenue for 2007 with a 26 percent margin, as a company that doesn’t innovate. In an interview with News.com’s Charlie Cooper and myself a few weeks ago, Benioff said:

Plattner, who was writing software when Benioff was in grade school, wasn’t biting, and became a bit exercised. He questioned whether Salesforce.com could keep thousands of on-demand service interfaces consistent as its platform grows and as customers write code to integrate with the platform.

Salesforce is like best of breed in the old days. It’s always an advantage, but you cannot be best at everything worldwide. That’s our advantage–we can run an entire business.

Benioff said Salesforce.com is aimed at all sizes of companies and across industries. “We have been passionate about moving obstacles out of the way of the old enterprise software companies,” Benioff said. “We are at the verge of a breakthrough, and it is as big as the software-as-a-service business has been. We see platforms emerging where we can accept customers and ISV code and run it natively, just as R/3 ran natively on Oracle. This means you can run the business processes of any company in the world. We are moving now to platform-as-a-service, and it’s biggest the threat to SAP, MS, Oracle, and BEA architectures.”

“We have many things in common. Let me give you some advice, but you might not take it because you are younger: don’t overestimate your platform.” –Hasso Plattner to Marc Benioff

The evening started off more calmly, with Benioff describing the new generation of enterprise software companies, which he said will look more like consumer companies, such as Google, Yahoo, and eBay on the back end, but serve up traditional business functionality.

In August 2007, Plattner’s proxy, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann, characterized Salesforce.com as follows:

“I would be scared at what you just said. If you extend that to whole enterprise system, I would be scared to death,” Plattner responded.

“All 41,000 Salesforce customers are on the same version. When we release the new version in June, we don’t break the links. In some cases they have to re-implement, but you still have a managed environment,” Benioff countered.

For SAP, software is about serving larger businesses with a complete, integrated suite of applications with “wall-to-wall functionality,” Plattner said.

As salesforce.com evolved from CRM to application platform, Benioff has been making that claim the client/server model is doomed. Plattner touted SAP’s developer community. “We have 1.2 million software developers on our platform, 2,000 partners developing addition software,” he said. “We have the largest software development project in our history, with 2,500 developers developing on demand,” Plattner added.

“You have 2,500 developers and 2,100 interfaces. All that and no customer success,” Benioff taunted.

Fundamentally, companies will find it more practical and cost effective to deploy enterprise software from the cloud over the next decade. As I said earlier, Benioff won the debate, but he has a long way to go to unseat Plattner’s company.

The sage, 64-year-old Hasso Plattner, co-founder and Chairman of SAP, and the upstart, 43-year-old Marc Benioff, co-founder and Chairman of salesforce.com, debated the future of enterprise software, fielding questions from Quentin Hardy of Forbes and the audience.

Benioff summarized the future of enterprise software during the debate in this statement: Software-as-a-service will not happen without Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP. But they are holding on to the past. The new Internet companies–Amazon, Google and ebay–what they have done and the new young internet companies is really the next generation.”

In a moment of calm, Plattner said, “We have many things in common. Let me give you some advice, but you might not take it because you are younger: don’t overestimate your platform.” Sage advice.

Benioff, who I declare the debate winner by nontechnical knockout (no references to in-memory database systems), stuck to his vision of the future. “You have to buy into the fundamental premise that the world has to change, and because we have a global network and a new architecture with massively parallel servers, we can build technology with a level of automation previously unimaginable.

With SAP, you really have not seen innovation in the last 10 years. If you think about what is the one thing that SAP has ever innovated, what have they created that’s unique to the industry or value-added technology? I have a hard time thinking about what SAP is going to be known for at the end of the day.

Plattner was asked if he would consider buying Salesforce.com. “It always makes sense to look into something. If the Apex platform (the Salesforce.com platform) is really as good a he thinks it is, we should look even more,” he said. Plattner also said that he thinks Oracle, where Benioff worked for 13 years, will end up acquiring Salesforce.com

Make groups of Twitter buddies and keep tabs on them in one place with Crowdstatus.

One thing sorely missing from Twitter is a way to clump together into groups people you’re following. Enter Crowdstatus, a delightfully simple tool that places the latest status message from a Twitter user in a small box with his or her avatar. You can add as many people as you want and check in on them throughout the day as people update. Each grouping gets its own vanity URL and management page where you can add or delete users.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

[via eHub]

The tool was created by Darren Stuart, who incidentally created one of my favorite Facebook apps called “please stop sharing applications with me.” On the about page Stuart notes he’s also planning to add other networks to the mix like Jaiku, Seesmic, and Facebook.