Mobile Talent in Short Supply as Employers Seek to Fill Jobs

Technology companies are running up against a dearth of qualified developers to create applications for mobile devices, according to a survey by online job board Dice Holdings Inc.

Almost 57 percent of employers and outside recruiters that hired for mobile-related jobs this year plan to boost such hires in the next 12 months, the survey, conducted on behalf of Bloomberg Businessweek.com, showed. More than half the respondents described the supply of quality mobile-software designers and engineers as “scarce.”

Companies need app developers as the market for mobile software surges to $17.5 billion by 2012, from $4.1 billion last year, according to a study by Chetan Sharma Consulting. The demand for programmers who can write for mobile platforms, such as Apple Inc.’s iPhone, Google Inc.’s Android and Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry, has stoked competition among recruiters, driven up salaries and led employers to consider getting new talent through acquisitions.

Small Rise

The online survey, conducted Oct. 11-15, was based on 283 recruiters who use New York-based Dice’s site and said they had hired mobile professionals this year. Dice sells services to businesses who recruit employees through its site.

More than a fifth of respondents said they hired substantially more mobile experts this year than last year, and more than a third said they added slightly more. Some 36 percent hired about the same number, while 6.6 percent said mobile hiring fell this year.

In the next 12 months, a fifth of recruiters anticipate a substantial increase in hiring, 37 percent see a slight increase, and 34 percent plan to hire about the same number.

The most common salary range for mobile engineers and designers was $75,001 to $100,000, according to 41 percent of respondents. About 28 percent said average pay was $100,001 to $125,000, while 21 percent said it was $50,001 to $75,000.

Higher Salaries

Almost a third of employers raised salary levels for the average mobile worker “higher than normal,” citing the increase in demand for talent.

Experience with Apple’s mobile platform carried the most weight on resumes, with 72 percent of recruiters saying they are hiring for development of iPhone applications, and 38 percent saying iPhone expertise is the most attractive among platforms.

“Anybody that has an application that has been working on a notebook now wants that to work on an iPad, an iPhone and on Google Android,” said Todd Thibodeaux, chief executive officer of the trade group Computing Technology Industry Association in Oak Brook, Illinois.

He described the supply of qualified talent as “scant.” “There’s a whole bunch of specialties that have to develop and emerge there,” Thibodeaux said.

Android Software

About 60 percent are hiring for Android development, and 23 percent said new recruits with knowledge of Google’s platform is most highly prized. Some 48 percent of employers are hiring for BlackBerry, while just 16.1 percent said that’s the most desirable type of mobile expertise.

This month, Dice’s site had 758 job listings requiring skills or experience with the iPhone, up from 264 a year ago. The site had 685 listings requiring Android skills, up from 158.

“If you look at jobs that require either iPhone skills or Android skills, the number of jobs is still pretty small, but if you look at the growth rate, it’s huge,” said Tom Silver, senior vice president at Dice.

Mobile was described as one of the top three priorities in technology hiring by 35 percent of employers. A year from now, as more businesses incorporate mobile technology, Silver predicts that number will be closer to 50 percent.

The vast majority of employers, or 95 percent, said mobile hiring was either competitive or extremely competitive.

Overseas Demand 

That competition has intensified partly because of increased demand for talent in other countries, especially India and China, said Russell Hancock, CEO of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a San Jose, California-based group formed by business leaders to focus on talent-pool concerns in the region.

While programmers and other skilled workers from India and China have had a significant presence in technology companies during the Internet boom, “in the past decade, that has tailed off significantly,” Hancock said.

Some businesses are resorting to acquisitions. About half of the respondents plan to add mobile-software expertise by buying companies in the next 12 months.

Other companies have learned to be more flexible in their hiring. Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of local-business reviews site Yelp Inc., said he began recruiting engineers talented enough to learn and adjust to new types of mobile platforms.

“If you’re doing searches for people with iPhone experience, it isn’t going to be a deep pool of people,” Stoppelman said. “We just look for good engineers.”

DIY App Inventor For Android

Google is offering a free software tool for non-developers to build their own Android applications. The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android, has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.

"The goal is to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world," said Harold Abelson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is on sabbatical at Google and led the project.

The Google project, Mr. Abelson said, is intended to give users, especially young people, a simple tool to let them tinker with smartphone software, much as people have done with computers. Over the years, he noted, simplified programming tools like Basic, Logo and Scratch have opened the door to innovations of all kinds. Microsoft's first product, for example, was a version of Basic, pared down to run on personal computers.

Google's App Inventor is a visual programming language for creating mobile phone applications on Android devices. It provides both a great way to learn how to program and, arguably, the fastest method for creating mobile apps in the world.

App Inventor allows even non-programmers to create apps. But it is also a valuable tool if you are already a programmer, the tool's visual nature and high-level components significantly increase the speed by which you can develop apps and prototypes.

App Inventor is a block-editing tool similar to the programming environment scratch developed at MIT.

Ajax and Mashup Security

Ajax and mashups represent two new Web application development approaches that both fit under the Web 2.0 umbrella.

Ajax

Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) allows user interaction with Web pages to be decoupled from the Web browser's communication with the server. In particular, Ajax drives mashups, which integrate disparate content or services into a single user experience. However, Ajax and mashup technology introduce new types of threats because of their dynamic and multidomain nature. It is important to understand these threats and to avoid them by adhering to some best practices.

Mashups

A mashup is a web application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. Usually, the mashup components interact with each other. In the classic example of a mashup, a Craigslist component is combined with a mapping component (e.g., Google or Yahoo maps) such that when a user clicks on a new Craigslist entry, the mapping component updates its view to show the new address.

Mashups typically allow the end user to discover and integrate third party, Ajax-powered mashup components onto the mashup's canvas. Examples in the consumer social networking space include Facebook Widgets and MySpace Widgets, which end users can discover and insert into their pages.

From a technology perspective, mashup components represent Ajax-powered "mini applications" that are assembled into an Ajax-powered mashup container application that provides a framework for the components to communicate with each other. Sometimes the mashup container application enables cross-site communications by providing proxy services to allow server-side redirection to Web servers that are associated with a given mashup component.

Here is a whitepaper from Open Ajax Alliance on Ajax and mashup security that you may wish to peruse.

Ajax and Mashup Security

"Web Application Security — How to Minimize Prevalent Risk of Attacks"

Vulnerabilities in web applications are now the largest vector of enterprise security attacks.

Stories about exploits that compromise sensitive data frequently mention culprits such as "cross-site scripting," "SQL injection," and "buffer overflow." Vulnerabilities like these fall often outside the traditional expertise of network security managers.

To help you understand how to minimize these risks, Qualys provides this guide as a primer to web application security. The guide covers:

• typical web application vulnerabilities
• comparison of options for web application vulnerability detection
• QualysGuard Web Application Scanning solution

Offered Free by: Qualys, Inc.

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Six steps to adopting cloud computing services

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is becoming one of the next industry buzz words. Cloud computing overlaps some of the concepts of distributed, grid and utility computing, however it does have its own meaning if contextually used correctly. The conceptual overlap is partly due to technology changes, usages and implementations over the years.

Trends in usage of the terms from Google searches shows Cloud Computing is a relatively new term introduced in the past year. There has also been a decline in general interest of Grid, Utility and Distributed computing. Likely they will be around in usage for quit a while to come. But Cloud computing has become the new buzz word driven largely by marketing and service offerings from big corporate players like Google, IBM and Amazon.

The term cloud computing probably comes from the use of a cloud image to represent the Internet or some large networked environment. Cloud computing is associated with a higher level abstraction of the cloud. Instead of there being data pipes, routers and servers, there are now services. The underlying hardware and software of networking is of course still there but there are now higher level service capabilities available used to build applications. Behind the services are data and compute resources. A user of the service doesn’t necessarily care about how it is implemented, what technologies are used or how it’s managed. Only that there is access to it and has a level of reliability necessary to meet the application requirements.

In essence this is distributed computing. An application is built using the resource from multiple services potentially from multiple locations. At this point, typically you still need to know the endpoint to access the services rather than having the cloud provide you available resources. This is also know as Software as a Service. Behind the service interface is usually a grid of computers to provide the resources. The grid is typically hosted by one company and consists of a homogeneous environment of hardware and software making it easier to support and maintain. (note: my definition of a grid is different from the wikipedia definition, but homogeneous environments in data centers is typically what I have run across). Once you start paying for the services and the resources utilized, well that’s utility computing.

Cloud computing really is accessing resources and services needed to perform functions with dynamically changing needs. An application or service developer requests access from the cloud rather than a specific endpoint or named resource. What goes on in the cloud manages multiple infrastructures across multiple organizations and consists of one or more frameworks overlaid on top of the infrastructures tying them together. Frameworks provide mechanisms for:

• self-healing
  
  
• self monitoring
  
  
• resource registration and discovery
  
  
• service level agreement definitions
  
  
• automatic reconfiguration

The cloud is a virtualization of resources that maintains and manages itself. There are of course people resources to keep hardware, operation systems and networking in proper order. But from the perspective of a user or application developer only the cloud is referenced. The Assimilator project is a framework that executes across a heterogeneous environment in a local area network providing a local cloud environment. In the works is the addition of a network overlay to start providing an infrastructure across the Internet to help achieve the goal of true cloud computing.

Steps to adopting cloud computing services

1. Assess IT software assets, then consider putting commodity and standalone applications in the cloud. The IT team should built a chart showing business users which applications they thought were differentiators and which ones they thought were commoditized and explained why applications they viewed as commodities were better suited for cloud services like email for LiveOffice. Standalone applications like HR/benefits and sales analytics were also better suited for the cloud.
   
   
2. Reorganize IT teams according to application functionality rather than brand. To prepare for a virtualized/cloud environment, eliminate application silos such as those for Oracle or Siebel applications. IT thinks their value is associated with an application rather than a skill, so we need to change the mind-set to skills that we want in this new paradigm, like data management, business intelligence and analytics and the ability to do end-to-end business processing rather than skills tied to a particular application.
   
   
3. Get a handle on your internal IT costs. What does email, ERP and clustered storage cost you internally? You need to know this before you can validate what it costs you in the cloud. Engage the finance department from the get-go to validate these costs internally compared with a services model.
   
   
4. To socialize the cloud computing concept around the business, figure out the terminology that business executives and users are familiar with. When we heard that business users were reading The New Age of Innovation and using terms such as R=G for Resources are Global, he started to adopt the same terminology to explain the benefits of the cloud. You need to sync up the vocabulary around the cloud and virtualization with what the business users are hearing about it.
   
   
5. Engage IT staff members by giving them a role in the process. Make testing cloud services a game for IT. pick several cloud applications for IT to test like sales analytics and HR/employee performance management and have no ground rules. Test whatever service on whatever provider you like.
   
   I can tell you that there is no better motivation for IT than to see the CIO/CTO doing it himself.
   
   
6. Engage stakeholders throughout the organization. Information security, legal and finance are just a few of the groups that need to be involved.
   It took us two months to figure out security issues in the cloud -- with a lot of trial an error. The consensus in general is that security is ultimately up to you -- most cloud providers leave security parameters up to the customer, whether they be a need for encryption or beyond.

Shareflow: It's Google Wave, And Available Now

From readwriteweb.com :

It was inevitable really. Ever since Google Wave burst on to the scene as the next hot thing, someone, somewhere was going to beat Google to the punch and release something comparable. That something is Shareflow, a new SaaS play by New York City-based startup Zenbe.

Whether or not Shareflow is simply an imitator is really beside the point. What matters is that it's available here and now, and it works.

Shareflow is a granular version of a flow-based collaboration; you can either view all flows or just single projects. In terms of content, it handles threaded comments, files of most types can be uploaded and previewed through Scribd's iPaper interface, there's Google Maps integration, images, and video. Like other Zenbe products, email integration is also a big component of Shareflow.

Part of the reason this doesn't look like an imitator is that the two major features that Shareflow doesn't really do very well are real-time document collaboration and chat, both of which are key parts of Wave.

Not A Wave-killer

It's doubtful Shareflow will be the game-changing tool that everyone has predicted Google Wave will be, and that's only natural, considering Zenbe isn't Google. Even if it was, the fact that Shareflow is proprietary means it will never get near the crazy level of adoption and interest that Wave will.

But open source or not, if you're desperate to start working in a manner that is similar to Wave, Shareflow might just scratch your itch until the big day arrives, just about two months from now.

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"Living Large: Small Companies Yield Big Results with Web Collaboration"

SMBs': Discover how to cut costs and stay competitive in a global economy through Web-based Collaboration.

For SMBs' doing more with less is a must in today's business climate. Virtual collaboration and online meeting technologies are advancing SMBs' reach without huge investments, thus allowing them to not only save costs and land more sales but to better educate consumers and business partners and serve a greater number of people lost by former logistical barriers. This report discusses how this knowledge transfer is allowing smaller companies to gain greater mindshare and reach new markets more efficiently and at Web-based speed.

Written by: Larstan Business Reports

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Business Colloaboration Opportunities around Google Wave

Business collaboration is where people assist and co-operate with colleagues and other contacts to further a particular aspect of the business that they share.

What if you could keep track of all the changes to a document (any kind of document, not just word processor files), without mandating that everyone use the same package (especially important if you collaborate with other businesses or even just people out side your business).

You would be able collaborate with anyone, at anytime with all changes and versions kept up to date automatically. Furthermore, all changes could be traced back to whom made them and when. All old versions of documents would be available for you to check information.

With the global economy tightening as never before, collaboration between businesses is absolutely vital to business growth as well as profitability.

Brought ever closer by technological breakthroughs and increased communications around the globe, today’s world is smaller than ever. The need to constantly grow, change and innovate in today’s business landscape requires a new approach to connect, communicate and collaborate, inside and outside the enterprise, to accelerate revenues and reduce costs.

Companies everywhere rely on positive and consistent interactions with customers, partners and suppliers.

Collaboration has been described as the next phase of the Internet, and a $34 billion market opportunity.

Collaboration Is a Key Driver of Business Performance

Collaboration is a key driver of overall performance of companies around the world. Its impact is twice as significant as a company’s aggressiveness in pursuing new market opportunities (strategic orientation) and five times as significant as the external market environment (market turbulence).

A global culture of collaboration exists, but that there are regional differences in how people in various countries prefer to communicate with one another.

American professionals were more likely to enjoy working alone, and prefer to send e-mail rather than calling a person or leaving a voice mail message. They are also more comfortable with audio, video and Web conferencing technologies than people of other regions and tend to multitask the most when on conference calls.

Europeans thrive on teamwork more than their counterparts elsewhere and prefer to interact in real time with other people. They are more likely to feel it is irresponsible not to answer the phone and want people to call them back rather than leave a voice mail message.

Professionals in the Asia-Pacific region, more so than anywhere else, want to be in touch constantly during the workday. As a result, they find the phone to be an indispensable tool and prefer instant messaging to e-mail.

These differences highlight an opportunity for greater cultural understanding to improve collaborative efforts around the world.

Collaboration can positively impact each of the gold standards of performance — profitability, profit growth and sales growth — to determine a company’s overall performance in the marketplace. “As a general rule, global companies that collaborate better, perform better. Those that collaborate less, do not perform as well. It’s just that simple.” said Jaclyn Kostner, Ph.D., best-selling author and expert on high-performance virtual collaboration.

Measuring the quality and capability of collaboration in a given organization presents an opportunity for management to prioritize technology investments, encourage adoption of new tools and open up communications lines for improved collaboration.

Google Wave is an incredibly smart tool that can turn any Web browser (even a mobile one) into an über-communication hub, essentially rolling e-mail, IM, social media and document sharing into one easy-to-navigate platform, er “wave,” that can be shared among different users on a single hosted server.

In Google’s own words, a wave is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more. Unlike e-mail, waves start out as a conversation with a set of users picked to participate in the dialogue.

Waves can have many uses in a business setting. For one, they’re highly collaborative. Wave participants can share and edit documents at the same time and use waves to track and complete projects without ever having to set foot in the same office. And since waves are live transmissions, employees can have faster conversations than they can by waiting for e-mailed replies. Waves also make managing multiple media easier. Within a single wave you can manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts, e-mail alerts, and more. As long as a gadget is open source, it can sit within a wave. Waves even come with a handy robot called Rosy, which can translate your typing as you type it into 40 different languages, allowing you to communicate with customers in real time around the world.

Collaboration Opportunities around Google Wave

What business opportunities exist around Google Wave? What can startups, software vendors, and consulting companies offer that could be profitable? Here are a couple of ideas...

1. Migration Tools and Services
   Companies today use Outlook and Exchange. If Wave is good enough, some of today's users of Outlook, Exchange, Notes, or even SharePoint could be convinced to switch, either in whole or just for a part of their workflow. Third parties could offer migration tools and services that allow companies to get started and port their existing data - Terabytes of emails and documents - into Google Wave.
   
   
2. Enterprise Wave
   The key to making organizations switch to Google Wave is to make it sufficiently full featured for enterprise use. In particular, it's hard to see anyone switching from Outlook without tightly integrated group calendaring, task lists, and mobile sync. Since Wave is open source, you could add those in and sell an "enterprise version" of Wave under your own brand.
   
   
3. Extensions
   There is no shortage of plugins, extensions, and add-ins to Microsoft Outlook: Think Xobni, Gwabbit, ClearContext, and many little helpers that can you extract attachments, schedule emails, or remove duplicate contacts. Some of these tools are highly profitable paid extensions, and it's conceivable that you could build and charge for extensions that add useful features to Google Wave.
   
   
4. Hosting
   Since Google Wave is open source, you can host the server on your own hardware. There's no shortage of hosted Exchange providers - a quick search will give you many offerings that will give you an exchange account for $9.95 a month. Similarly, you could host Google Wave accounts for a fee.
   
   
5. Wave as a Feature
   I imagine that this will be the most common type of use for Google Wave. Once it's released, websites will replace systems for commenting and user-generated content with Google Wave.
   
   

6 reasons Why Google Wave will Change PLM Collaboration

"It’s impossible to speak about collaboration these days, in my opinion, without touching Google Wave. I analyzed multiple presentations, demos, videos, analyzes and would like to present my take on the 6 top reasons as to why Wave will change today’s PLM collaboration world."

Read more at 6 reasons Why Google Wave will Change PLM Collaboration « Daily PLM Think Tank Blog:

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Google Wave: Redefiniing Communication

In May, at the Google I/O developer's conference, Google announced its new project: Wave.

Created by many of the same team members that developed the highly successful Google Maps, the preview of the service itself on Thursday was quite compelling, resulting in a rare standing ovation at a tech conference.

Its egalitarian and federation-friendly design is intended to create an entire open ecosystem for communication and collaboration that Google is not-so-modestly touting as the reinvention of digital interaction circa 2009.

Basically the idea is rather than using electronic tools to emulate analog communication methods, we should use the strengths we already have and do things you simply can't do in the analog world. Create a "wave," add people to it, and edit and collaborate. View all the collaboration in close to real time, and then view the history and evolution in "playback" mode.

Google has launched many communication services since its inception including Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs to name just three, yet none of these have had such obvious business utility or attempted to reinvent the collaborative process from the ground-up.

"A Wave is a single shared space where two or more users can exchange real time dialogue, photos, videos, maps and documents in what we call a Wave. Everyone can reply to a Wave, people can come and go and you can drag and drop information from all over the web."

In Google's own words, Wave will "try out some new ideas" such as concurrent rich text editing – you'll be able to see on your screen almost instantly, letter-by-letter, what your fellow collaborators are typing into a message or document in a wave, unlike in instant messaging where you need to wait to see what someone is typing. (If you don't like this, there is a draft mode.)

Google is planning to open source Google Wave in the coming months while any developer can build extensions to Google Wave using open APIs.

"The way we think about Wave is that it's a communication system, a productivity tool as well where you can produce content but there's a very rich set of APIs that come with the tool and that of course is why we're releasing it to developers first," explains Lars Rasmussen, Software Engineering Manager.








Google Wave is rather confusingly a product, a platform, and a protocol. Meaning that you can use Google Wave by itself or write your own application that incorporates or extends Google Wave, and make tools that use Google Wave interoperable. The project is only open to developers right now, but you can sign up to be notified when they open the project to users.

10 things about Technology every HR Manager should know

After spending a lot of time working on HR technology, I have collated some of the technology knowledge that every HR Manager should know.

1. The Era of Excel is over, its no more the most Powerful tool.

There was a time when Excel Geeks were highly in demand. Everybody will approach them for a solution. However, with the arrival of softwares like PeopleSoft, where HR can ask the software team to create personalized reports, Excel has been moved to the corner. With the amount of analysis and metrics that appear today, Excel is just insufficient. Added to it is the cost of acquiring MS Office. Open Office and Google Docs have appeared as the free alternatives to Excel. Sharing Excels sheets is fun with Google Docs. Though none of these serves as an alternate to customized HR software.

2. Locally developed softwares are out of fashion.

The technology is growing at such a pace that the small and one-room-run software vendors are unable to infuse the technology and dynamics that world of HR needs. Don't you remember the important updates that you required but your software vendor was unable to do. People are changing, become more tech savvy, blogs are swarming all over – so how can you expect your employees to appreciate your locally developed software. And then there is no need to worry, the latest SaaS technology offers high degree of customization to develop a system meeting your specific needs.

3. Web based Software is the new affordable tool

The huge success of Monster.com, Salesforce, EmpXtrack, SuccessFactors, etc. is enough to prove that the era of web 2.0 has begun. Most of these, especially, EmpXtrack provides updates to the software at the fly, the price of these softwares is unmatched and no need to keep in-house support staff. So why would anybody keep the old, poorly interfaced software in HR. Would you?

4. Books are not the only resource of knowledge

The web 2.0 has changed the way the knowledge was store. Gone are the days when you need to read a complete book to know what you need. There are blogs (like this one), forums, communities where you can interact with people of similar interest and read their articles, opinions and blah blah. The ones that I frequent often are Cite HR, TooStep and Recruitment Blogs.

5. Email is not the only communication tool

The nightmare of writing e-mails and then waiting impatiently for the response is over, and off course of missing an important e-mail id in your list. Thanks to chat software, blogs, SaaS software, twitter, forums – you can send your message to your employees, juniors, seniors seamlessly. Web-based softwares provide employee portals for easy communication of information like News and Events to employees. Use these to make your life better.

6. Virtual Office is no more merely a 'Good Thought'

Its a reality! Employees can work equally well from home using virtual office softwares, where they can share their important files, documents, projects with your team. With the rising cost of travel, why to bother your employee to ask them to travel to office daily, when they can do the same from their home-office.

7. There are freelancers exchange forums to get the job done.

Sometimes your project managers needs an expert to do a urgent job, that is not part of their regular activity. What to do? No matter whatever you did in the past, there are sites that allow freelances and the HR managers to interact. HR managers/ project managers can post their jobs or choose a freelance of their choice to do the job. Like Elance.

8. Job sites are not the only place to find right talent.

There are social sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Ecademy, communities like Orkut, yahoo groups, and blogs etc. where people post their portfolios. Try using these, they are an alternate to the conventional job sites. They are almost free.

9. New Generation employees are very tech savvy – catch up with them

The latest generation of employees is very tech savvy. They play with gadgets, iPods, write blogs, create communities and interact in so many ways. HR needs to catch up with them, else they will find a place that suit their tastes. Given them web based softwares, blogs, and forums to be engaged – it will energize them to use their creativity for the organization.

10. Technology cannot do magic! It is not a replacement for man.

Technology can do wonders but only to the extent of helping people to do their tasks better. It cannot replace the intelligence that man carries with him. Even the best technology cannot replicate the convincing HR manager who can motivate an employee to give his best, understand complex Human problems and provide solutions, show empathy to employees.

HTML5: The OS Killer?

By allowing the Web to become a universal operating system, and making mobile devices more powerful than low-end laptops, HTML5 (also sometimes referred to as Web Applications 1.0) is transforming IT more profoundly than any development since the advent of the Internet. As HTML 5 becomes the widely-adopted standard for authoring on the Web, it will radically transform the IT landscape.

The Web Applications 1.0 (WA1) specification updates HTML, but that’s not all it does. WA1 also defines several application programming interfaces (APIs) that have been de facto standards, and adds new ones. WA1 improves on the abilities to use the web as an application platform by adding things such as document state storage in the browser history, local data storage, offline browsing, drag and drop, copy and paste, undo and redo history, cross document messaging, and more.

Unlike XHTML2, which doesn’t have any support from browser vendors, HTML5 has support from all the major browser vendors except Microsoft.

HTML5 is almost the Holy Grail, offering the ability to run applications regardless of the underlying operating system. While the browser isn't more important than operating system today, Google this week firmly suggested it is only a matter of time.

At its developer conference, Google demonstrated HTML5 applications support inside future versions of its Chrome browser and the future Android 2.0 operating system. Mozilla executives also promised HTML5 support inside the forthcoming Firefox 3.5 browser.

Google demonstrated how HTML5 allows tighter integration of browsers and applications, such as its Google Web Elements. Developers will be able to add applications to web sites by adding only a few lines of HTML5 code, much as they already do with Google Web Elements.

The rate of browser innovation is accelerating, with new browser releases nearly every other month. The progress towards the level of UI functionality found in desktop apps through adoption of HTML 5 features in browsers has been quite rapid. It's also fascinating to see how mobile browsers are in the forefront of the innovation.

The technology is here even if the standards committees haven't caught up. Developers are taking notice of these new features, and aren't waiting for formal approval. That's as it should be. As workers on the web today, we reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.

Support by four major browsers adds up to "rough consensus" in my book. We're seeing running code at Google I/O, and I'd imagine the 4000 developers in attendance will soon be producing a lot more.

Never underestimate the web. We believed that web apps would never rival desktop apps. What was once thought impossible is now commonplace.

Java was supposed to raise apps above the level of the operating system, offering cross-platform "write once, run everywhere" applications that would break the coupling between an application and a specific operating system. Proponents predicted Windows would become less important with the rise of Java apps.

While Java has accomplished a great deal, it's potential as an OS-killer has not been realized. HTML5 has a better shot.

What does this mean for users?

HTML5 is a standard that is still being developed and is likely to remain so for several years. Its focus on running applications within the browser is an important driver of interest in cloud computing, where applications live somewhere off on the Internet and are delivered by the browser.

The focus of future browsers will shift from "going places" to "doing things." This will be a boon to free operating systems, which will increasingly be able to hide themselves under the browser user interface. While Windows and Mac OSX won't go away overnight, the pressure on them will be to innovate beyond the browser, perhaps through a common set of extensions for HTML5 applications to use.

It is too early to start betting against desktop operating systems from the major vendors. However, it is clear their role and importance is likely to change--and probably diminish--as browsers become dominant in users' lives.

Mobile Mashups: Breaking Out of the Pocket

What is a Mashup?

Mashup is a very general term for an application that incorporates realtime data and services (APIs) from 3rd party sources over the Internet. A Mashup is often very focused and task oriented.

Although the browser is the most accessible platform for developing and distributing a Mashup it is by no means the only platform, and arguably not always the most appropriate from an end-user perspective. mWorks, for example, provides a platform for creating mashups that run as an application on your mobile phone, Apple Widgets and Yahoo! Konfabulator both provide a platform for creating a mashups that run as Widgets on your desktop, and the list goes on. The important thing to remember about a Mashup is that it is an application that leverages realtime data and / or services accessed over the Internet. The delivery mechanism for the Mashup is completely independent. In fact, many mashups are available in mobile, widget, and browser versions.

The mobile browser is NOT the only platform “open” to the developer. You may be surprised to find out that you could create a mashup using SMS and Java in addition to the browser on a device.

Things are getting really interesting in the mobile development field.

Five years ago when you talked about application development you were most likely targeting web browsers, desktop computers, game platforms or very limited phone OS’s. On each of those platforms the vast majority of the input was via the user’s fingertips — text, buttons and joysticks.

Today’s devices obviously offer so much more. Touch, GPS, compasses, accelerometers, and proximity detection to name just a few previously unavailable input modes. This has made possible a raft of new types of applications.

The idea that the mobile phone should be a one-stop shop of digital services is universally shared in Asia. There's also a convergence of features among cell phones, personal digital assistants, cameras, MP3 players, and high-speed wireless networks that's turning mobile phones into all-purpose digital devices.

But the combination of disparate features into one device isn't just a top-down phenomenon pushed by carriers and manufacturers. Consumers often take the lead, playing with user-generated content in myriad ways. They can seamlessly "mash up" or combine, say, music or video from various sources and integrate applications from their personal computers and printers with their handsets.

The feature-power of mobile phones and the creative melding of content and software applications are bound to increase as 3G mobile handsets and ever-speedier wireless networks continue to be rolled out across the region.

Korean handset maker LG Electronics is also trying to export high-end multimedia mobile phones to the U.S., where the mashup fad is also entrenched, though more PC-based. LG's Fusic mobile phone delivers an array of services over Sprint's high-speed network. Subscribers can access Sprint TV and Sirius Satellite adio via the handset, buy songs, and copy tunes from one handset to another—or even transfer music collections to a car radio or personal computer.

Japan's mashup scene is more dominated by small Web 2.0 venture businesses than programming-savvy individuals. A company called DigitalStreet has come up with software filters that let mobile-phone users view Web pages that would normally only be accessible from a PC. In the past, businesses had to direct cell-phone users to special Web sites that were pared-down versions of the actual site, with few graphics, loads of text, and limited content.

The new programs aren't limited to Web browsers. For instance, a program called Fileseek lets you check out the latest YouTube videos from your cell phone. I see real potential as we move forward with the synergy and integration between mobile social media and enterprise applications. I am reminded how much Web 2.0 trends will drive mobile technology. When I originally started to design mMashups I had it in my mind to create a platform that would allow me to pull together interesting web services in a way that was intuitive and useful on any mobile device. Today, web services are now passé and terms like Ajax and Mashup are gaining in popularity; but this does not change the fundamental technology and concepts upon which mMashups was originally designed.

My research (with help from co-workers Viktor Stephen and Amit Kapur), has turned up an interesting list of services and sources of services. Amit pointed me to http://www.programmableweb.com which has an impressive list of XML APIs for creating mashups. Technorati and Feedburner also have some interesting APIs for navigating and browsing blogs and feeds. Sites like Flickr and TextAmerica have some interesting API’s for accessing a wealth of image content, and Google and Yahoo both have API’s for a variety of things. In addition there are some UDDI registries for for premium Web Services such as StrikeIron and XMethods.

Mobile Mashups sounds like a really interesting niche to me.

The Google Analytics API and PHP

The Google Analytics API allows developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users. Large organizations and agencies now have a standardized platform for integrating Analytics data with their own business data. Developers can integrate Google Analytics into their existing products and create standalone applications that they sell. Users could see snapshots of their Analytics data in developer created dashboards and gadgets. Individuals and business owners will have opportunities to access their Google Analytics information in a variety of new ways.

Google Analytics API PHP Class

Cris Hope has created a PHP class for accessing the Google Analytics API with CURL and using DOMDocument to parse the XML. The resulting class and example script can be downloaded here and there are a number of posts on this website showing how to use it.

Code Reuse

Feel free to use the class as you wish but if re-posting it on other websites or using it in your own projects or for your customers, please retain the notice in the analytics class file attributing the original work to Cris.

GA API Introductory Posts

The following posts cover a couple of things about the Google Analytics API:

• Get the ID for the Google Analytics API IDS parameter
• Google Analytics API dimensions vs metrics
  

Code examples

The following code examples have been posted for using the Analytics class:

• Basic data example getting the most popular pages
• Get the profile id from the accounts list
• Get data without a dimension
• Looping through the data
  
• Using filters
• Paging through result data
• Calculating a page's bounce rate

More on SEO Best Practices

Though SEO tactics evolve with the technologies used to render Web sites, certain fundamentals remain constant.

How can you tell if your site adheres to current SEO best practices? Let's start with some honest answers to the following questions:

• Are the keywords you're targeting relevant to site content?
  
  
• Are targeted keywords popular phrases used in search engine queries?
  
  
• Do page titles start with your targeted keywords?
  
  
• Does your site employ H1 header tags for prominent content titles?
  
  
• Is your permanent body copy contextually sufficient and keyword-rich?
  
  
• Do text links include targeted keywords that point users to pages within your site?
  
  
• Do you use CSS image replacement in graphical navigation on the site?
  
  
• Do graphics used in the site have descriptive, keyword-rich alternative attributes that are useful for visitors?
  
  
• Does your Web site have a site map with text links?
  
  
• Do the URLs of your dynamic, database-driven pages look simple and static?
  
  
• Does your site have a flat directory structure?
  
  
• Do your site's home page and other key category pages have PageRanks?
  
  
• Is your site listed in Open Directory?
  
  
• Do you routinely list your site in other trusted, human-reviewed online directories?
  
  
• Do all the pages in your Web site have keyword-rich meta descriptions?
  
  
• Does your site have a custom error page?
  
  
• Do the site's filenames and directory names include targeted keywords?
  
  
• Does your site avoid using pop-ups?
  
  
• Is the exact same content visible to both users and search engine spiders?
  
  
• Do you avoid free-for-all linking offers?

If you answered "yes" to all or most of the above questions, your Web site embraces some of the most common elements essential to SEO best practices. If you're unsure about some of the answers, consider the following additional information.

There's no point in angling for high rankings on keywords and keyword phrases no one searches for. If you're not certain what keywords your site's well positioned for, start digging through your referrer logs or Web analytics data to determine which search engines send your site considerable traffic for which phrases.

If you can't access your log files and search engine referral data, use a tag cloud generator to get some visual clues as to how the search engines interpret your pages. You might be surprised as to what any particular page in your site is actually optimized for.

Most subscription-based keyword analysis tools offer a free trial period. You can readily compare keyword popularity using tools such as WordTracker, KeywordDiscovery, and Yahoo's Keyword Selector Tool before deciding what phrases could send you considerable search-referred traffic.

Despite the popularity of individual words, it's best to target two- or three-word phrases on a page-by-page basis. Because of the vast number of Web pages indexed by the major search engines, competing for a listing or two on the first or second SERP for a one-word keyword is a losing battle. Trying to make one page optimal for a multitude of unrelated keyword phrases is almost equally fruitless.

It should go without saying, but the keywords you select to target should be relevant to your business and your site's content. Permanent body text should consist of at least two to three sentences on every page, ideally more. Opportunities vary from industry to industry. At the very least, try to build about 250 words into key category pages.

Of course, site structure plays a large role in how well your site's indexed. The search engines have improved their ability to crawl through dynamic URLs, yet static URL structures tend to rank better. Flash and AJAX present additional search engine visibility issues that can't be addressed in this brief column.

If you have an all-Flash site and answered "yes" to visible text links, you may want to reconsider your answer. Use the control-A function in your browser to see what words are really visible on a page, or use Zippy to take a deeper look at what any particular page or site is actually optimized for.

Better rankings come with better linking. Better linking starts within your site. Having a site map is a no-brainer, as are nongraphical site-wide navigation, footers, and related deep links.

Pursuing well-ranked inbound links is an art form and an ongoing endeavor for nearly every Web site. Just make certain you execute on the fundamentals first, which should include submissions to key directories. Once your site is listed in DMOZ, the Yahoo Search Directory, Gimpsy, JoeAnt, and the like, continually grow you inbound links with vertical directories, local listings, business partners, vendors, and so on.

Implementing the 20 most fundamental elements of SEO best practices (or at least most of them) and avoiding the dregs of worst practices should provide you with a straightforward approach to better visibility for your Web site in the major search engines.

Netbook: Evolving Category?

Laptops are evolving—and forcing the rest of the computer industry to change

A new class of cheaper, smaller netbook computers might upset the IT establishment this year and potentially usher in new players in a hotly competitive market.

Simple, low-cost laptops are not a new idea. There were several abortive attempts to make them in the 1990s, but big computer-makers soon dropped them for fear that they might undermine sales of traditional laptops. In 2005 a charity called One Laptop Per Child designed an ultra-cheap laptop for the developing world. That inspired Asus, a Taiwanese PC-maker, to develop one of its own, called the Eee PC, which it started selling in late 2007 for $250.

The timing was perfect. A few months later, the credit crunch hit. At the same time, Intel started selling its cheap and power-saving new processor chip, called Atom. By the end of 2008, Asus had sold nearly 5m Eees and all its rivals had jumped on the bandwagon. In total, 21m netbooks will ship this year, almost twice the number in 2008 and more than 15% of the entire market for laptops, according to Gartner, a market-research firm.

Yet as netbooks have become more popular, many of them have also become more sophisticated. Asus’s first Eee PC was a puny device with a screen measuring only seven inches (18 centimetres) diagonally, a midget keyboard and flash memory instead of a hard disk. It also ran Linux, a free operating system. But consumers in the rich world wanted more. As a result, most of the new devices on display in early June at Computex, a trade show in Taipei, boasted at least ten-inch screens, full-size keyboards and sizeable hard disks, and they ran Windows XP, an old version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system. Many models now go for $600 a pop.

Though netbooks have acquired many frills and mutated into new forms, the theory behind them endures: computers do not need to be stuffed with the latest whizz-bang technology if they have a high-speed connection to the “cloud” of services available online. At Computex, a trade show in Taipei, firms showed devices equipped with WiMAX, a new wireless technology that allows for fast, ubiquitous wireless connections.

It is this combination of connectivity and cloud computing that makes netbooks and their successors so disruptive. Some mobile-network operators now throw in free netbooks if subscribers sign up for a mobile-broadband contract. This will put further pressure on prices, since mobile operators have more bargaining power than individual consumers, although it also opens a huge new distribution channel for computer-makers.

More important, netbooks and similar devices could weaken Microsoft and Intel, which have so far dominated the PC industry and extracted most of the profits. To keep Linux off most netbooks, Microsoft has had to discount Windows XP from $40-45 per copy to $10-15.

Intel, by contrast, has so far mainly benefited from the netbook craze, which has created a huge market for its Atom chip. The firm insists this has neither cannibalised sales of its other chips as much as feared nor put pressure on its lofty margins, since Atom costs less to make. Still, just as with Linux, there is a credible alternative to Atom: processors based on designs by ARM, a British firm, which already power most of the world’s mobile phones. Several Taiwanese PC-makers are working on a netbook-like gadget that would be powered by an ARM chip and run Android, a variety of Linux developed by Google for use on smart-phones.

At Computex, Acer announced that it would use Android together with an Intel chip. Other firms are expected to follow suit. Intel is also pushing another version of Linux, called Moblin. Its long partnership with Microsoft notwithstanding, Intel does not seem to care what operating system netbooks use, provided they contain the firm’s chips.

Netbooks are surging. At first, vendors thought of them as a way to sell cheaper, less powerful alternatives to notebooks, but netbooks have gradually come into their own—and now we're almost to the point where netbooks can be taken as seriously as their larger, weightier brethren.

It seems that netbooks, already hot, may benefit from improved functionality. It is unclear if the gradual improvements represent a new generation or simply incremental improvements as the technology evolves. Regardless, that the category is addressing some of the shortcomings of the past, such as “cramped” keyboards, small screens, slow processors, short battery life and too little memory.

The march of devices from consumers to businesses is occurring in the netbook sector. ADNH Compass, a 17,000-employee caterer in the Middle East decided to give workers Aspire One netbooks instead of full-size laptops. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit is that the company’s ERP software manager is in the process of enabling the devices to access SAP applications via 3G wireless. This clearly shows that the netbooks aren't out of their league and are robust enough to support the heavier workloads demanded in business environments. IT managers who formerly scoffed at the idea of replacing laptops with netbooks are taking the concept far more seriously.

The netbook/MID/smartphone/laptop sector is perhaps the most interesting and fun to watch. For one thing, the sour economy means that nothing good is happening in many other sectors.

What do you think? Are netbooks the future? This industry always evolves toward smaller and less expensive. If netbooks can continue to harnass great computing power—as with the Acer AspireRevo—I think there's no stopping them. And that means a lot of PC manufacturers are going to see a lot of upheaval in their business models.

Social Networks as a Market Research tool

Traditionally, marketers used demographics (compiled by market research firms) as one of the main tools to identify and target potential customers. Factors such as a person's age, sex, and where they live remain important to getting your message across to the right people.

Social networking is one of the hottest new Web technologies in sight with millions of users registering and participating around the globe. The social web is an often overlooked resource full of excellent information. Whether you’re working on a research project, building your brand, or just trying to find some information, look to social media sites to find what you’re looking for.

Participants worldwide contribute to and collaborate in readily available online discussions, creating new knowledge bases that are not yet fully recognized as information sources. Social networks typically require registration but are free to join, and significantly, to search for a vast array of reference questions, research projects, and to find experts for all kinds of requirements.

Word of mouth has always been one of the most powerful marketing methods—people more often that not use the products that their friends like and recommend. Social media sites can provide this type of data on numerous products and services. Want to find the best laptop computer? Doing a traditional Google search won't get you far. Why? Because you won't get a recommendation, or multiple recommendations. More than likely, you'll get review sites. Do a search on a social networking site, however, and I guarantee you will find a list of what people think are the best laptops.

Because of the open nature of social networking, you can easily find your customers and see what they do online and who their friends are. Friends of your customers are an excellent target market. In fact, research has shown that people are as much as five times more likely to buy a product if their friends like it.

While you may not be able to get full details of an existing customer's contacts from websites like FaceBook and MySpace, you can get a lot of valuable information. If you set up a FaceBook profile and ask to become a friend with an existing customer, you will most likely be accepted, if they liked your product. Through this one connection, you have the opportunity to identify their friends and other contacts.

Some people may argue against the ethics of this, it can certainly be effective. If you're genuine and upfront, you shouldn't have any problems. If you approach it as a problem solver, rather than a marketer, you'll be able to make some headway.

However, it's not a good idea to make unsolicited requests for friendships on these websites. You'll probably get rejected as well as banned from contacting that person again. However, if you can come up with good, interesting content you can send it along to your friend list. If people value your information, they will ultimately value you.

Use these tips to make the most out of social web research.

1. Set up alerts: Use various services to create tracking and alerts for industry keywords, your name, and any other information that is relevant to your research.
   
   
2. Filter your feeds: Monitoring social media can be time consuming, so set up your feeds to
   only deliver content that’s relevant to you.
   
   
3. Pay attention to demographics: Be sure to pay attention to the demographics of the social media users you’re using for research.
   
   
4. Monitor your reputation: Researching the social web will allow you to find out when others are talking about you and allow you to respond.
5. Use Google Search’s site: operator: By adding “site:yoursocialmediasiteofchoice,” you can delve into the depths of just about any social media site.
   
   
6. Set up feeds: Save yourself some time when researching-instead of occasionally checking for alerts, news, and other pieces of social web information, set up an RSS feed that will collect it for you.
   
   
7. Regularly assess subscriptions: Make sure you’re only following feeds that are helpful to your research by doing a review every month or quarter.
   
   
8. Perform market research on your connections: In Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools, you can turn to your own connections and learn about their interests just by monitoring the videos, images, and information they post.
   
   
9. Use a dashboard: Create your own social media monitoring dashboard in order to keep all of your research in one place.
   
   
10. Seek out authorities: On Facebook, Twitter, and other sites, get connected with users who will provide you with excellent information.
    
    
11. Look beyond who you already know: Check out your contacts’ contacts to find people that can offer you quality knowledge as well.
    
    
12. Just ask: Make use of your social media connections, and simply ask the people you know on Twitter Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sites what you’d like to find out.
    
    
13. Use “best of” features: On FriendFeed, you can use the “best of” feature to only check out the best posts of the day, week or month, so you can just skip to the good stuff.
    
    
14. Find out what’s buzzing in your niche: Use social media to track ideas and see what’s going on in your niche.
    
    
15. Check out popular posts: Use tools that will allow you to see the most popular posts on the web.
    
    
16. Research your competitors: The social web is a great place to learn about what your competitors are putting out there, and what others are saying about them.
    
    
17. Stay on top of breaking news: Use social media research to keep up with the important events happening in your niche.
    
    
18. Always check out the comments: On blogs with a good following, the comments are often as valuable as the blog post itself.
    
    
19. Get networked: Find out who is talking about issues that are relevant to your niche through social web research.
    

Social Media Goldmines

Check out these sites for the most reliable research information on the social web.

1. Delicious: Delicious is the biggest collection of bookmarks online, and can point you to high quality resources for just about anything.
   
   
2. Wikipedia: This excellent online encyclopedia offers information on just about anything you’d like to know about.
   
   
3. Digg: Digg highlights top stories and breaking news across the web.
   
   
4. Facebook: With a large enough network, you can use Facebook to crowdsource information and perform your own market research on connections.
   
   
5. Yelp: Research local businesses through the information found on Yelp.
   
   
6. Twitter: Build your Twitter follow list to include sources that can provide you with the ongoing information you seek.
   
   
7. Flickr: Find images and photographs of people, events, and more on Flickr.
   

Polls, Q&A

Ask questions and get answers with these tools.

1. BuzzDash: Using BuzzDash, you can create a poll and get community members involved.
   
   
2. LinkedIn Polls: With LinkedIn Polls, you’ll be able to find answers to your research questions by asking your network and other professionals.
   
   
3. WikiAnswers: On WikiAnswers, users can edit answers to questions anyone asks.
   
   
4. IKnowTweet: This site monitors Twitter for questions and answers.
   
   
5. Research Aid: Use Research Aid to get information via questionnaires on Facebook.
   
   
6. Ask MetaFilter: Use MetaFilter’s tags and search to find the information you’re looking for on Ask MetaFilter.
   
   
7. ToAnswer: Ask a question to @toask, and you’ll get answers through your Twitter account.
   
   
8. Answerbag: On Answerbag, you’ll be able to post questions and receive answers that others can vote on.
   

Trends

Monitor what’s popular on social media sites using these tools.

1. TweetVolume: Find out how much your keyword is discussed, and its stats to similar terms.
   
   
2. Facebook Lexicon: Check out Facebook Lexicon to see what’s being discussed on Facebook walls.
   
   
3. Technorati: Blogger Central: Check out rising links, top blogs, and more in BloggerCentral.
   
   
4. Social Radar: Social Radar offers the Ultimate social media marketing with an overview of content from blogs, social networks, feeds, news, and forums.
   
   
5. TweetScan: TweetScan will tell you who is currently talking about the keywords you subscribe to.
   
   
6. eKstreme: eKstreme shares blog data from Technorati and social bookmarks from del.icio.us.
   
   
7. Google Trends: Google Trends shares some of the hottest search trends in social media and beyond.
   
   
8. Twendz: Stay on top of Twitter conversations and trends through Twendz.
   
   
9. BlogPulse: Nielsen Buzzmetrics’ BlogPulse offers automatic trend discovery on blogs, and what’s going on in the blogosphere.
   
   
10. Trendpedia: With Trendpedia, you can see charts that show the volume of topic discussion.
    
    
11. PostRank: Using PostRank, you’ll be able to find the most talked about posts on any RSS feed.
    
    
12. Omgili Charts: Through Omgili’s Buzz Graphs, you can measure and compare the buzz of different terms.
    

Search

These tools will make it easy for you to go straight to what you’re looking for.

1. Technorati: Use Technorati’s search to find out what’s being said in the blogosphere.
   
   
2. Google Custom Search: Google Custom Search will make it easier for you to get results only from the blogs and social media websites that you’re interested in.
   
   
3. Social Mention: Social Mention searches all over user generated content to find the information you seek.
   
   
4. compfight: compfight will search Flickr for inspiration, research, and more.
   
   
5. Yahoo! Pipes: Using Yahoo! Pipes, you’ll be able to better wrangle information on the social web and beyond.
   
   
6. Keotag: Use Keotag to tag multiple search engines and generate social bookmark links.
   
   
7. BlogCatalog Social Media Search Engine: This search engine seeks out information from the BlogCatalog directory as well as more than 20 other social media sites.
   
   
8. Addictomatic: Addictomatic makes it easy for you to create your own custom page with buzz on any topic.
   
   
9. Icerocket: Icerocket will allow you to search blogs, the web, Twitte, MySpace, and more.
   
   
10. FlickrStorm: Use FlickrStorm to find related and relevant images on Flickr.
    
    
11. WhosTalkin?: This social media research tool will allow you to find topics on more than 60 popular social media sites.
    
    
12. Google Blog Search: Find recent blog posts in your keywords to get ongoing insight.
    
    
13. BoardReader: Using BoardReader, you’ll be able to search multiple message boards and forums at once.
    
    
14. Alltop: Alltop’s “online magazine rack” will help you find information about popular topics being discussed in blogs.
    
    
15. Omgili: Omgili offers a search that focuses on user generated platforms like forums, discussion groups, and other social media.
    
    
16. Twitter Search: You can search to see current conversations on Twitter.
    

Tracking & Alerts

With these tools, you can conveniently get updated whenever your keywords are mentioned on the social web.

1. Tip’d Social Tickers: SocialTickers on Tip’d will allow you to track stock tickers all over the social web.
   
   
2. ThreatTracker: Using ThreatTracker, you can identify and assess online threats to your company, brand, or product.
   
   
3. Google Alerts: Get email updates on the latest Google results for your keyword from Google Alerts.
   
   
4. TweetDeck: TweetDeck is a Twitter application that offers grouping and notifications for keywords.
   
   
5. Technorati Watchlist: Set up a Technorati Watchlist to find out when certain URLs or keywords are mentioned in blogs.
   
   
6. Wikiscanner: Wikiscanner will help you learn about anonymous Wikipedia edits from well known organizations.
   
   
7. Monitter: Set up keywords in Monitter to keep an eye on keywords on Twitter through RSS as well as live monitoring.
   
   
8. Backtype: Backtype is an excellent tool for monitoring blog comments.
   
   
9. The BuzzMonitor: Use this open source application to listen to what people are saying on blogs and other social media.
   
   
10. BoardTracker: Track words in forums with BoardTracker.
    
    
11. Yacktrack: Through Yacktrack, you can follow comments from a variety of sources all at once.
    
    
12. Filtrbox: Use Filtrbox to track your prospects, brand, competition, and investments on the social web and all over the Internet.
    
    
13. TweetBeep: TweetBeep is a reliable tool for getting alerted when someone tweets about your selected keywords.
    

Analytics & Information Gathering

Analyze and gather information with the help of these tools.

1. Adonomics: Use Adonomics to get analytics for the Facebook platform.
   
   
2. UGC Finder: Check out this tool to get information from citizen journalists.
   
   
3. SocialToo: Get daily updates on social media analytics, create surveys, and more through SocialToo.
   
   
4. Twitter Grader: Check out Twitter Grader to learn more about a Twitter user and discover related users as well.
   

Organization

Use these tools to get your social media research conveniently organized.

1. iLeonardo: iLeonardo is a social utility that can help connect people with notebooks of information.
   
   
2. PeopleBrowsr: PeopleBrowser will allow you to keep tabs on all of your most useful social networking sites at once.
   
   
3. ThinkFold: ThinkFold makes it easy to create outlines for sharing and collaboration online.
   
   
4. Netvibes: Netvibes is an excellent tool to use as an RSS social media monitoring dashboard.
   
   
5. Google Docs and Spreadsheets: Organize your documents and spreadsheets online, and keep them open for collaboration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
   
   
6. Bubbl.us: With Bubbl.us, you can get your thoughts organized online.
   
   
7. Zoho Notebook: Use Zoho Notebook to keep your research notes online in a handy place.
   
   
8. Zotero: Add Zotero on to Firefox, and you can collect, manage, and cite your research sources right in your web browser.
   
   
9. WebNotes: Using WebNotes, you’ll be able to highlight text, make sticky notes, and organize them all in folders.
   
   
10. Flowchart: Flowchart makes it easy to create organized charts for your notes and research information.
    
    
11. UberNote: UberNote’s tool lives where you do your research-in your browser, email, IM, mobile device, and more.
    
    
12. Backpack: Keep all of your research information together online using Backpack.
    
    
13. Google Notebook: Use Google Notebook to keep notes, clips, and more handy, with the option to access notes from your mobile device.
    
    
14. Connotea: With Connotea, you’ll be able to organize and share research information.
    
    
15. EverNote: Research and take notes both online and on the go with EverNote.
    
    
16. Google Reader: Make Google Reader your base for collecting research information from various RSS feeds.
    
    
17. Notecentric: Notecentric will allow you to organize your notes online and share them with others.
    
    
18. ClipMarks: With ClipMarks, you can save bits and pieces of any webpage, and even share them with others.
    
    
19. Remember the Milk: Remember the Milk is a great tool for project checklists and more.
    
    
20. openonmy: Use openonmy to store files up to 1GB online, so you can access them from anywhere.
    
    
21. iLighter: Highlight portions of a webpage and save them to your notebook with iLighter.

Source: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/use-social-networking-for-market-research.html

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