Businesses are missing out on the huge potential that social networks present, a leading information technology company has warned.
Researchers for Gartner found that huge opportunities for improving the management of large firms exist.
Telecoms group BT plans to invest 1.5 billion pounds to roll out super-fast broadband to up to 10 million homes by 2012.
The programme represents the largest ever single investment in super-fast broadband, which can deliver speeds of up to 100 Megabytes per second through fibre cables. Read more………
LinkedIn, a networking site for professionals, has raised $53m (£27m) of new funding from investors.
The financing by venture capitalists values the Silicon Valley start-up at more than $1bn, reflecting investor confidence in online communities.
Five-year-old LinkedIn has 23 million members worldwide and attracts 1.2 million new members every month, according to the the company. LinkedIn connects people in the workplace, helping them search for new jobs and make professional contacts, whereas people use sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo for social reasons. Networking sites have been on the rise since Microsoft paid $240m for a 1.6% stake in Facebook last year. That deal valued Facebook at $15bn. Read more…..
Price cuts and the popularity of 3G are prompting Europeans to use mobile data like never before, says a survey.
Text messaging has sometimes had a bad press, with some commentators calling it a ‘linguistic disaster’ and predicting ‘the end of literacy as we know it’. At Bangor Univesity this month, David Crystal, professor of linguistics at Bangor University, discusses the origins and motivations lying behind texting, dispels the myths surrounding it, and draws on numerous studies to illustrate its linguistic reality. Texting turns out to be not as revolutionary as people think: the distinctive abbreviations have in fact a long history. His conclusion is that, far from being a disaster, text messaging actually helps rather than hinders literacy. Read more….
Google is to make the web more social by introducing tools that will enable people to interact with their friends.
Friend Connect follows plans announced last week by the world’s two biggest social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook.
Data Availability and Connect let users move their personal profiles and applications to other websites.
“Social is in the air,” says Google’s director of engineering David Glazer.
During a conference call at Google’s California headquarters, Mr Glazer told reporters: “Google Friend Connect is about being the ‘long tail’ of sites becoming more social.”
“Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard.”
Google’s Open Social will allow third parties to build and develop applications for the site.
“Social networking is going mainstream. It used to be proprietary, but now it’s going to be open and baked into the infrastructure of the net, not just one site or one source,” says Mr Glazer.
A new report from independent market analyst Datamonitor reveals that the number of people participating in online social networking (OSN) is booming. The UK has the highest membership in Europe and it is forecast to almost triple by 2012 to 27 million. Social media provide consumers with the opportunities to enhance existing relationships and create new ones. Interaction is a key factor in a network’s success, as shown by the success of sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, which encourage user-generated content. While the trend is driven by the younger age groups, many older generations are also being drawn to social media. Read more
Vodafone is to offer unlimited internet access as a standard feature of its new monthly mobile price plans, driven by an increasing amount of people accessing social networking sites and email from their phones.
The Newbury-based group is the first mobile phone operator in the UK to offer the unlimited deal with all its monthly tariffs, although O2 currently offers an unlimited deal for its iPhone customers.
Vodafone hopes the new flat rate policy will fuel use of the internet on mobiles, as operators search for additional ways to generate revenue in a saturated market.
Web 2.0 is set to be embraced by Enterprise 2.0 as businesses prepare to spend nearly $5 billion by 2013 on social networking tools.
Over half of the companies in North America and Europe see Web 2.0 as a priority for next year, a report says.
Forrester, the research company which carried out the Web 2.0 survey, believes the technologies being developed and unveiled over the coming days represent “a fundamentally new way” for businesses to communicate with employees and customers. Read more….
Nokia, the world’s largest handset manufacturer, has persuaded Sony Ericsson, NEC and Alacatel-Lucent to join it in developing plans for a 4G wireless system.
The companies will work together to develop the emerging mobile standard, called Long Term Evolution (LTE).
LTE, could be set to become a direct competitor to Wimax, which is currently being developed by Intel.
The first LTE networks are to be trialled in the US and China but it will be some time before it reaches UK shores.
Compared to 3G, LTE offers a greater distance and potentially faster rates.
Nokia and its partners see LTE as the logical evolution of 3G systems. ”
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