Chatting Cars and Enterprise Software
Enterprise Software May 23rd, 2011
I admit when Chatter first came out, I did not get it. Yeah, another activity stream, so what? I’ve long agreed with Chief Curmudgeon Dennis Howlett that activity streams without business context offer little value in business. Things started to get interesting when Chatter added the ability to follow documents, opportunities and other business objects. Aha! So now we’re getting business context in Chatter! But why?
Tags: cars, CloudAve, Duet, Google, Just for fun, netsuite, salesforce.com, social network, tibco, toyota, Twitter, unstructured data
Facebook and T-Mobile Launch Bobsled. With Huge Privacy Glitch. Or is it By Design? Skype, Google Voice and Telcos Beware, Anyway…
Personal Productivity, SaaS April 19th, 2011
Out of left field, T-Mobile and Facebook launched Bobsled, a VOIP service that allows voice calls to anyone on your Facebook list for free. At this moment the entire blogging world is busy writing about it, so I skip the basics… and just run to some funny experience while testing it.
First, here’s how you call from your Chat list: click the phone button.. then voila!:
As it happens, none of my contacts pick up my test call – I suppose the feature is too new, nobody knows where the funny sound comes from or how to react. They will get used to it. But here’s the real surprise: it has VoiceMail. To the World. Literally:
Tags: CloudAve, facebook, Google Voice, privacy, skype, social network, t-mobile, Voicemail, voip
Beyond the Web
Humor February 26th, 2010
Now We Know Why The City Never Sleeps
Business, Customer Service February 25th, 2010
Now we know why The Citi Never Sleeps: they are busy censoring their customers. If you are a Citibank customer and they dislike your blog, you may just get in trouble. (Disclosure: I do have a Citi account… so am taking a risk by writing this post.)
That’s just what happened to fabulis, a social network for gay men. Someone at Citi read their blog, decided that “content was not in compliance with Citibank’s standard policies” and froze their business account without advance warning. Fabulis Founder Jason Goldberg says:
for the life of us we can’t find anything “objectionable” on our blog besides some good humor, some business insights, and some touching coming out stories from some great and fabulis gay people.
Some speculate it’s images like that of this underwear with fabulis printed on it. If you ask me, these are not the most fabulis [sic] briefs, but who cares?
In fact it really doesn’t matter whether the fabulis blog has any “objectionable” material or not. Since when is it the business of a bank to read and censor their Client’s writing?
I’m pinching myself, thinking it’s a bad dream. But it’s not. This happened in the United Sates in 2010.
Something tells me within hours as management wakes up, Citi will be bending over backwards to dig themselves out of this huge PR nighmare – the damage is done, repairs will be costly.
In the meantime, enjoy Fabulis (almost) by Amanda Lear.
Tags: banking, censorship, citi, citibank, CloudAve, fabulis, free speech, gay, privacy, social network, Startup
Zoli Erdos
