Salon Sells The Well to Longtime Members

One of the earliest online communities, The Well, has a new owner: its members.

On Thursday evening, Salon Media Group, the previous owner of The Well, said it had sold the community to the Well Group, a private investment group consisting of longtime members of the community, which was founded in 1985, long before the rise of the Web.

Although The Well was never a huge community by the standards of today’s consumer Web sites, it had an influential audience of cyber-thinkers and entrepreneurs, one that became smaller and smaller over the years. In June, Salon said it was putting the community up for sale.

The sale of to the Well Group includes the potentially valuable domain name well.com.

“The Well welcomes the opportunity to support its existing base and extends an invitation to like-minded individuals looking for a social network that puts the free exchange of ideas at the forefront,” said Earl Crabb, chief executive of The Well Group, in a statement.

In a brief phone interview, Cindy Jeffers, chief executive of Salon, declined to say how much the investment group paid Salon for The Well.

“As a true pioneer of the digital age, and a forerunner of today’s ubiquitous social networks, the Well has played a central role in the origin of countless creative endeavors and cultural movements,” Ms. Jeffers said in a statement. “We wish the Well countless more under their new management.”

Salon Sells The Well to Longtime Members

One of the earliest online communities, The Well, has a new owner: its members.

On Thursday evening, Salon Media Group, the previous owner of The Well, said it had sold the community to the Well Group, a private investment group consisting of longtime members of the community, which was founded in 1985, long before the rise of the Web.

Although The Well was never a huge community by the standards of today’s consumer Web sites, it had an influential audience of cyber-thinkers and entrepreneurs, one that became smaller and smaller over the years. In June, Salon said it was putting the community up for sale.

The sale of to the Well Group includes the potentially valuable domain name well.com.

“The Well welcomes the opportunity to support its existing base and extends an invitation to like-minded individuals looking for a social network that puts the free exchange of ideas at the forefront,” said Earl Crabb, chief executive of The Well Group, in a statement.

In a brief phone interview, Cindy Jeffers, chief executive of Salon, declined to say how much the investment group paid Salon for The Well.

“As a true pioneer of the digital age, and a forerunner of today’s ubiquitous social networks, the Well has played a central role in the origin of countless creative endeavors and cultural movements,” Ms. Jeffers said in a statement. “We wish the Well countless more under their new management.”

Training Dynamics CRM

Training is one of the foundations of CRM adoption – if people don’t know how to use a system, and if it’s not clear how a system will benefit them, they won’t use it. The same goes for the partners who implement CRM systems.

So how do you take someone with an IT background and bring them up to speed with CRM in a hurry? One solution might be an immersive course – stick them in a CRM boot camp and drill them until they know a CRM solution backward and forward.

“Actually, I hate the term ‘boot camp,’” says David Minutella, vice president of education for Training Camp, a developer of IT training programs that’s rolling out just such an accelerated set of courses dealing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. “We call it accelerated training – we get you in there, house you, and then have you in a classroom for 10 hours a day so you can focus what you need to learn.”

Having attended a boot camp, I can assure you that a program like this would suffer little from an absence of tear gassing, draconian haircutting policies and random yelling, although occasional forced push-ups might help focus attention, but that’s neither here nor there. The program takes students from their home organizations and houses and feeds the students, who have access to lab facilities – and instructors – 24 hours a day. Minutella says the outcome-based learning of this program is based around a lecture-lab-review format, or as he puts it simply: “we teach it, teach it again, then teach it one more time.”

The two courses, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Applications and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Installations and Deployment, aim to instill in-depth knowledge of the configuration, management and customization of the application, as well as instruction on new features, installation and networking with Windows Vista. The take away for the companies sending the pupils to the accelerated training is an in-house expert on Dynamics CRM 4.0 who’s ready to work on the solution upon arriving home after just a few days away away (Applications is 10 days and Installations and Deployment is seven days, but the training doesn’t have to be bak-to-back); for students, completing the course and exams means they’ll get the Microsoft Certified Business Management Solutions Specialist and Professional Application certifications

CEO of business endorse Salesforce Chatter iPad App 2012

Salesforce says it created Chatter for iPad to take advantage of the iPad's unique capabilities while keeping users connected to the people and the records that matter most, whether they are working in the office or on the road. "The biggest thing I see in Chatter is it clearly starts driving down the volume of e-mail traffic," says Mario, president and CEO of security software maker Symantec. "It's information being sent to people who need it."
"Wherever I am," Salem elaborates, "I can now very effectively communicate with the 20,000 people at our company. I would tell you, the biggest game-changer over the next five years in business productivity will be how companies use social media and we've chosen to use Chatter."
Driving Innovation
Chatter for iPad lets users view updates about the people, groups, and records they follow. It also lets users view documents and links shared by others, and find and follow people in their organization. Chatter sets the stage for collaboration . The free mobile app lets users find and join groups within an organization, view coworker profiles, e-mail them directly, and more.
Essentially, Chatter for iPad leverages the social features made popular by Facebook and Twitter -- such as profiles, status updates, and real-time feeds. Salesforce.com characterizes Chatter as a Cloud 2.0 app. Cloud 2 came onto the scene with consumer social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter that people use every day to connect and collaborate with friends and family.
Paul Rothemore, chairman of publishing house DMGT (Daily Mail and General Trust), credits Chatter with bringing in more innovative ideas from employees in the last three months than he had seen the previous 15 years. He said he sees his company embracing tools like Chatter and using them to drive their top line and relationships with customers and staff.
"Companies that don't use social collaboration internally will find it harder to recruit talent and will lose significant competitive advantage," Rothemore said.
Cutting-Edge Companies
Any Salesforce user can invite any colleague -- even those who aren't Salesforce users -- to collaborate with Chatter. The goal is to create a network effect, as the pool of Chatter users widens and deepens across a company. Salesforce.com pointed to the security of Chatter Free, noting that because it's built on the Force.com platform, enterprises are assured employees only see what they are authorized to see.
Bob Beauchamp, Chairman and CEO of business-app maker BMC Software, remembers the first time Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff talked to him about Chatter. Intuitively, he thought it was a great idea.
"It's obvious that this is a change that's going to last forever. This way of doing business just makes sense," Beauchamp said. "I want BMC to be a company where the employees feel like they are working for a cutting-edge company that's setting the pace -- not a follower but a leader."
"The biggest difference between CRM on premises and CRM in the cloud comes down to where the server resides. On premises CRM means that the server is in your office," Smith wrote in a blog post on CRM Software Blog.
"And if you choose CRM in the cloud? Well, the server could be almost anywhere, and I can't tell you where 'anywhere' is because that depends on your cloud provider. But I can tell where 'anywhere' is NOT. It's NOT hanging over your head in a mass of white cotton outlined against a blue sky."

YouTube now local in Chile through YouTube.cl

Latin America is a melting pot, full of talented and witty people, and Chile is no exception. Traditionally known as a country of poets and wine, Chile is also home to many people coming to YouTube to entertain and be entertained. For that and so many other reasons, we’re very excited that now Chile joins the nations with a local version of YouTube.
Chile joins the group of 40 countries around the world with a local version of YouTube, the fifth in Latin America with Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.
Having a hometown version of the site makes finding and sharing local channels easier through charts and trending videos, and it also makes discovering new videos more relevant for Chileans on the local version. It also gives more visibility to local channels as Chileans subscribe and favorite new videos.
Because of its geography, Chile has varied cultures and customs, and we hope you enjoy seeing how they connect through YouTube. Some examples we’ve seen already are the work of Puntaje Nacional, a channel that prepares students to get into college.
We’re looking forward to see the rich content that will be discovered and shared through YouTube Chile, and hope you enjoy it too. We’ll soon see how YouTube Chile takes flavor and color, like its world-renowned wines the local team is celebrating with right now!.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network

with more than 800 million active users around the world, and roughly 200 million in the United States, or two-thirds of the population.
Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room at Harvard, Facebook grew from being a quirky site for college students into a popular platform that is used to sell cars and movies, win over voters in presidential elections and organize protest movements. It offers advertisers a global platform, with the exception of China, where Facebook does not operate.
Facebook took its first step toward becoming a publicly traded company on Feb. 1, 2012, when it filed to sell shares on the stock market. The service is on track to be the largest Internet initial public offering ever — trumping Google’s in 2004 or Netscape’s nearly a decade before that. In its filing, Facebook said it was seeking to raise $5 billion. The company will seek to have the ticker “FB” for its shares, but did not list an exchange.
Many close to the company say that Facebook is aiming for a far greater offering that would value it near $100 billion. At that lofty valuation, Facebook would be much bigger than many longer-established American companies, including Abbott Labs, Caterpillar, Kraft Foods, Goldman Sachs and Ford Motor.
Trading of the stock is expected to begin by late May 2012.
The filing sheds some light on how its meteoric run has turned the upstart into a formidable money-maker. The company, which makes the bulk of its money from advertising and the sale of virtual goods, recorded revenue of $3.7 billion in 2011, a 88 percent increase from the prior year. During that period, Facebook posted a profit of $1 billion. It is still a fraction of the size of rival Google, which recorded revenue of $37.9 billion in 2011, but many analysts believe Facebook’s fortunes will rapidly multiply as advertisers direct more and more capital to the Web’s social hive.
Facebook, unlike any other site, has come to define the social era of the Web. More than a portal, its value lies in its dynamic network of social connections and the massive amount of information shared by its users. Facebook, in many ways, is a data processor, archiving and analyzing every shred of information, from our interests, to our locations, to every article and link that we “like.” The collection of data is a potential goldmine for advertisers, keen to better understand and target consumers.
The social network has become something like an economy onto itself, fostering businesses like the music service Spotify. Game-maker Zynga, which went public late in 2011, generates more than 90 percent of its sales from Facebook.

Testing Gmail’s new look

Editor's note: This post, like yesterday's, is more technical than most posts here, but we thought some of you might find it interesting to look inside how Gmail works.
Yesterday, we talked about how we make changes like the new look to Gmail. The new look is not just visual, but involves completely different code in the interface. Testing a large user interface (UI) change like we launched for Gmail is foremost a permutation problem. Because all the Gmail features we wrote while we developed the new UI had to work both there and in the old existing UI, we basically needed to double our testing. Plus, the new UI has to work in many browsers, in all languages Gmail is available in, which means even more testing -- and by testing, we mean functional testing, latency testing, usability testing... you get the idea! The only way to handle all of these moving parts is through a) test automation, and b) using the new look.
We use automated tests as much as possible: we test if code changes lead to functional regressions, how they affect speed and our servers, if the UI breaks in many browsers and more. The scalable build and test infrastructure at Google allows us to run these tests automatically after every single(!) code change. However, a major UI change like this requires that our automated tests are very stable. If a test relies too much on the structure of the UI, then the test starts failing - not because the functionality is broken, but because it fails to work with the new UI. Luckily, we learned this lesson many years back and most of our tests did not have this problem.
But even the best automated tests can’t guarantee that everything is working well and that the visuals are pleasing. The only way to find out is to actually use the new look. For Gmail, we have special environment that gets updated every night with the latest stable code. Almost all Gmail engineers and a handful of other Googlers are using this environment for their real Gmail usage. But it turned out even daily updates were too slow for the rate of code change with the new look. So, we created an environment that updates every hour with the latest stable code. This version of Gmail was used by all engineers who worked on the redesign. It allowed us to test code changes very quickly on the real system. We were able to find many functional and usability issues here. And because we used this system and no engineer likes their email to be broken, issues were fixed very quickly. We can only do this because we have a very good coverage by our automated tests. When all these tests pass, we can be sure that most of the Gmail functionality is working. However, there could still be usability, color, layout or other challenges that tests can't catch.
Gmail’s new look also put a lot of additional load on our testing team. They had to keep up with a high rate of change, test critical functionality quickly and triage a lot of reported issues. Plus, they had to test new features in both the old publicly-available UI as well as the new unlaunched UI. The dedication of our testing team helped us catch bugs early so we could fix them in preparation for launch.
Once we felt that the new look was good enough to be used by others, we turned it on for all Googlers. At Google, we "eat our own dogfood," meaning we use new products and features ourselves before releasing them to the public. Often, this is a very humbling experience. The shiny, new features, that we just developed and are so proud of are now used by people, including sales teams, managers and other non-engineers, who just want to get their job done. And believe me, Googlers are not shy when it comes to feedback! But for a project like this one, this step is absolutely critical. Our different teams at Google tested Gmail in all kinds of use cases and the feedback that we received from this phase was invaluable. It helped us to put the final touches on the new look and get ready for usability tests that were previously discussed.