The way Bracelin sees it, sales in Cisco’s new business lines such as Unified Computing System–Cisco’s cloud hardware offering–as well as wireless LAN and collaboration products, could triple to $10 billion in 2013 from $3.3 billion in 2009, and could generate a combined operating margin of 25 percent and could account for 20 percent of overall sales.

Too iffy for you? There’s more. Yes, investors are clearly unhappy with the drop in sales of switching products, historically an important Cisco business segment and indeed its biggest segment so far, accounting for 31 percent of sales last year. And they should be unhappy about it. But? Cisco’s non-switching business is on pace to deliver $30 billion in sales this year, Bracelin says, more than double what it did in 2005. This means the non-switching business is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 12 percent, more than double the five percent seen in switching. If all goes well the contribution to earnings of the non-switching business to per-share earnings could be 97 cents in fiscal 2011 and could reach $1.50 by 2014.

Still not convinced? There’s more. The sell-off has pushed Cisco’s valuation metrics to significant lows versus its peers in the tech industry. At $17 a share, Cisco’s market cap of $94 billion works out to an enterprise value to EBITDA ratio of less than five. By comparison, Microsoft trades at more than six times EV/EBITDA, IBM’s ratio is north of eight, Oracle’s is about 10 and Qualcomm’s is nearly 13.

And? That $40 billion in cash that Cisco has on its books is worth more than $5 a share. Meanwhile, investors have turned up their noses at Cisco’s switching business to such an extent that they now value it at only $3 a share while the non-switching business is valued at more than $9 a share. In 2008, the switching business was valued at more than $8 a share. “The sell-off, based on competition and margin erosion, now appears overstated,” Bracelin wrote.

So what does he think it’s worth? Add up all the parts and you get a company that could be valued at anywhere from $20 to $28 a share. And that’s assuming the value of the switching business improves only a little bit. All in all, Cisco shares could be undervalued at anywhere from 17 percent on the low end to 63 percent on the high end.

Investors, however–at least for today–didn’t buy Bracelin’s argument. Cisco shares fell 11 cents to close at $17.04 a share. That’s only seven cents a share higher than its 52-week low from last month.

As it gets ramped up for a wider launch, Asana, the high-profile workplace collaboration start-up founded by top former Facebook execs, has hired former SolarWinds product strategy exec Kenny Van Zant in a “COO-type of role.”

Van Zant, who will be Asana’s first business-side hire, has also worked at a variety of tech companies, including Cisco.

Co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein remain at the top of the leadership at the productivity software company, which–perhaps in keeping with its yoga-style name–does not have official titles.

But Van Zant will essentially fulfill the COO role, focusing on bringing Asana to the enterprise market in a socially-fueled, “bottom-up” approach.

“We now have a great product and are ready for our next phase of bringing it to the market,” said Moskovitz, in an interview this afternoon with BoomTown. “While Justin and I continue to work on product and engineering, Kenny will be the driver of that launch.”

Specifically, in a blog post today, Moskovitz wrote:

“Kenny will be leading functions outside of product and engineering, and serve as a key driver for Asana’s marketing and corporate strategy.”

Asana, which is aimed at helping people work on projects together in groups, is now in private beta.

It tackles the often unexciting, but very large and problematic, workplace collaboration and communications software market.

In Sanskrit, “asana” means “sitting down” and refers to strong but relaxed postures in yoga, which presumably means the product will help frustrated workers achieve a digital form of nirvana.

The San Francisco-based start-up, which has raised $9 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, now has 15 employees.

Asana had previously garnered just over $1 million in an angel round, which included a spate of Silicon Valley bigwigs.

Still, it has not, thankfully, received the intense hype of other innovative start-ups from former Facebookers–hello, Quora!

That said, many who are using Asana think it will make a huge splash as it is rolled out and attempts to bring consumer-style tools to the workplace.

There are, of course, a range of companies doing this in different ways–from Jive to Yammer to LinkedIn and to a variety of cloud-based enterprise efforts by Google and Microsoft.

In an interview, Van Zant said the time was ripe for big changes in the way enterprise-aimed products were bought and sold.

“I will be focused on selling our enterprise software product from the bottom up, rather than targeting the CIO,” said Van Zant. “It is clear the world of enterprise is being impacted by consumer behavior.”

While he does not start until Monday, Van Zant speculated that Asana’s free product offering will remain, with a premium version to come.

Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, who made the Asana investment for the firm and is on its board, said the time is right for such businesses aimed at enterprise transformation.

“Kenny wrote the book on this at SolarWinds,” he said. “The consumerization of the enterprise isn’t going to happen–it already has.”

Here is a demo video Asana put out in February of an open house, as well as the blog post from Asana on the Van Zant hire:

Asana Open House from Jerry Phillips on Vimeo.

Justin and I are excited to welcome Kenny Van Zant as the newest member of the Asana team. Kenny will be leading functions outside of product and engineering, and serve as a key driver for Asana’s marketing and corporate strategy.

Until now we’ve focused primarily on developing the Asana product into the best of class solution for task management and project execution. Encouraged by positive feedback from the early adopters in our beta program, we’re now preparing for the company’s next phase–bringing this technology to the rest of the market–and we can’t imagine a better partner than Kenny to drive this strategy and build a strong organization to support it. At SolarWinds, Kenny helped pioneer the bottom-up distribution model for selling software and SaaS into enterprises and small businesses–a sales approach we plan to develop further at Asana. This experience, together with an almost uncanny overlap of values, made it clear that Kenny is the right fit.

While finding Kenny concludes a long search for the right leader of Asana’s business operations, we are continuing to grow the team, looking for passionate designers and engineers to join us in our common purpose: using software to help groups of people work together more effectively.

–Dustin

Kenny Van Zant is a technology entrepreneur with leadership experience in start-ups and public companies. Kenny was most recently the SVP and Chief Product Strategist for SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) from 2006-2010, where he was responsible for products, marketing, and corporate strategy. At SolarWinds, Kenny helped pioneer a disruptive business model for selling software and SaaS into the enterprise and SMB segments from the “bottom-up,” using inside sales, online marketing, free products, and a loyal user community. Based on a unique combination of growth and profitability, SolarWinds enjoyed a successful IPO in May of 2009.

Prior to SolarWinds, Kenny was the EVP of Marketing and GM of the Communications BU for Motive (NASD: MOTV) and the co-founder and COO for BroadJump (acquired by Motive), where he managed the company’s growth from start-up in 1999 to over $60M in revenue and 350 global employees within 3 years.

Kenny has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

That’s the idea behind a new commenting system being introduced in Google Docs today. Comments have been converted into what Google is calling Discussions. And these discussions are comparable to the streams in so many social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, complete with the Twitter-like convention of “@ mentions” (A sample comment is pictured) but they’re also linked to email, so you can participate in the discussion without having sign into Google Docs. You can also tell who made a comment and when, as it includes timestamps, profile pictures and email notifications make it easy to keep track of the feedback process.

The feature is going live today, but only on new documents, and for those Google Apps users who have opted for the Rapid Release track on new features–those who haven’t will get it over the next week or so. A two-minute video below gives you a pretty good idea of what it looks like.

It’s called Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, and it’s going live today for all Windows users running Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010. (Sorry Mac users.) It’s a plug-in (reader Ben provides a download link in the comments below) that gives Office users in multiple locations the ability to edit and collaborate on Office documents at the same time. The new service grew out of Google’s acquisition of DocVerse last year.

Alongside the new service Google says it is launching a 90-day trial period that will allow companies that haven’t yet embraced the notion of cloud-based productivity and collaboration to try Google Apps for 90 days. Google is calling it the 90-Day Appsperience, and it’s available for what Google calls “a nominal fee.” Companies who take advantage of the trial get unlimited use of Google Apps for 90 days, plus support.

This is taking place as the competitive scrum between Google and Microsoft concerning cloud-based office tools heats up. Microsoft of course has the huge Microsoft Office franchise, which is the Big Kahuna within the Microsoft Business division, which reported $18.6 billion in sale last year. Its own cloud-based enhancement for Office, known as Office365, was first announced in October, but remains in a limited Beta test period, and so isn’t generally available. Microsoft has promised to release it generally during the second half of later this year. Google is clearly trying to take advantage by finishing its beta test of Cloud Connect well before Office365 is ready. Maybe this will spur Microsoft to speed it up a little.

Earlier this year, BoomTown’s Kara Swisher visited with Shan Sinha, former DocVerse CEO, who’s now product manager for Google Apps. In the interview below he talks about the learning process Google has been going through as it goes after the enterprise market.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110224/googles-cloud-connect-beta-is-over-now-wheres-office365/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110224/box-net-the-file-sharing-and-collaboration-cloud-for-businesses-raises-48-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20110224/box-net-the-file-sharing-and-collaboration-cloud-for-businesses-raises-48-million/#comments Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:15:25 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=3582 Box.net, the enterprise-oriented file-sharing and collaboration cloud service has raised a combined $48 million in venture capital funding and debt financing. Meritech Capital Partners is leading Box’s Series D round, with Andreessen Horowitz and Emergence Capital Partners joining prior investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Scale Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. The round includes $10 million in debt financing from Hercules TGC.

It’s a big shot in the arm for Box, which has 5 million users and saw its revenue grow more than threefold last year, largely on business with 60,000 corporate customers including DreamWorks, Cisco Systems and Dell. Not bad for a company started in a dorm room as college business project.

I asked CEO Aaron Levie–the company started in his dorm room at the University of Southern California–what he’s going to do with all that money. “There’s a pretty significant transition underway from legacy on-premise systems to the cloud,” he says. “Two years ago it was a tool for medium sized businesses, and now we’re seeing much larger companies. Just the technology we have to build to serve those customers takes a lot of investment. We’re also going to invest in our sales team significantly.”

Use of Box.net is so easy–you can start for free sharing pretty much any kind of file–that by the time a company is talking formally to Box.net, it’s already an unofficial customer. “Our plan is to have Box.net surface [from free users] in these organizations, and then we have to sell it,” Levie said.

So why the mix of VC funding and debt? Infrastructure. Box operates two data centers in California and needs more. It can be cheaper to pay for that kind of infrastructure with debt, he said.

George Bischof, managing director at Meritech Capital, said that during the due diligence period before the investment, all the lawyers and investors involved had to use Box.net to give it a thorough going-over. “That was sort of the ultimate litmus test for simplicity if the lawyers and investors can use it well,” Bischof said.

Box.net sees itself as a rival to Microsoft’s Sharepoint, and threw down the gauntlet pretty hard in 2009 when it launched a bake-off challenge and handed out T-shirts declaring Sharepoint to be “Sharepoo.” Nothing grabs attention like starting a fight.

So does Levie want to take Box public? Sure, he says, but he’s in no hurry. “Now that we’re selling to larger companies, there’s actually a strategic reason to go public. Large public companies tend to more easily trust other public companies with their IT, so it turns out to be a competitive advantage. But it’s a few years out for us.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110224/box-net-the-file-sharing-and-collaboration-cloud-for-businesses-raises-48-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/social-enterprise-apps-are-popular-and-so-is-attacking-chatter/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/social-enterprise-apps-are-popular-and-so-is-attacking-chatter/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 20:06:57 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2938 Get out your scorecards. There’s yet another social enterprise play to keep track of. And like all the others, it’s being actively marketed as an alternative to Chatter.com, the social enterprise app from Salesforce.com.

BroadVision today announced Clearvale Express, which it describes as a free and streamlined version of Clearvale Enterprise, its cloud-based business collaboration platform. It was created in part at the suggestion of Softbank, the Japanese telecom concern that is a partner on the product and will resell it in Asian markets.

Above, that’s an ad for Clearvale Express evoking the old “Pepsi challenge” ads from the early 1980s. In this case, Chatter is being portrayed as “Coke,” the established player being challenged by the upstart, which is silly because Chatter is a relatively new player in an increasingly crowded social enterprise market, though Salesforce is clearly the biggest among the new entrants.

Bashing Salesforce is suddenly trendy. On Sunday, Yammer and Socialcast were spotted buying text ads on Google using the word “chatter” in hopes of catching the odd Google user responding to the pair of TV ads for Chatter.com that aired during the Super Bowl.

And that followed an attack video put out by Yammer highlighting how Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff loved Yammer at a 2008 TechCrunch event and accusing him of basically copying it. You can see that video below. Then there’s Jive, which used an industry survey to try to make a case that it’s a worthier player in the space than Chatter or anyone else, for that matter.

I’m betting there’s more of this public pile-on ahead, though with luck it will be followed by a round of deal-making. Last year, Gartner estimated the 2011 market opportunity for all these apps at less than $800 million and said that it’s tracking at least 80 vendors, at least 50 of which are based in the cloud. That makes the social enterprise market seem like small potatoes at first until you see Gartner’s prediction that these apps will replace email–Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes–as the primary tool for collaboration in businesses for 20 percent of companies within three years.

Combine that with a longer-term shift away from email–by teens, college-age people and younger people entering the workforce–and toward communication via Facebook and things like it, and you’ve got the makings of a fundamental shift in what’s considered normal as workplace technology. No wonder they’re taking swipes at each other. It is, however, already getting old .

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110208/social-enterprise-apps-are-popular-and-so-is-attacking-chatter/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110201/salesforce-buys-manymoon/ http://allthingsd.com/20110201/salesforce-buys-manymoon/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:44:04 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40098

Salesforce.com has bought Manymoon, the social productivity start-up.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but one source put the sale at between $25 million and $35 million.

Manymoon makes one of the more popular tools on Google’s apps platform.

The San Francisco company, funded with only a small seed funding round by Harrison Metal, offers an online collaboration app that businesses and consumers can use to organize group projects, conversations, tasks or documents that are often done via email or other software.

Manymoon is rather typical of the innovative app makers the search giant has been courting to populate its marketplace.

Salesforce.com has been moving aggressively into social networking in the enterprise arena with its Chatter offering and more.

Earlier today, in fact, it was also part of a $4 million funding of Seesmic, the social dashboard app maker.

Here is the Manymoon blog post–which just went up–on the sale, as well as a video interview BoomTown did with its co-founders Amit Kulkarni and Manav Monga, just as Manymoon joined the Google Apps Marketplace store rollout in March:

Manymoon Acquired by Salesforce.com

February 1, 2011

Today we are excited to announce that Manymoon has been acquired by salesforce.com!

Manymoon has experienced tremendous growth since our launch, with more than 50,000 businesses adopting our social productivity app. We’ve launched on three major web platforms: Google Apps, LinkedIn, and the Google Chrome Web Store. We think we’re on to something special, building an easy-to-use application that integrates with the tools you already use to help you get work done. Over 1,000 new businesses choose Manymoon each week to track any type of work activity with anyone from anywhere.

We’re looking forward to even more growth in 2011, and are thrilled to now be part of salesforce.com, the leader in enterprise cloud computing, to continue to deliver an amazing social productivity application for everyone to use.

What Does This Mean for Manymoon Customers?

We’ll still be the Manymoon that helps you get work done. The Manymoon team will remain intact and will operate as a separate business within salesforce.com so we can continue our focus on building a great social app that makes our customers more productive and successful every day.

The Manymoon you know and love will remain the same:

* Manymoon Standard, our free product, will continue to be available for existing and new customers. In fact, we’ll continue to add features to our free product. And, if you want to upgrade, you are welcome to do that through the Manymoon website whenever you like.

* Existing premium features, subscriptions and price points will remain unchanged.

* Manymoon will continue to work with Google Apps, LinkedIn and the Chrome Web Store. And, we will continue to develop new features to enhance support of these platforms.

*We’ll continue to support our customers in the Manymoon Support Universe.

Salesforce.com and Manymoon Together

Our approach to the market remains unchanged: work with the tools that people already use online (Google Apps, LinkedIn, Chrome), build an app that requires no training or setup, focus on serving the daily productivity needs of professionals and be on the cutting edge of the latest technologies like HTML5. As we’ve grown, we’ve learned that serving customers is more than just building an app with nifty features. It includes providing scalability, security, performance and support–all areas in which salesforce.com has a proven track record.

Like most startups, we admire salesforce.com as the original cloud computing company that made this industry possible. Over the last 12 years salesforce.com has been an evangelist and driver for bringing applications, platforms and collaboration to the cloud. We’re excited to be part of their vision for cloud, social and mobile, utilize their knowledge and experience to build a world-class social productivity app, and move even faster in delivering new capabilities to you!

What’s Next?

We are going to invest more in what you’ve told us you like about Manymoon: Google Apps, LinkedIn and Chrome Web Store support. You can expect to see many of the key social productivity features you’ve requested released in the near future. We’re also going to be working on some exciting, new developments in the coming months…so stay tuned!

Thanks,

The Manymoon Team

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/salesforce-buys-manymoon/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110201/seesmic-raises-from-4-million-in-funding-salesforce/ http://allthingsd.com/20110201/seesmic-raises-from-4-million-in-funding-salesforce/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:39:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40053

In an interesting social enterprise move, popular social networking collaboration tool Seesmic is taking a $4 million investment from Salesforce.com, as well as from Softbank.

The San Francisco-based Seesmic has one of the top desktop and also mobile applications for monitoring a consumer’s various feeds from Twitter, Facebook and more.

So far, Seesmic has received $16 million in total funding. Other investors include Atomico, Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners.

Moving beyond a consumer app, where it has one million registered users, Seesmic has also worked closely with Salesforce.com on integrating its Chatter social enterprise network offering.

Deeper integration with Chatter and bridging more social communications with its customers is coming, said Seemsic founder and CEO Loïc Le Meur.

“It becomes an amazing internal dashboard if you are a manager,” said Le Meur in an interview with BoomTown this morning. “It has everything we have built for consumers, but internally.”

There are many such apps and software-based services being developed to inject social into the enterprise, including Yammer, Socialcast and Jive.

It will also be interesting to see if the investment is a prelude to an acquisition by Salesforce.com, to further bolster its own efforts in socializing the workplace.

Here is the official press release:

Seesmic Receives $4 Million Investment

SAN FRANCISCO–Feb 1, 2011–Seesmic, the leading maker of applications that monitor social networks across mobile devices, today announced a $4 million investment from salesforce.com, inc. and a Softbank Group company managed by Softbank Holdings Inc.

Seesmic helps companies monitor, engage and build their brands across social networks and mobile devices. The Seesmic Desktop provides a single console that lets companies view and respond, in real time, to comments being made about their brands in Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Seesmic Desktop works with Apple’s iPhone and Macintosh computers, smartphones running Google’s Android or [Microsoft] Windows Phone 7 mobile operating systems, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and on personal computers.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, and Softbank group join previous investors Atomico, Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners. Seesmic has received a total of $16 million, including the most-recent investment round.

Seesmic and Salesforce.com have worked closely for more than six months to create a seamless integration between Seesmic Desktop and Salesforce Chatter, the industry’s first enterprise social collaboration app and platform. Leveraging the social features popularized by Facebook and Twitter–such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds–Chatter lets employees “follow” documents, people, business processes and application data. The result is a new level of productivity that crosses departments and organizational barriers. By integrating with Chatter, Seesmic Desktop will enable salesforce.com users to immediately see comments that customers have posted on Facebook and Twitter.

“Salesforce.com has become a valued partner as we work together to bridge external and enterprise social communication with Chatter. These investments will enable us to reach more enterprise customers” said Loïc Le Meur, CEO, Seesmic.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/seesmic-raises-from-4-million-in-funding-salesforce/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110127/salesforce-com-to-plug-chatter-com-now-free-for-all-companies-during-the-super-bowl/ http://allthingsd.com/20110127/salesforce-com-to-plug-chatter-com-now-free-for-all-companies-during-the-super-bowl/#comments Fri, 28 Jan 2011 01:47:25 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2489 Get ready to start hearing about a new social collaboration tool, called Chatter.com, at the office. Its creator is Salesforce.com, which plans to promote it in “bookend” TV spots–one before and one after the half-time Super Bowl show next month. Both spots will star the pop group the Black Eyed Peas. The company says it’s the first time that an advertiser has collaborated on an ad with the half-time show’s act. (What is it with tech companies and Will.i.am these days?)

I got a quick look at Chatter.com today with the folks at Salesforce. At first glance it looks a lot like Facebook. Almost identical. Kraig Swensrud, VP of marketing at Salesforce, told me that’s deliberate. Facebook, he says, has trained people to collaborate in a certain way, and was always in mind as Chatter was being built. “The fundamental mantra was, ‘Why isn’t collaboration software more like Facebook?’” he said. Now apparently it is.

So far, Chatter has been available only to companies that are already Salesforce.com customers. Come Jan. 31–next Monday–the company is throwing open the doors to any and all companies for free. All you need is a corporate email address. The hope is that Chatter users will eventually become Salesforce.com users too.

Below is a screenshot of what a Chatter profile pages looks like.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110127/salesforce-com-to-plug-chatter-com-now-free-for-all-companies-during-the-super-bowl/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110124/do-you-check-facebook-or-email-first-each-day/ http://allthingsd.com/20110124/do-you-check-facebook-or-email-first-each-day/#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:00:12 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2646 When you first roll out of bed and hop onto your laptop (or perhaps you grab your iPad or phone before you roll out of bed), what site or service do you load up first?

Is it Facebook? Twitter? Personal email? Work email? A news site or aggregator? A corporate collaboration tool or chat room?

It’s a minor detail perhaps, but something I love asking people. Your bleary-eyed self may speak the truth about the utility you find in these sites and the loyalty they command.

(Personally, I’m not always a creature of habit; I mix it up. My All Things D email and our internal Socialcast stream are high up on the list. Facebook and Twitter usually come a little later in the morning scramble.)

There’s a user poll going around on Facebook at the moment that a couple of people from disparate parts of my life have taken, so it’s been popping up in my newsfeed. The poll asks, “Which do you check first each day: Facebook, or your Email?”

So far, with 518 responses, email is pulling 54.1 percent of the vote. This is in a survey of presumably very active Facebook users who would take the time to fill out the poll (which is part of the beta Facebook Questions product). What about you?

P.S. Quora has a question on the matter as well, with fewer but more diverse and detailed responses.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110124/do-you-check-facebook-or-email-first-each-day/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20110114/docverse-now-google-cloud-connect-head-shan-sinha-talks-about-biz-apps/ http://allthingsd.com/20110114/docverse-now-google-cloud-connect-head-shan-sinha-talks-about-biz-apps/#comments Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39519

Earlier this week, I motored the Mini down to the Googleplex in Silicon Valley to visit with entrepreneur Shan Sinha.

He headed the start-up DocVerse, which was acquired by the search giant in March for a reported $25 million to $30 million.

Since then, Sinha has been ferreting away on scaling up DocVerse’s product, which allows users of Microsoft Office documents to collaborate in real-time on the Web.

Its new name: Google Cloud Connect.

About 4,000 companies quickly signed up to be early testers in the preview program, and Google said it had thousands of requests to be notified when it becomes available, which will be in a few weeks.

DocVerse was founded in 2008 by Sinha and Alex DeNeui, who both used to work at Microsoft. It raised only $1.3 million in venture funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal and Naval Ravikant.

Google’s acquisition of it was yet another shot across Microsoft’s software bow, along with a range of mashups of cloud computing and productivity applications.

For example, Google has been pushing its own cloud-based Google Docs to compete against the Office juggernaut.

For its part, Microsoft has committed itself to moving its hugely popular productivity suite–which includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel–into the cloud, in order to protect its software hegemony.

Why? Simultaneous group-editing and collaboration online is the future of Office.

Clearly, the race for productivity applications is in the cloud.

So–along with Cloud Connect –Sinha has been put in charge of deploying a $50 a person package of them, including Sites, Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Video, to millions of business users.

Here is Sinha talking about all of that and more in the video interview I did with him:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110114/docverse-now-google-cloud-connect-head-shan-sinha-talks-about-biz-apps/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110114/happy-10th-birthday-wikipedia-whats-next-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110114/happy-10th-birthday-wikipedia-whats-next-video/#comments Fri, 14 Jan 2011 18:04:34 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2383 Wikipedia now seems like an enduring institution on the Web, but the site was only founded 10 years ago, tomorrow.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, says it is just recently that the site has gotten itself on sustainable financial footing, and has become widely accepted as a useful, quality resource.

We stopped by the nonprofit’s San Francisco headquarters, which is located amidst a sea of tech companies in the city’s SOMA district, on the eve of the big anniversary, which Wikipedia is celebrating with a set of relatively mellow user meet-ups around the world.

Gardner spoke about the evolution of Wikimedia as an organization, and set out its goals for the coming years. We videoed the part of the interview where she sets the scene for the 10th anniversary.

Wikipedia is coming off a successful grassroots fundraiser, where it was able to raise $16 million from users, in part due to founder Jimmy Wales’s face greeting users every time they visited the site until the end of the campaign. That’s double the amount raised in a similar campaign the year before.

And over the last 18 months, Wikimedia orchestrated a wide-scale community discussion of its strategy, aided by collaboration expert Eugene Eric Kim, which resulted in a set of goals to take the organization and its many volunteers forward.

Wikipedia now has cumulative 380 million edits, resulting in 17.8 million articles in 250 languages by eight million user accounts, of which about 100,000 edit at least five times per month. It has 52 people in its San Francisco headquarters, which Gardner took over in 2007.

The nonprofit’s three-part mandate is to increase Wikipedia participation, quality and reach. Its big focus for the coming year will be reach, according to Gardner, specifically targeting poorer areas of the world where Wikipedia has so far proved to be less popular.

The idea, said Gardner, is that if people in these places have the tools and exposure to contribute to Wikipedia, the resulting content will be better representative of the world, as well as more comprehensive.

“You can’t blame editors for not being representative,” said Gardner. “The way to solve this is not to make them feel bad.”

A major implementation of the initiative will be opening a Wikimedia office in India in the next couple of months. Gardner had just recently returned from a trip to India when we spoke.

Meanwhile, Wikimedia’s product team is also working to redo its registration and discussion tools, and future projects include a better system for understanding user reputations.

The company has also started a campus ambassador program at colleges, which Gardner said is promising in part due to the folks who have turned out so far. Unlike with Wikipedia, where 87 percent of contributors are men, the campus ambassador volunteers were 50 percent women.

Another college effort is a program with 25 public policy classes to improve the Wikipedia pages on a particular subject matter.

And on the infrastructure front, Wikimedia is finally moving its data center out of the hurricane zone in Florida to a dedicated space in Virginia. The nonprofit is also looking to cache the site from more locations (it currently does so in Amsterdam) so it can be more quickly accessible in more parts of the world.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110114/happy-10th-birthday-wikipedia-whats-next-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110106/lady-gaga126000-pasty-geeks-in-vegasboomtown-nirvana/ http://allthingsd.com/20110106/lady-gaga126000-pasty-geeks-in-vegasboomtown-nirvana/#comments Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:24:35 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39227

This is going to be good.

The iconic singer and performance artist Lady Gaga will be appearing at the Consumer Electronics Show later today to unveil “creations” she came up with for Polaroid.

Gaga announced last year here that she had been named the creative director of Polaroid.

As part of the collaboration that will debut her Polaroid “Grey Label” project, Gaga said a year ago that she would be coming up with “prototypes in marrying the fields of fashion/technology/photography innovation.”

Oh, goody. Fishnet stockings that can post pictures to Instagram!

I am considering going to the event–as ordered to by the shy and retiring Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel.

But it will likely be a mosh pit of nerdy dudes, so I’ll need to frontload starting at 10 am.

And you can watch it on Polaroid.com at 3:30 pm PT.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110106/lady-gaga126000-pasty-geeks-in-vegasboomtown-nirvana/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110105/judge-google-was-excluded-microsoft-favored-in-federal-contract/ http://allthingsd.com/20110105/judge-google-was-excluded-microsoft-favored-in-federal-contract/#comments Wed, 05 Jan 2011 18:08:31 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1377 When the U.S. Department of Interior said it would move to using Microsoft’s cloud-based email and collaboration services, it was seen as a big validation of cloud computing by a big organization. That is, unless you’re Google.

In November, Google sued the Department of Interior, arguing that the Google Apps platform was frozen out of the bidding. Today, a federal judge, Susan Braden, sided with Google by issuing a preliminary injunction preventing the department from deploying Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite. Braden also found that Google had made a preliminary showing that the department had violated a 1984 regulation on competitiveness in government contracts.

Google and a reselling partner, Onix Networking, had argued in court that the Interior Department’s request for bids specifically excluded Google Apps by stating the system had to include the Microsoft product.

The case isn’t over, but it’s certainly not looking good for the Interior Department, which may be forced to reconsider Google Apps for the contract.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110105/judge-google-was-excluded-microsoft-favored-in-federal-contract/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101202/gsa-goes-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20101202/gsa-goes-google/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 11:00:43 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=53479

The General Services Administration–which oversees government procurement–will soon become the first major federal office to move to cloud-based email and calendar apps on an agency-wide basis. And it’s chosen Google Apps to do it.

A hard-won victory for Google, which beat out Microsoft for the $6.7 million five-year contract, leaving the folks up in Redmond more than a little peeved to see Office’s ubiquity in government threatened in this way.

“We are disappointed in the GSA’s internal e-mail decision,” the company said in a post to its “Why Microsoft” blog, adding that it is nonetheless “gratified that so many federal, state & local governments have chosen Microsoft to meet their business needs.”

You can almost hear the gritting teeth, can’t you? The horror of 15,000 GSA employees all using Gmail….

So again, a coup for Google, which has been working hard to push its cloud computing suite of messaging and collaboration apps to the government.

Interestingly, sources close to the negotiations tell me that the RFP (Request for Proposal) for the GSA contract was amended midway through the process to allow for offshoring of government data outside the United states–as an accommodation for Google.

Which is odd, because you’d think that if the United States government is embracing cloud computing, it would prefer the clouds in which its data is stored to be within its own borders. That Google requested and was granted the option to store GSA data offshore isn’t necessarily troubling (it must meet GSA security requirements regardless), but it is…interesting.

Google wouldn’t tell me the reason for its request, although I’ve heard it may have something to do with how the company segregates data and apps geographically. It was, however, quick to insist that it isn’t planning to offshore any U.S. government data entrusted to it–at least, currently.

Said spokesman Andrew Kovacs, “The government’s starting with Gmail and Calendar, and their data will be stored in a segregated system located in the continental United States that is exclusively for our government customers.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/gsa-goes-google/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101129/if-google-buys-groupon-itll-be-a-windfall-for-investors-bankers-and-regulators/ http://allthingsd.com/20101129/if-google-buys-groupon-itll-be-a-windfall-for-investors-bankers-and-regulators/#comments Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:33:39 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37734

If Google does manage to close the deal to buy Groupon–acquisition discussions flagged by BoomTown 10 days ago–it will be at a cost that is likely to be much more than the $2.5 billion price tag being floated in the latest batch of rumors.

It’s not just that the deal will likely come in at a higher number–upwards of $3 billion, according to sources I have spoken to–which will mean a big payoff for Silicon Valley’s Accel Partners, Boston’s Battery Ventures and Russia’s DST Global.

Or that this deal will net New York bankers used on each side–Allen & Co. for Groupon and Morgan Stanley for Google–sizable fees.

It’s because as soon as it purchases the social group buying phenom, the search giant will be buying a whole lot of pricey regulatory scrutiny too.

That cost will be, many think, much deserved and will definitely not come at any discount, given the rising worries in Washington about the swaggering power of Google.

After ever-testier brushes with federal regulators–including over an overreaching attempt to join with Yahoo in search and online access to copyrighted books–Google narrowly missed getting approval for its $750 million purchase of mobile advertising start-up AdMob.

That deal was only saved after Apple made enough noise in the same space to take the focus off the controversy.

And let’s not forget Google suing the feds earlier this month over being excluded from competitive bidding to provide email and collaboration technology to the Interior Department’s 88,000 employees.

More seriously, Google has come under fire recently from numerous critics for its proposed purchase of huge flight data firm ITA Software for $700 million.

Those opposed to the acquisition, on antitrust grounds, contend that Google would control travel search in a way that would inevitably invite abuse.

The government, of course, is looking over the whole deal now.

Having Groupon in its arsenal would garner Google even more powerful pricing information from both customers and merchants across the globe.

That would in the lucrative local commerce arena. Currently, despite a plethora of clones, Groupon dominates socially fueled couponing across cities worldwide.

Owning the hot space around local purchasing and consumer information, combined with the social element, would be a tasty treat for Google.

The Silicon Valley search giant has struggled to deliver social tools to users, even as Facebook has morphed into a potent rival.

Google had looked at social reviews site Yelp for purchase previously, but that deal fell apart.

It has been introducing its own various local advertising and commerce efforts, which would be instantly turbocharged given Groupon’s much quicker progress.

In April, Groupon garnered a valuation of well above $1 billion in a massive venture funding.

It has used that money to buy up companies in the U.S. and internationally, trying to solidify itself as the major player in the marketplace.

If Google were to complete a deal to buy Groupon, it would have echoes of its purchase of YouTube in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

Many felt it a high price at the time, but it looks cheap now given how the site almost completely dominates Web video.

If that deal were to be struck today, of course, it is unlikely regulators would allow such a purchase to sail through the approval process so easily.

Thus, it will be interesting to see how they will react to a possible hook-up with Groupon, which–in many ways–is perhaps the most aggressive of Google’s moves to date to own valuable data up and down the food chain.

And, like I said, this particular move to buy discounting online could be one of its costliest too, in more ways than one.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

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