The Technology Life

Huzzahs and alarums! Apple’s January 27 event has just been announced to tech journos all over the world with a new invite reading “Come see our latest creation” hitting inboxes left and right. The event will happen on January 27 at 10am PST.

More as we get it. You can read all about our iSlate obsession here.

via Giz (Where’s our invite!)

At IBM’s annual conference, Lotusphere,

Big Blue has announced innovations to its cloud-based collaboration platform, LotusLive. LotusLive provides enterprise users with online email, web conferencing, social network and collaboration applications within the cloud.

To spur innovation around the platform, IBM is officially launching LotusLive Labs, an R&D pipeline that combines the resources of IBM Research with Lotus. The venture is kicking off with a suite of new LotusLive technologies at the conference including Slide Library, a collaborative way to build and share presentations; Collaborative Recorded Meetings, a service that records and instantly transcribes meeting presentations and audio/video for searching and tagging; Event Maps, a way to visualize and interact with conference schedules; and Composer, the ability to create LotusLive mashups through the combination of the platform’s services. Project Concord will also debut as a web-based document editor for creating and sharing documents, presentations and spreadsheets. And IBM will be adding LotusLive support for the iPhone via Labs.

Big Blue is also opening up LotusLive’s API to third-party developers (who have to be an IBM business partner). Previously, the platform’s API was only available through a specific program but now all IBM partners can build upon the collaboration suite technology. For example, Salesforce.com will offer an integration of its CRM application with LotusLive and Skype will also offer the ability to integrate with LotusLive contacts.

IBM will be rolling out a new version of its email offering within LotusLive, LotusLive Notes, that will have upgraded connectivity to mobile devices, data migration options, and flexible storage choices. In addition, the new client will support hybrid on-premise and public cloud deployments.

LotusLive got a boost last week as Panasonic announced

that it was switching over to IBM’s online collaboration suite from Microsoft Exchange. This was a significant win for IBM because the deal represented the largest enterprise cloud deployment

to date, with over 100,000 Panasonic employees to use LotusLive.

While this coup strengthens IBM’s place in the collaboration suite cloud, Microsoft is also aggressively pursuing the cloud, with a recent $250 million cloud computing deal with HP. And Microsoft is pushing its collaboration offerings online with Office 2010. As more and more businesses look to the cloud for collaboration and productivity suites, the landscape to provide these services is becoming extremely competitive. Google is also a strong competitor in the space with its Google Apps enterprise offering, and VMware just upped its stake with the acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo. Startup Zoho,

is also growing at a rapid pace.

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CrunchBase Information

IBM

Website:	ibm.com
Location:	Armonk, New York, United States
Founded:	1896

IBM, acronym for International Business Machine, is a multinational computer technology and consulting corporation. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating back to the 19th century. IBM… Learn More

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Last week, Google announced a new feature for Google Docs that may be the closest thing to the fabled GDrive that we may ever get: the ability to upload and store any kind of file to your Google Docs account. This is a big deal, because it allows you to use Google as a storage service for the first time. But Google only went half way — they let you store the documents, but they didn’t actually build any desktop clients to help you sync them. For that, Google teamed with a handful of third parties. Today sees the launch of the most interesting of those: a desktop syncing client called Memeo Connect that lets you manage your Google Docs account from your desktop, giving you offline access to your Google Docs and making it easy to sync your files across multiple computers.

Most people probably aren’t very familiar with Memeo, but there’s a good chance you’ve come across one of their products at some point — the company makes the local backup software that comes with most external hard drives. But Memeo has also recently been offering some cloud-based file transfer services, which is probably why Google approached them last year about building a local client for the upcoming Google Docs storage feature. Memeo has built native applications for Mac and Windows (both of which are available today), and the service will cost $9/user per year. That’s on top of the $50/year fee you pay Google to become a Premier account holder (which you need to upload files).

Friends,
Nice job @TechCrunch for finding this little outlook add-in gem. Consider how much more on top of your work (or life) you would be if you could have action items automatically extracted (identifying owner, due date and priority) from your emails and organized for easy follow up.

I have been using Liaise for about a month and have been impressed with the accuracy of action item (known as "key points") creation and tracking. This week as TechCrunch reports here, Liaise went to public beta. Check it out!

 

The winner of DEMO’s enterprise category and people’s choice award, Liaise

, is moving from private to open beta by launching their much anticipated mobile calendar integration and introducing their Team Services platform.

Liaise focuses on collaboration within email: it analyzes the content within your incoming and outgoing emails, captures the important information (Liaise dubs these KeyPoints) which needs to be acted upon, and sets up a management list based on this info.

To quote from our previous coverage

of Liaise:

The product works quite intuitively. For instance, let’s imagine I am sending an email to a fellow writer: “Greg, make sure you interview the CEO of Liaise on Thursday.” The software will then recognize that my email is a call to action directed towards Greg and that it is due Thursday (these are the KeyPoints). The priority for this will be set at normal because it is due a few days from now. However, Liaise is a learning software; so it will change the way it works based off of the language I use and the edits to the suggestions which Liaise has made. For instance, lets say that I manually changed the priority of this issue to Very High. In the future, when I use the phrase “make sure,” in an email, Liaise will set the priority to high. If Liaise does not identify some parts of an email, there is an edit option to add your own action items.

Previously, Liaise only worked with desktop clients, but hoped to expand into the mobile market. Today, they have done just that. Now, utilizing Microsoft Outlook’s

synchronization process, users are able to see their KeyPoints directly on their iPhone, BlackBerry, or with any other device that supports an Outlook-enabled calendar.

Liaise has also upgraded the interface of their application. When a team used Liaise to collaborate before, users would have to individually update their to-do list. With the addition of Team Services however, they no longer have to send new emails to each other to update the status of shared action items or issues. Instead, these updates are automatically synchronized when completed (or not) through each user’s calendar, simplifying the process.

The product now gives users the ability to hide KeyPoints from the individual they are emailing. This is beneficial because it allows Liaise users to check up on their subordinates without making it seem obtrusive. Thus, end users get the tasks assigned to them, and Liaise users are constantly appraised of their progress without seeming like they are micromanaging.

Liaise is sticking to their original price point and will be charging between $4.95-9.95 per user, per month when the beta is completed. Liaise is headquartered in Sunnyvale and has received an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Southern Cross Venture Partners.

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CrunchBase Information

Liaise

 

Website:	liaise.com
Founded:	2008

Liaise’s mission is to turn words into action™ – wherever words are used. Recognizing that most people manage their business interactions through messaging systems such as e-mail, IM, SMS and others, Liaise has created a solution that… Learn More

Southern Cross Venture Partners

 

Website:	sxvp.com
Location:	North Sydney, Australia
Founded:	2000
Investments:	Mantara, Quantenna, Evostor, Evostor, Xumii, Mocana, Redfern Integrated Optics

Southern Cross Venture Partners was launched in 2006 by veteran venture capitalists who have managed and operated companies themselves. Southern Cross Venture Partners assist early stage technology companies that demonstrate the potential for… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase