CALABASAS, Calif., Apr 29, 2010 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) — NetSol Technologies, Inc. (“NetSol”) /quotes/comstock/15*!ntwk/quotes/nls/ntwk  (NTWK  0.83, +0.01, +0.59%) (Nasdaq Dubai:NTWK), a U.S. corporation providing global business services and enterprise application solutions to private and public sector organizations worldwide, is set to reveal a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering for its smartOCI(TM) search engine at SAP’s SAPPHIRE(R) NOW conference being held May 16-19, 2010 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla. Hosted by SAP AG, the SAPPHIRE NOW show brings together software industry leaders to share and demonstrate innovative solutions running on-premise, on-demand or on-device to enable real-time decision-making. NetSol Technologies will be exhibiting at Booth Number 3415b.

NetSol’s smartOCI(TM) 1.0 is a new search engine technology developed to provide corporate buyers and shoppers a simple and intuitive user interface to search multiple supplier catalogs simultaneously within the SAP SRM application. Designed for customers who currently run the SAP Supplier Relationship Management eProcurement platform, smartOCI(TM) is delivered through the SaaS distribution model, where software applications are remotely hosted and users can securely access them from anywhere with an Internet connection.

The beta program for smartOCI(TM) 1.0, now employed by six customers, is set to end May 10, and the solution is currently pending SAP certification. NetSol will offer special “QuickStart” pricing packages to SAP customers attending the SAPPHIRE NOW event.

Najeeb Ghauri, Chairman and CEO of NetSol, commented: “We wanted to provide our customers with a solution that drives immediate and real value to procurement organizations without upfront hardware, software license and maintenance costs. Deploying our smartOCI(TM) search engine as a SaaS offering allows us to achieve this goal.”

About NetSol Technologies, Inc.

NetSol Technologies, Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!ntwk/quotes/nls/ntwk (NTWK 0.83, +0.01, +0.59%) (Nasdaq Dubai:NTWK) is a worldwide provider of global IT and enterprise application solutions. Since its inception in 1995, NetSol has used its BestShoring(TM) practices and highly experienced resources in analysis, development, quality assurance, and implementation to deliver high-quality, cost-effective solutions. Specialized by industry, these product and services offerings include credit and finance portfolio management systems, SAP consulting and services, custom development, systems integration, and technical services for the global Financial, Leasing, Insurance, Energy, and Technology markets. NetSol’s commitment to quality is demonstrated by its achievement of the ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and SEI (Software Engineering Institute) CMMI (Capability Maturity Model) Maturity Level 5 assessments, a distinction shared by fewer than 100 companies worldwide. NetSol Technologies’ clients include Fortune 500 manufacturers, global automakers, financial institutions, utilities, technology providers, and government agencies. Headquartered in Calabasas, California, NetSol Technologies has operations and offices in Alameda, Adelaide, Bangkok, Beijing, Karachi, Lahore, London, and Riyadh.

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http://www.cmocouncil.org/news/pr/2010/041910.asp, B2B marketing trends are shifting more towards the digital realm.

The report, which surveyed more than 600 marketing firms, indicated that 46 percent of the respondents would be shifting more of their budgets to digital demand generation and online relationship building. Most firms said they would be focusing on fine-tuning customer data to better target and segment their audience, while some will be exploring new digital routes.

The growing shift from traditional marketing to digital market is also beginning to show its effects on some marketing firms’ hiring practices. The report indicates that 59 percent of the firms were looking to retrain existing staff on digital marketing practices, while 40 percent were adding or expanding their digital marketing agency.

“Globalization of markets and new channels of digital engagement are causing senior corporate marketers to seek new internal skills and capabilities, and re-direct spend towards more inventive and localized go-to-market programs,” says Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council. “The transformation of marketing organizations, practices and functions is well underway.”

This mirrors findings reported by eConsultancy. According to its report, digital ad spend in North America is expected to increase to $16 billion.

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Salesforce and VMWare have big news today with the pre-announcement of VMForce.  Inevitably it will be less big than the hype that’s sure to come, but that’s no knock on the platform, which looks pretty cool.  Fellow Enterprise Irregular and Salesforce VP Anshu Sharma provides an excellent look at VMForce.

What is VMForce and how is it different from Force.com?

There is a lot to like about Force.com and a fair amount to dislike.  Let’s start with Force.com’s proprietary not-quite-Java language.  Suppose we could dump that language and write vanilla Java?  Much better, and this is exactly what VMForce offers.  Granted, you will need to use the Spring framework with your Java, but that’s not so bad.  According to Larry Dignan and Sam Diaz, Spring is used with over half of all Enterprise Java projects and 95% of all bug fixes to Apache Tomcat.  That’s some street cred for sure.

Okay, that eliminates the negative of the proprietary language, but where are the positives?

Simply put, there is a rich set of generic SaaS capabilities available to your application on this platform.   Think about all the stuff that’s in Salesforce.com’s applications that isn’t specific to the application itself.   These are capabilities any SaaS app would love to have on tap.  They include:
Search: Ability to search any and all data in your enterprise apps
Reporting: Ability to create dashboards and run reports, including the ability to modify these reports
Mobile: Ability to access business data from mobile devices ranging from BlackBerry phones to iPhones
Integration: Ability to integrate new applications via standard web services with existing applications
Business Process Management: Ability to visually define business processes and modify them as business needs evolve
User and Identity Management: Real-world applications have users! You need the capability to add, remove, and manage not just the users but what data and applications they can have access to
Application Administration: Usually an afterthought, administration is a critical piece once the application is deployed
Social Profiles: Who are the users in this application so I can work with them?
Status Updates: What are these users doing? How can I help them and how can they help me?
Feeds: Beyond user status updates, how can I find the data that I need? How can this data come to me via Push? How can I be alerted if an expense report is approved or a physician is needed in a different room?
Content Sharing: How can I upload a presentation or a document and instantly share it in a secure and managed manner with the right set of co-workers?

Pretty potent stuff.  The social features, reporting, integration, and business process management are areas that seem to be just beyond the reach of a lot of early SaaS apps.  It requires a lot of effort to implement all that, and most companies just don’t get there for quite a while.  I know these were areas that particularly distinguished my old company Helpstream against its competition.  Being able to have them all in your offering because the platform provides them is worth quite a lot.

There is also a lot of talk about how you don’t have to set up the stack, but I frankly find that a lot less compelling than these powerful “instant features” for your program.  The stack just isn’t that hard to manage any more.  Select the right machine image and spin it up on EC2 and you’re done.

That’s all good to great.  I’m not aware of another Platform that offers all those capabilities, and a lot of the proprietary drawbacks to Force.com have been greatly reduced, although make no mistake, there is still a lot to think about before diving into the platform without reservation.  Force.com has had some adoption problems (I’m sure Salesforce would dispute that), and I have yet to meet a company that wholeheartedly embraced the platform rather than just trying to use it as an entre to the Salesforce ecosystem (aka customers and demand generation).

What are the caveats?

First, this is just an early glimpse.  You can’t actually go try this thing out and pricing isn’t even being talked about until this year.   Historically, pricing has been another Achilles Heel of the Force platform, although I know Anshu disagrees with me on that one.  We got our Helpstream service to the point where it cost 5 cents per seat per year to deliver the service.  Don’t be surprised if VMForce is a LOT more expensive than that.  Second, ISV’s will also have to wonder whether Salesforce is friend or foe.  At Helpstream, we finally got comfortable with the idea that they are a sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  Their product organization viewed us as competitors, and would’ve been only to happy to wipe us off the face of the Earth.  Meanwhile, we were getting around a hundred leads a month from being on the AppExchange and they were good quality leads.  We were able to appear at Dreamforce, and it was a good venue for us.

But VMForce represents a much higher degree of collaboration.  Take advantage of all those juicy services and it will be hard to back out of that platform, Java or no Java.  There just isn’t anything else like it, and that’s the real distinction of VMForce.com.  It’s a brilliant repackaging of some great functionality from the Salesforce apps as a platform.  What remains is to see if Salesforce can behave itself and act like Switzerland the way a platform vendor is supposed to.  And don’t overlook what kinds of data will now be completely beholden to that Swiss Data Bank.  The heavy focus on Social will be very powerful.  In the broadest sense, CRM is a system of record for what your customers and prospects are doing.

On balance, I think Salesforce has tee’d up a potential game changer for the SaaS platform world.  Whether or not ISV’s get comfortable with the Swiss angle, Corporate IT should find a lot to like here from the get-go.  VMForce also seems like a rich opportunity for the Salesforce ecosystem of SI’s and VAR’s to add value too.  Salesforce has listened and learned and seems to be on the right track.  I don’t see it as an Amazon killer, but rather as a welcome new addition to the Clouds that’s going to enable new things we haven’t seen before.

Two thumbs up for now and let’s see how things develop.

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Have you ever been to a cocktail party and met people who did nothing but talk and talk about themselves? How did you respond to these people? Probably by escaping from their circle as quickly as possible then avoiding them the rest of the evening.

Apply that line of thinking to social media. The participants who do nothing but talk about themselves—broadcasting their events, news, and good fortune—are creating the same situation they’d find themselves in at a cocktail party: Everyone stops listening and avoids them.

To be a successful social media participant, you must first learn to listen. Listening is one of the most important aspects of communication. In order to truly interact with others in the social media venue, you must hear what they’re saying. How do you cut through all the noise? By using these tactics:

Using Google Alerts: The first thing you should do is create Google Alerts for yourself and your practice. This free, easy–to-use service will send you a condensed e-mail each night reporting all mentions of the keywords you request. I suggest you program Google Alerts for your practice’s full name, as well as the names of each veterinarian on staff. If people are mentioning your doctors or the practice—with good or bad comments—you’ll know about it within 24 hours.

Using Social Mention: Similar to Google Alerts, this free service is offered at socialmention.com. This program scans all forms of social media and sends you e-mail alerts whenever your chosen keywords—again, practice name and doctor names—are mentioned.

Retweeting on Twitter: When you retweet (noted by RT) on Twitter, you re-broadcast a message someone else posted, indicating your support of what they had to say. Simply retweeting a few posts goes a long way in showing others in the social media world that you are listening.

Monitoring your mentions on Twitter: Pay attention to who’s speaking to you—or about you—on Twitter by clicking on the “@yourname” button. You can also do this by using free tools like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. These programs help you organize your Tweets and allow you to view columns of mentions, as well as to create categories of people you follow, such as veterinarians, clients, or even pets.

Remember, before you start posting to Twitter and Facebook and sites all over the World Wide Web, take a few moments to listen. You’ll be a much more effective social media speaker when you do.

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New York, NY, April 22, 2010 –(PR.com)– Binah Advisory is pleased to announce the 2010 revised edition of the book Unlocking Your Empire – Keys to enable your social media powered business.

Unlocking Your Empire – reveals how to transform your business into a people centric, value adding, and profit making well oiled machine.

Within the 295 page book you will find the keys to business 3.0; the power of social media to unlocking your empire, along with proven management strategies for building companies that will last for generations to come.

The author – Tullio Siragusa, developed the content of the book over 10 years; a collection of both practical ideas that have been tried and true in Tullio Siragusa’s 20 year career as a senior executive and entrepreneur, along with the introduction of new thinking around social powered business 3.0; why and how it serves as the keys to unlocking your empire.

Pick up your 2010 revised copy of the book to get an inside look into timely ideas for managing business in today’s ever changing social information enabled world.

–
About the Author

Tullio Siragusa is a visionary leader who has impacted over $2.9 Billion Dollars in revenues; a 20 years veteran of Media (search, publishing, web/mobile and social networks), Software (products and services), Consulting (IT, M&A, professional services), and Telecommunication (data and voice) industries.

Tullio Siragusa’s background prior to starting Binah Advisory includes: Co-Founder and CEO of M3 Mobile Ltd – UK, a self publishing social media platform on web and mobile for entrepreneurs; CEO of SEM/SEO expert Ansearch Ltd. (publicly traded on ASX); Senior Global Vice President of Operative Media (Edison Venture Fund); Director and Partner roles with Softtek / Ernst & Young, Computer Sciences Corporation, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Tullio Siragusa brings a truly international perspective to his work, having been born in Switzerland, lived in Italy, London – UK, Toronto – CA, Monterrey – MX, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and now residing in Los Angeles California.

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The rising popularity of Twitter has made it an invaluable tool to marketers and business owners. With more than 75 million people making 600 tweets per second, Twitter allows business owners to connect and engage with prospective clients 24 hours a day.

A new study conducted by HubSpot shows that businesses that have an active Twitter account can attract more business. According to the research, small- to medium- size businesses that use Twitter will generate two times as many leads as businesses that don’t.

Further, having more followers on Twitter will increase the number of leads obtained. The study found that having 100 or more followers was the key to maximizing lead generation.

Businesses that blog may also generate more leads than business that don’t. According to the research, businesses that averaged 52 or more blog articles a month gained 77 percent more leads than those that did 24 to 51 per month. These results were consistent with both B2C and B2B organizations.

Facebook is similarly important in B2B online marketing. A recent study conducted by Morpace indicates that people are more likely to buy a product or service recommended to them by a Facebook friend.

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WhatApp.org – a Stanford project dedicated to measuring security – recently found that Facebook users had significantly less privacy than Twitter and the iPhone. The site uses experts’ analysis to rate different applications, and on the whole, Facebook scored 2 out of 5 while Twitter and the iPhone scored 3 out of 5.

The site’s co-founder, Ryan Calo, is a Stanford University Law Fellow and feels that the results of his site are accurate and match people’s frustration over using Facebook Applications:

“I think people are upset because when you download an app, you don’t have any control over what the app developer sees on your profile,” says Calo. “There’s the perception among users that they don’t need to give away so much information to have the apps do the same thing as they are currently doing.”

The WhatApp site works by approving experts to help measure the privacay, security and openness of web and mobile applications as well as their platforms.  The goal is primarily to look at specific applications, but results can be extrapolated to determine how platforms are faring as well.  The site focuses on approving experts such as lawyers, security gurus and computer scientists to do the actual ratings, where other users can join to leave comments and suggest applications.

According to the Forbes analysis, Facebook got 2 points out of 5 for all three categories.  The problem here is that you can’t see how many experts rated the platform at this point, but Calo is planning to add this shortly.  Calo also adds an “expert review” analyzing the site and knocking its privacy settings.  Twitter and the iPhone were slightly higher at 3 points out of 5.  The problem here is that if Ryan Calo, who is a law student, qualifies as an expert, how can we trust the score?  How do we know these are objective results and analyses of security if we can’t even see how many experts, and which experts, gave the rating.  There are still some problems to work out here, but the idea is definitely sound and fits a niche.

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The first step in developing a social media strategy is deciding what you hope to accomplish by using Facebook, Twitter, and so on for your practice. Here are some examples of goals to consider:

> Attract new clients
> Boost your presence in the community
> Create pet health awareness campaigns
> Enhance your practice’s image
> Get news alerts and information to your clients as quickly as possible
> Increase traffic through your practice’s door
> Increase retail sales

Start by choosing just two or three goals to incorporate into your strategy. This narrows your focus and helps you avoid spinning your wheels. (You can add more ideas as you become proficient using social media.) Then write down the results you hope to achieve and the people you hope to reach—and be specific.

Next, you should outline your plan for the following three months. Sit down with your team—and a calendar—and brainstorm the topics you need to write about in order to achieve your goals and connect with your target audience.

For example, are you looking to create health awareness campaigns and increase traffic through your practice’s doors? Then plan a pet health topic to blog about each week. Write each topic on your calendar, preferably scheduling the blog for the same day each week so your readers (aka, clients) start to “tune in” to see what’s next. (Don’t have a blog yet—or not even sure what one is? Don’t worry. We’ll focus on blogs in a more in-depth article in the next few weeks. Remember, we’re just building strategy now.)

If you blog every Monday, then on Thursdays you should create a follow-up “call to action” that encourages members of your social network to visit the practice. For example, if this week’s blog post is about dental health, then your call to action might be a complimentary dental examination for your Facebook fans or Twitter followers only. Then you can track how many of these people came in your doors—did you see a jump in the number of dental cleanings?—so you’ll know how your strategy is working. Whatever call to action you decide on, make your audience feel special by offering them something outside the norm.

Take the next week to lay the groundwork of your practice’s social media strategy with your team. The next few articles will help you refine your plan by explaining the finer points of listening to your network, as well as developing your clinic’s blog and other social media tools.

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The new investments, in photo-sharing service TweetPhoto Inc. and Twitter marketplace TweetUp Inc., follow Twitter’s acquisition last week of Atebits LLC, maker of an iPhone client called Tweetie, and the launch of its own client for Blackberry devices. Twitter says Tweetie, which sells for $2.99 in Apple’s iTunes store, will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and distributed for free in the coming weeks.

The announcements have sparked concerns among developers, voiced throughout the blogosphere, about how many third-party services Twitter intends to acquire or develop into rivals with their own products. Those fears were further stoked when Fred Wilson of Twitter investor Union Square Ventures wrote a blog post suggesting that Twitter should be building for itself many of the features and services offered by third parties.

These concerns, however, didn’t sway Canaan Partners from leading TweetPhoto’s $2.6 million Series A, which included participation from Anthem Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and angel investors.

“When we first did this a few months ago, one of the biggest issues was, will Twitter want to do this themselves?” Canaan General Partner Deepak Kamra said. “We kind of knew this was a big possibility going forward, but we decided to go forward. We think [TweetPhoto has] a meaningful strategy.”

TweetPhoto, based in San Diego, offers a real-time media-sharing service that enables users to instantly share their media to popular social networks through mobile devices and on the Web. Sharing photos is a popular practice on Twitter, so it seems natural that Twitter would build its own photo tools or acquire the company with the most robust offering.

“Is Twitter going to get in the photo-sharing business?” TweetPhoto Chief Executive Sean Callahan said. “A lot is about to happen that will shape the direction of where we go.”

That direction may be a bit clearer later this week when Twitter holds its official developer conference, Chirp, where the developer community hopes to receive a better explanation of the micro-blogging service’s strategy. Twitter also is expected today to switch on a new advertising service called Promoted Tweets that will place ads at the top of search results on the Web site.

To differentiate itself from competitors like Twitpic Inc. and yFrog, a service operated by Sequoia Capital-backed ImageShack Corp., TweetPhoto is trying to integrate new ways to share and interact with photos. For example, among the business models the company is flirting with is an online social game related to photos.

“What we do is more than photo sharing,” Callahan said. “We’re building a platform that could quite quickly turn into a real-time information network, much like that of Twitter.”

TweetPhoto is generating revenue through advertising, but it plans to use the new funding to secure office space and bring on a full-time team, which was previously working part-time from home. He said the team is focused on finding the best way for the service to serve consumers and make money. The company also is working on licensing the technology to other developers who need a photo-sharing component to their offerings, Callahan said.

Despite its name, Callahan said the company also is trying to be less reliant on Twitter. TweetPhoto users can link their accounts and publish media instantly to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and other popular social networks, and the TweetPhoto APIs support features such as photo commenting, favoriting and voting, meta-data filters, geo-tagging, location-based search, friend feeds and customizable widgets.

TweetUp, meanwhile, has developed a new Twitter marketplace designed to showcase the world’s best tweeters.

Backed by a $3.5 million round led by Index Ventures, the company is creating an algorithm to determine relevance, allowing tweeters to bid on keywords in a competitive marketplace very similar to what now occurs at Internet search engines.

TweetUp is backed by Betaworks, Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Revolution LLC, Jason Calacanis and Jeff Jarvis. The company was founded by Bill Gross, who is credited with developing the first model for paid Internet search over a decade ago. A representative from TweetUp was not immediately available for comment.

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According to Apple, Adobe’s software is outdated, it is a security risk and Steve Jobs said that they crash the computer. There is some truth to that – Adobe’s PDF and Photoshop takes up so much resources when starting up that practically everything else has to shut down. It basically freezes your computer or worse crashes it. Further, Adobe’s PDF is major target for malware and Adobe does a great job of routinely plugging those holes. However, every time a hole is plugged the patches get bigger. Eventually Adobe software on your computer become a big application and takes up more space on your hard drive. Now that the Adobe application is bigger it takes up even more resources during start up (bigger applications don’t always take up more resources).

However, others say that the war is not over any of this. The war dates back to 1996 when Adobe dropped support to Mac products. At that time Steve Jobs needed Adobe’s support because he was trying to woo the artist and designer community. However, Adobe decided to support only Microsoft. This is what Adobe CEO said:

Creative professionals will “be able to edit their video in Premiere, edit their images in Photoshop and be able to create DVDs in a very creative way”, Chizen said. But they may not be able to do that on a Mac with an Adobe product. Making a Mac DVD product is “something we’re still evaluating”, Chizen said.

In 2004 Adobe published a report that showed certain Adobe applications running faster on Windows PCs than on Macs. It was not until 2005 that Adobe ported Photoshop to OS X. Until then Adobe focused solely on Windows. Adobe did not support Flash on Macs either, but when Apple turned around and bought a Macromedia offshoot, repackaged it as Final Cut and cut Adobe out of a lucrative revenue stream, Adobe came running.

It was not until 2006 when Apple was a hit that Adobe decided to start supporting it. By then it was too late. In fact some say “Adobe thought that it had the dominant hand and displayed its arrogance in public“. A blogger writes:

Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourselfl. You made a business decision in 1996 to screw Apple when it needed you most to gain credibility for its fledgling OS with the creative crowd. Somehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time.

How about Adobe start fixing their relationship with the Apple community one step at a time: fix Flash for the desktop and then we can chat about the iPhone, iPad and i….

Adobe made a wrong bet in 1996 and is suffering the consequences in 2010 and has no one to blame except themselves. It’s Adobe’s turn to show that it matters to Apple and the tech industry. I don’t remember Apple or Steve Jobs whining in 1996-2006 about Adobe not contributing to the Apple ecosystem.

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